His father had seen more. His father had dug deeper. His father had witnessed a murder and agreed to testify, but he died in a car crash that everyone said was an accident but wasn’t supposed to be. Talk about fucking irony.
“This is all dandy, but it’s twenty years too late,” Trent mumbled.
"Justice doesn't have an expiration date."
Trent laughed. It came out harsh and broken, scraping against his throat. "That's a nice sentiment. You should put it on a poster."
“My uncle didn’t know this was coming. Didn’t know a criminal was going to confess to a crime he hadn’t had a chance to commit.” Dove's voice, soft but firm, cut through the rising tide of his anger.
He reached up and patted the hand she still rested on his shoulder. She was right. She was almost always annoyingly right.
“This brings me to the request my office is making.” Slade tapped his finger on the paper. "There are a few requests in this document. One of them being the exhumation of your father's body."
The chair screamed against the linoleum as Trent shoved back from the table. He glanced at Dove, who’d taken two steps back, hands in the air as if to say she’d given up. Or maybe she was just simply okay with him losing his shit because this new information sat in his gut like sour milk.
He was on his feet a second later, his hands balled into fists at his sides, his vision narrowing to a red-edged tunnel with Aaron Slade at the center. "You've got to be kidding."
“I wish I were, but they've made the formal request. It's just a matter of time before the court makes a decision."
"No." The word tore out of him like something with claws, ragged and raw. "You don't get to do that. You don't get to come into my house and drink my coffee and tell me that after twenty years of nothing, after my mother spent two decades waiting for justice that never came, now—now—you want to dig up my father's grave and for what? Confirm that it was an accident? That this hitman didn’t do his job because some idiot ran a red light?”
“This isn’t my decision,” Slade said.
"I don't give a damn whose decision it is.” Trent slammed his fist onto the table hard enough to send the coffee mugs jumping. Hot liquid sloshed over the rims, pooling on the oak his father had sanded smooth with his own hands and seeping into yesterday's newspaper that Trent hadn’t yet found time to read. "He's dead. He's been dead for twenty years. My mother’s dead. Everyone who your justice could have helped is dead.” Trent's voice cracked on the words. “Your investigation couldn't solve it. Your justice system couldn't prosecute it. My father burned in that car. Whatever was left of him, we put in a box and put in the ground, and my mother stood there in a black dress and threw dirt on her husband's coffin and didn't stop crying for three months." His chest heaved. His hands shook. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice that sounded like his mother was telling him to calm down, to breathe, to remember that anger was just fear wearing a mask.
He couldn't calm down. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't do anything but stand there and shake with a fury so deep it felt like it might crack him open.
"I was fourteen years old," he said, and his voice had gone quieter now, quieter and in that kind of quiet way his mother had always told him was worse than when he shouted. "I watched my mother fall apart. I watched her try to explain to me why Dad wasn't coming home. I watched her stand at that grave every Sunday for twenty years, talking to a headstone as if he could hear her." His eyes burned. He blinked hard, refusing to let the tears fall. "She's been gone three weeks. I haven't even figured out how to move her sweater off the couch, and you're sitting in her kitchen telling me that the government wants to dig up my father."
Dove slowly moved closer.
He wanted to hold up his hand. To push her away. But right now, she was the only person he had to hold on to.
She curled her fingers around his biceps, leaned into him, and suddenly, he could breathe again.
“I don’t want to dig up your dad,” Slade said softly. “I wanted you prepared for what’s coming.”
“And I'm supposed to stand here and thank you for that?”
“I want you to know that you can fight this request,” Slade said.
“You? A US Marshal is suggesting I take on your office?” Trent's voice steadied. His heart rate slowed to a less painful rate. He raised his hand and placed it over Dove’s.
Her presence made everything bearable.
“Why would you do that?” Trent asked.
Slade ran a hand over his face. He glanced toward the ceiling. “I spent two months with your dad. At first, he was just a job. Just another person the marshals service expected me to watch over. But as hours turned into days, and days into weeks, we became friends.
Jesus, Trent didn’t want to hear this. It was hard enough listening to Silas Monroe, Cullen’s uncle, tell stories about his dad. About the good old days. About when they would sit out in the river, fishing, talking about absolutely nothing, and laughing their asses off over everything. But to hear this from the man who’d been there when his dad died?
Trent wrapped his arm around Dove. He needed her strength. Her energy. Her kindness.
“Jack would tell me all about his wife. About how they met and how three weeks later he found himself at the local church getting married.” Slade pressed his hands against the table and stood. “He would talk for hours about Linda and even longer about his slightly out of control teenage son who had a chip on his shoulder, an attitude the size of Texas, and how it was like looking into a mirror of his youth.” Slade waved a finger around his face. “You look exactly like him except for the eyes.”
“I get that a lot.”
“Uncle Aaron,” Dove said. “Fighting this is probably a lost cause. Why do you believe he should?”
