Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
FBI Field Office
Tacoma, Washington
Four hours in the conference room had been enough. Allie dragged the custody logs and the trial exhibit records to the office she shared with Jason after lunch, spreading the paperwork across her desk in overlapping rows. She’d been working through them side by side ever since.
Pym's original entries were meticulous. Every log had been signed, timed, and initialed in the same precise block lettering, with each transfer of evidence noted to the minute. Records that thorough should have made any tampering easy to spot.
That was the problem.
When she laid his logs against the official trial records, the entries matched. Every number, every date, and every chain-of-custody signature accounted for. To anyone reviewing the file in preparation for trial, the evidence custody chain would have looked clean.
But she was no longer reviewing it in preparation for trial.
She was reviewing it knowing what she now knew, and something about the pattern wasn't right.
She couldn't point to a single forged entry or an obvious fabrication.
Pym had logged everything. That was the whole point of his job.
But the shape of it, the timing, the way certain exhibits moved through the system, none of it looked the way it should have if the process had been legitimate.
She sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes.
It wasn't any single entry that had stopped her cold.
It was where the chain led once you followed it.
Sterling had handled the revolver. Halloway had introduced the financial ledgers.
Park had presented the witness affidavits.
And the wiretap package carried Judge Vance's authorizing signatures.
He had subsequently presided over every motion challenging the admissibility of the recordings.
Denied, denied, denied. And not because the challenges had no merit, she was beginning to understand, but because Vance had known exactly what he was protecting.
Allie stared at the judge’s name in the margin of her notes.
Vance had been on the bench for decades before the Torrino trial.
He was highly respected and politically connected, the judge who drew the most complex and sensitive cases in the district.
Nothing in his record suggested a man who would sign off on fraudulent warrants.
That was what made it so hard to see. Why throw an entire career away on a single case?
The question that had lodged itself in her mind was Linda Hayes.
Hayes had visited Pym at St. John's. She had been, by all accounts, the one person who had maintained contact with him after his institutionalization.
Everything they had pulled on her had come back ordinary.
She was a freelance web designer with no criminal record and no obvious connections to anyone in the Torrino case.
None of it pointed to a woman who would help a broken man plan four murders.
And yet, Hayes had been visiting Pym regularly in that hospital.
If she knew what had been done to him, if she had known what the prosecution team had put him through, she might have been the one person with enough access and motivation to push him over the edge.
Allie wrote a note in the margin of her notepad and capped her pen before standing up.
The bullpen was quieter than usual for a Tuesday afternoon.
A few agents were on phones. Hagan was at his computer with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.
Allie passed through without stopping. Eastman's desk was in the far corner, and his putter was leaning against the partition. She picked it up without guilt.
The putting green was a strip of artificial turf that ran down the middle, fifteen feet from tee to cup. Allie had possessed no interest since performing so abysmally at the charity tournament.
But now, she set a ball down at the near end, adjusted her stance as Jason had shown her on the golf course, and tapped it.
The ball rolled straight and dropped in.
She stared at the cup.
She set another ball down and tried again. In.
“Okay…” she said, to no one in particular.
“Would you look at that?” Hannah had appeared beside her, her arms folded and head tilted.
“I have no idea what I'm doing.” Allie retrieved the balls and set up again.
“That might be why it's working.” Hannah leaned against the partition. “You're not overthinking it.”
Allie putted again. In.
Hannah was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Do you want to hear something that might make you feel better about where you are right now?”
“Probably.”
“Three years ago, I was working a counterintelligence case.
We had a possible asset compromise, and for about nine days, we couldn't find the thread.
We had everything— documents, intercepts, travel records—and we couldn't see what was connecting it. I was ready to tell my supervisor we had the wrong theory entirely.”
Allie set another ball down and waited.
“Day ten, one of our analysts pulled a financial record we'd already reviewed twice, and there was something in the formatting that nobody had caught.
A timestamp that wasn't in the right time zone. Turned out the records had been generated domestically and backdated to look like they came from overseas.” Hannah shook her head.
“The whole thing unraveled in about four hours once we had that. Nine days of nothing, and then four hours.”
Allie looked at her. “You're telling me to be patient.”
“I'm telling you the wall is usually right before the break.” Hannah nodded toward the putter in Allie's hand. “Also, that's Eastman's favorite one. Don't let him catch you with it.”
The conference room door opened, and Marze appeared in the frame. He nodded for Allie to join him. She handed the putter to Hannah and followed him inside.
The table in the conference room was covered in the same strata of paper it had accumulated over the past week, a geological record of the investigation laid out in manila folders and printouts and handwritten timelines.
Jason was at one end with his legal pad.
Allie plopped into her usual seat beside him.
“Walk me through what you found,” Marze said.
She laid it out for them: what she'd discovered in the custody logs, the places where the documentation didn't add up, and the pattern that emerged when you looked at all of it together, one that pointed not to isolated clerical error but to something coordinated.
“A conspiracy,” Jason said when she finished.
“That's the word.”
Marze stroked his mustache. “To pull something like that off, you need more than one person looking the other way. You need people actively participating. The evidence custodian, sure, but also whoever directed him. The prosecutors who introduced the exhibits. The judge who ruled on every challenge to their admissibility.”
“And presumably whoever was coordinating it from the top,” Jason said. “Someone had to decide this was worth doing. Someone had to believe it was worth the risk.”
“Why?” Allie said. “That's what I can't get past. These are career prosecutors and a long-serving federal judge. Halloway had a clean record. Park had a pristine academic background. These are not people who take stupid risks.”
“Nobody takes stupid risks,” Jason said. “They take risks that don't look stupid from where they're standing.”
“So what did it look like from where they were standing?” Allie spread her hands. “What was compelling enough to get this many people to go along with it? What does Sal Torrino have that changes the calculus for that many people at once?”
Whatever the answer was, it had compelled enough people to risk their careers to get Torrino. That was the part she couldn't see yet, and she suspected it was the part that explained everything else.
Marze's phone rang.
He pulled it from his pocket and glanced before answering. “Marze.” He listened. Allie watched the set of his jaw shift, the muscles along the line of his cheek slowly go taut. He turned slightly away from the table without moving from his spot.
“On our way.”
He lowered the phone and set it face down on the table. His eyes moved around the room without settling on anyone. Then he shook his head once.
Allie's stomach dropped.