Chapter 41
Chapter Forty-One
U.S. Attorney's Office
Seattle, Washington
Elias Thorne stood behind his desk as Reeves shut the door and crossed the room.
The man was infuriatingly calm, and Thorne felt nearly ready to wipe that smug look off his face.
He pressed the intercom on his desk. When the receptionist picked up, he confirmed the agents had left, then told her to hold all his calls. “No visitors and no interruptions.”
“Yes, sir.”
He turned on Reeves.
“You promised me,” he growled, barely keeping his voice under control, “that this would never come back on us.”
Reeves met his eyes. “Elias, I understand you're upset.”
“Upset?” Thorne straightened, a vein rising along his temple.
“Four people are dead, Jake. Sterling. Vance. Halloway. Park. Four members of the prosecution team I supervised, and the FBI is crawling through every corner of the Torrino case like ants on a carcass. Yeah, you know? I’m a little upset. ”
Reeves dropped into a chair. “What was I supposed to do, anticipate Arthur Pym having a complete mental breakdown and deciding to murder everyone five years after the fact? Nobody could have predicted that.”
Thorne slammed his open hand against the desk. The sound cracked through the office like a gunshot, and a silver pen rolled off the edge and thudded onto the plush carpet.
“The point,” Thorne said, “is that we fabricated evidence to convict Sal Torrino. We planted a gun. We backdated financial records. We authorized illegal wiretaps. We coerced witnesses into lying under oath. And now it’s all coming to light because a man we broke is somewhere out there burning exhibit numbers into people's skin. If the FBI examines those documents too closely, if they pull the original chain of custody logs and compare them against what was presented at trial, the entire case collapses. The Torrino verdict will be overturned.”
Reeves rubbed both hands along his thighs, a gesture Thorne had seen him make before when he was calculating. “The FBI is focused on catching Pym. That's their priority. They're not conducting an independent review of a five-year-old conviction. They're running a homicide investigation.”
“For now.” Thorne paced the room, his polished shoes marking a tight circuit on the rug.
“Bishop is sharp, they all are, and they’re getting closer every day.
They’re already asking about exhibit irregularities.
She interviewed Carmichael, who practically drew her a map to the corruption.
It's only a matter of time before someone pulls a thread that unravels the whole thing.”
Reeves leaned back and crossed his arms. “What about you? You were the one overseeing the entire prosecution.”
“I was the U.S. Attorney who trusted his team to build a clean case.
That's my story, and that's what the record reflects.
My name isn't on a single piece of fabricated evidence.” Thorne stopped pacing and fixed his gaze on Reeves.
“But what about you, Jake? You were the one who strongarmed Pym into accepting the tampered evidence in the first place. You stood over that man in the evidence vault and told him to log items he knew were fabricated. His signature is on those custody forms because you put him in a position where he had no choice.”
The room went quiet except for the muted hum of traffic far below. Reeves uncrossed his arms, dropping his shoulders. The lines around his mouth had deepened. Whatever composure he'd walked in with was gone. When he spoke again, his voice was lower.
“I know I'm exposed. That's why I'm sitting in your office instead of mine.” He leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees. “I need to know if you're going to protect me, Elias. Because if the FBI comes at me, I need to know where I stand.”
Thorne stared at him. In all the years they had worked together, through the Torrino prosecution and everything that followed, Reeves had never asked for help.
He was a man who calculated every angle before he entered a room and didn’t leave until he had the outcome he wanted.
The fact that he was sitting here, asking where he stood, told Thorne more about how far things had deteriorated than any FBI briefing could.
He walked to the window. A container ship inched north toward the port, and gulls circled above the ferry terminal.
He had spent most of his career in this city.
He'd tried his first federal case at the courthouse a few blocks south, had argued motions in front of judges who were now retired or dead.
Everything he had built was tied to this office.
“Five years ago,” he said without turning around, “we made a decision.
Sal Torrino was a cancer in this region.
He'd been running racketeering, extortion, and murder operations for three decades, and the people of this city suffered for it. Businesses were bled dry. Witnesses were terrorized into silence. Families were destroyed.”
“You did something about it.”
He turned to face Reeves. “I—we—had no choice. You know why the previous prosecution failed.”
“Because we played by the rules. Torrino didn’t.”
“Exactly.” Thorne’s voice was heated now. “His damn defense team tore us to pieces. Somehow got to our key witnesses.”
“And those cowards recanted everything,” Reeves recalled.
Thorne seethed at the memory. Their carefully collected evidence vanished from storage. The jury acquitted him in under four hours, and Torrino walked out of that courtroom and went right back to business.
“Bastard got away with everything,” Thorne said. “I wasn’t going to let that happen again. What I did, I did for the good of every citizen in my district.” He pointed his finger at Reeves. “And you were supposed to keep Pym in line. You had one job.”
“And I did it. Pym complied.”
Thorne reminisced on his feeling of satisfaction when the jury came back with the verdict and then later, when the judge handed down the sentence. Torrino went to prison for life. His organization crumbled. “We made the entire Puget Sound region safer, dammit.”
He returned to his chair and shook his head wearily. “And now, one by one, Pym is making us pay for what we did, and everybody he leaves behind brings the FBI one step closer to the truth.” He glared at the marshal. “You were supposed to make sure nobody would ever know.”
Reeves came to his feet. “So what do you want to do about it?” He kept his voice controlled, but the anger at Thorne’s accusation seeped through.
Thorne placed both hands flat on the surface in front of him. “I worked my entire career to reach this position. I am a presidential appointee to the highest prosecutorial office in this district. I have given everything to this job, and I will not let some psycho madman take it away from me.”
Reeves waited.
“Find him,” Thorne said. “Find him before the FBI does.”
“And then what?”
Thorne held the marshal's gaze. “Make sure he never talks. If Pym tells the FBI what really happened during that trial, what we asked him to do, what you forced him to do, we’re all finished. Torrino walks, and you and I take his place behind bars.”
Neither man spoke for a long moment. Reeves's face had gone still, the muscles around his eyes narrowed.
“If Pym talks,” Thorne repeated, “we are all toast.”
Reeves nodded once, slowly, as though confirming something he’d already decided. “I'm already working on it.”
Thorne stared at him for a beat.
Reeves picked up his coat from the chair and shrugged it on. He moved toward the door, then paused with his hand on the knob.
“Elias.”
Thorne looked up.
“We're past the point where this ends cleanly. You understand that.”
Thorne didn’t respond. After a moment, Reeves opened the door and stepped into the hallway. The latch clicked shut behind him.
Thorne stood alone in his office. Through the glass, ferries crossed Elliott Bay in slow, deliberate arcs.
Traffic crawled along the Alaskan Way Viaduct.
Somewhere below, people walked to work and bought coffee and checked their phones, unaware of the man standing high above them whose world was collapsing in on itself.
He picked up the silver pen from the floor and placed it back on his desk, aligning it precisely with the edge of his leather blotter. It was a small, automatic gesture, the instinct to impose order on a situation that had long since spiraled beyond his control.
He had convinced himself years ago that bending the rules to stop Torrino had been justified, that the ends had justified the means, that putting a violent criminal behind bars for life was worth whatever compromises they had made along the way.
He had told himself that story so many times it had become indistinguishable from truth, and it became a foundation he had built everything on top of.
But four bodies and an FBI investigation had a way of stripping the insulation from a lie. And as he thought about his dead colleagues, about the repercussions of their decisions, Elias Thorne was certain of one thing.
He was not going to outrun his sins.