Page 106 of Silent Vendetta (Vendetta Duet)

“How? How do you know what happened?”

Stanley hesitated, his shoulders softening after a few seconds.

“A kid on the street caught it all on his video camera. He’d gotten the damn thing as a birthday gift and was out there playing around with it when this fancy car comes down the street. He wasn’t expecting it to hit my boy, and when it did, he recorded the whole thing. Then two men stepped out. They didn’t try to help my son. They dragged his body into an alley like he was a piece of trash. And they left them there to die.”

“The kid recorded it?”

“He didn’t intend to, but after the car struck…he froze. I only learned about it because after my boy was killed, I did my own investigation. Went door to door near the scene, asking questions. The kid’s mom was afraid of whoever they caught on camera—if they killed one boy, they might kill her son. At least, that’s what she was afraid of. Can’t blame her for refusing to get involved with the police, and I can’t blame her for destroying the Mini-DV tape. At least she showed it to me before she did.”

Mini-DV tape…used in video cameras from two decades ago.

“If that was true, why didn’t you tell the police?”

“I did. In fact, I told them I recognized the guys on the tape; they were prominent figures all over the news back then.”

“None of that was in the police reports,” I argued.

“And that should, what, surprise you?” He shook his head. “The men who hit my kid were rich. Probably funded political campaigns, and had enough influence to make sure their names wouldn’t get tarnished in any public record. Plus, without that video recording, there was no physical evidence to back up my claims.”

“Police would at leastinvestigatewhat you said.”

“You would think so, wouldn’t you? And maybe they did, off the record, but talk about a reality check when you realize your son’s life means less than smearing the name of a prominent figure in the community. My son was disposable. Nobody listened to me, and nobody was doing anything about it.”

Maybe this guy was a conspiracy theorist.

But I’d learned the hard way not all hunches were documented by police.

Putting down someone’s name in the public record of having been accused of killing a kid was a significant step. One that law enforcement could never erase. If they firmly believed Stanley was wrong and they had relationships with the powerful figures in question, they might have withheld the names from official documents.

In this day and age, something like that would probably never happen. But back then, times were different.

“When no one listened to me, I tracked the two men down myself,” he said.

“Who were they?” I asked. “Who killed your son?”

Stanley hesitated.

“The person that killed my son was your father.”

CHAPTER47

Hunter

The adrenaline shot through my muscles like a missile, and I charged Stanley, the room blurring as I focused only on him, watching the shock flash in his eyes just before he hit the ground. His gun slid along the stained linoleum floor with a metallic scraping sound, coming to rest six feet away from us.

“You’re a fucking liar!” I snapped, climbing on top of him. “You killed my father in cold blood, and you expect me to believehe’sa killer?”

How dare this piece of shit!

No wonder the police didn’t believe him. My father was a successful businessman, an adoring husband, a loving father, and a moral person. He was a hard worker who had never been arrested in his life, and in a sea of cutthroat businessmen, my father held on to the values of my grandfather, treating people with respect and kindness.

Hell, my father went to church every Sunday.

This lunatic was so delusional in his heartbreak that he convinced himself my dad killed his son? If someone ran his child down, he clearly got the wrong guy. Video footage from twenty years ago wasn’t as crisp as it was today.

He got it wrong. He got the name wrong, and thanks to his delusions, he broke into my home and murdered my father in front of his child.

His neck was cold and clammy as I wrapped my hands around it.

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