Page 57 of The Guilty Trial

“I’ve been thinking about us,” he said. “About what this is.”

Allie turned to look at him, her hazel eyes catching what remained of the fading sky. She waited.

“I care about you, Allie. More than I’ve cared about anyone in a long time. And I didn’t want to let another evening end without telling you that.”

She held his gaze for a long moment. He could see her processing, weighing his words. It’s what she did with everything. When she finally spoke, her voice was steady but raw at the edges.

“I feel the same,” she said. “I do. But I need you to know that trusting people is hard for me. It always has been. My father, Sadie, people I thought I could count on turned out to be the very people who hurt me the most.” She tightened her grip on his hand, as if anchoring herself. “You’ve earned my trust, Ethan. Over this past year, you have absolutely earned it. But if this is going to move forward, I might need you to be patient with me. I’m not always going to be easy.”

He nodded. “I’m in no hurry. There’s no direction I’m trying to push this in. Whatever pace feels right for you is the pace we go.”

“You mean that?”

“Sure I do.”

She studied him, and whatever she found in his face seemed to satisfy her, because the tension in her jaw released and a small, unguarded smile surfaced. She leaned back in her chair, still holding his hand, and turned her eyes toward the horizon.

The sky was bleeding its last colors into the west, deep amber giving way to violet, violet dissolving into the blue-gray of early dark. The hawk had gone quiet. The wind had stilled. Somewhere inside the house, Shepherd’s music drifted faintly through the walls, a muffled beat that belonged to another world entirely.

Ethan sat with his hand in hers and felt something he hadn’t felt in a very long time. Not excitement exactly, or even relief. Not even happiness, though all of those were present in their own measures. What he felt was possibility. The sense that the life he’d been carefully rebuilding might have room in it for something he’d stopped expecting to find.

He didn’t feel the need to say any of this. The evening said it for him, and Allie’s hand in his was answer enough.

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.