He walked past the weeping man pinned to the mahogany, his hand-welted leather shoes making that clean, concussive *tack… tack… tack* against the marble floorboards.
He stopped beside my gurney.
He reached down, taking my cold, trembling right hand into his warm, calloused fingers:
“Clara,” the old lawyer whispered softly:
“Howard…” I wept, the naloxone washing the last of the gray fog from my eyes: “You… you withdrew two weeks ago… they told me you abandoned the case…”
“I didn’t withdraw, Clara,” Howard Jenkins answered, his eyes shining with fifty years of finished justice:
“When Daniel emptied that joint account… it triggered the automated forensic flag inside the Department of the Navy’s strategic asset registry.”
“I spent the last fourteen days inside the underground vault at Offutt Air Force Base with Colonel Carter and the federal grand jury.”
“We needed Daniel to file the final conservatorship petition in open court.”
