Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
FBI Field Office
Tacoma, Washington
The conference room smelled of recirculated air and too many hours with the door closed.
Allie dropped into her usual chair beside Jason and set her notebook on the table, flipping to a clean page as the rest of the team filtered in.
Brandy was already at her laptop near the projector, her fingers moving across the keyboard in quick, practiced bursts.
Marze stood at the head of the table with his arms crossed and waited for everyone to settle.
Jason leaned toward Allie before their boss could start. “So how was dinner with Ethan?”
The question caught her off guard, and she felt her face warm before she could help it. She thought about Ethan’s place, the fire pit, and the easy conversation that had stretched well past midnight. “It was really nice,” she said, and could hear the brightness in her own voice. “But, later.”
Jason raised an eyebrow, clearly filing that response away for later interrogation. He opened his mouth to press further, but Marze cleared his throat and the room went quiet.
“All right, we got the forensic document examiner’s report back,” Marze said.
He picked up a folder from the table and waved it once.
“As you know, we requested detailed analysis of Exhibits 14, 22, and 35 from the Torrino trial to determine if there was any evidence of tampering or fabrication.” His lips pursed in a hard line. “The conclusions are damning.”
Allie straightened in her chair. She’d been waiting for this, hoping for it and dreading it in equal measure.
Hard evidence of fabrication would change the entire shape of their investigation.
It would take it from theory and suspicion to something concrete and provable.
It would also mean that the justice system had failed in ways that went far beyond aggressive prosecution.
Marze leaned over the table and read from the examiner’s summary.
“Exhibit 14 is the .38 Special revolver that tied Torrino to the Abramov murder. The examiner found the fingerprint transfer patterns on the weapon are inconsistent with natural handling. The orientation and pressure distribution of the latent prints suggest they were applied to the surface after the fact, possibly using a transfer medium rather than direct contact.” He looked up from the page.
“In plain English, the fingerprints on that gun may have been planted.”
Jason let out a low breath through his nose. Brandy pinched her eyes shut.
“And now Exhibit 22,” Marze continued. “These are the financial ledgers that Bob Halloway presented during trial to establish money laundering through Torrino’s legitimate businesses.
The digital forensics team recovered metadata from the original documents showing that the files were created or modified after the dates they supposedly represented.
Someone had backdated them to align with the prosecution’s timeline. ”
Allie thought about Carmichael sitting in his wood-paneled office in Seattle. His defense team had argued the timestamps didn’t match. Judge Vance had overruled them. And Halloway had presented those ledgers as gospel.
“And Exhibit 35,” Marze said as he set the folder down.
“These are the wiretap authorizations that Judge Vance signed. The examiner cross-referenced the timestamps on the authorization documents with the actual recording dates on the surveillance tapes. Several of the recordings were made before the warrants were even issued.”
The silence in the room felt like a held breath.
“Illegal surveillance,” Jason said quietly.
Marze nodded. “Recordings that should never have been admitted at trial, presented as if they were obtained through lawful process.”
Allie sat back in her chair and let all of it settle.
She looked at the faces around the table and could see the same recognition taking hold in each of them, the same slow understanding of what all this meant.
They now had hard proof that evidence in the Torrino case had been fabricated, but not by some outside actor or criminal enterprise.
This had been done by people who had sworn an oath to uphold the law and then systematically corrupted the very system they were charged with protecting.
This wasn’t just coerced witnesses or aggressive prosecution tactics.
Physical evidence had been planted, and documents had been altered.
Warrants had been issued after the surveillance had already occurred.
The entire foundation of the Torrino conviction was compromised, and the people responsible for that corruption had held positions of public trust.
“So the question becomes,” Jason leaned forward with his forearms on the table, “who would have had access to do something like this? We’re talking about planting fingerprints on a firearm, backdating financial records, and manipulating wiretap authorizations. That’s not one person acting alone.”
Marze set his pen down. “It would require someone with direct access to the exhibits storage and the ability to manipulate chain of custody documentation. Someone would have had to be embedded in the process from the inside.”
Allie tapped her pen against her notebook. “We need to find out who was responsible for handling evidence during the Torrino trial. The evidence custodian would have been the person logging the exhibits, maintaining the custody records, and tracking all the transfers and signatures.”
The room turned toward Brandy, who was already pulling records on her screen.
“Hold on,” she said. She adjusted her laptop so the rest of the table could see, though the text was too small for Allie to read from where she sat. “The evidence custodian assigned to the Torrino case was a man named Arthur Pym.”
Allie wrote the name down and underlined it twice. Every thread they had been pulling for weeks led back to the evidence itself, and now they had the name of the man who had controlled it.
“Pym had a thirty-year career as a federal evidence control specialist,” Brandy continued, scrolling through his file.
“His performance reviews are spotless. He was known for being obsessively precise about documentation, a person who triple-checked every log entry and caught discrepancies that other custodians would have missed. His supervisors described him as meticulous to a fault.” She looked up from the screen.
“His signature appears on every single custody log from the Torrino case. Every exhibit that moved through the system during that trial went through Arthur Pym’s hands. ”
Allie turned the information over in her mind. “Did he retire?” she asked. “Where is he now?”
Brandy scrolled further. “Shortly after the Torrino trial concluded, Pym had a complete mental breakdown. He was hospitalized and eventually committed to a psychiatric institution.” She paused, reading more carefully. “St. John’s Psychiatric Hospital in Seattle.”
The room absorbed this in silence. Allie watched Brandy’s face, waiting.
Brandy glanced between her screen and the team. “From what I can see, he’s still there.”
Jason exchanged a look with Allie. She could read his thoughts without him speaking them out loud.
Here was a career evidence specialist who handled every exhibit in a trial that was now proven to involve fabricated evidence.
A man who suffered a psychiatric breakdown immediately after that trial ended.
The timing alone was enough to warrant serious attention, and the circumstantial connections ran even deeper than that.
Marze didn’t hesitate. He looked directly at Allie and Jason. “Get over to St. John’s before the end of the day. Interview Pym. I want to know what he saw and what he knew.”
Allie was already on her feet, gathering her notebook and phone. Jason pushed back from the table and reached for his jacket draped over the back of his chair.
“If Pym was the custodian for every exhibit…” Allie paused at the door. “Then he’s either one of the people who built the fraud from the inside, or he’s the person who watched it happen and couldn’t stop it.”
Marze held her gaze. “So find out which one.”