Page 58 of The Guilty Trial

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.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Little Sprouts Daycare

Tacoma, Washington

Sarah Park pulled into the parking lot of Little Sprouts Daycare at exactly 5:30 and checked the rearview mirror out of habit. The dark SUV was right behind her, as it had been every morning and every evening for the past week. The two U.S. marshals inside kept their measured distance while making their presence impossible to miss. She put the car in park and grabbed her purse from the passenger seat, then stepped out and gave them a wave. They nodded back from behind the tinted windshield and settled in for the wait.

This had been her routine since the protection detail started, and while she hated every second of it, she certainly wasn’t going to complain. The surveillance was constant, and the paired shadows trailing her from home to work to daycare and back again, compressed her life into a series of approved routes and scheduled check-ins. In a way, it made her feel like a prisoner on supervised release, which she supposed was ironic given how many defendants she’d helped put behind bars.

But she was grateful for it too. Two people from the Torrino prosecution team were dead, and she had no intention of becoming the third. The marshals were thorough, professional, and vigilant, and she trusted them with her life and her son’s life in a way she trusted very few people.

What she could not shake, what gnawed at her during the quiet moments between meetings and motions and bedtime stories, was the knowledge that if these men knew everything about her role in the Torrino case, they wouldn’t be protecting her. They would be arresting her. And then Lucas would grow up without his mother.

She pushed the anxiety down into the locked compartment of her mind that she only opened late at night when Lucas was asleep and the apartment was too quiet to outrun her own conscience. Five years of building a career on the foundation of something rotten, smiling through commendations and promotions while the truth sat inside her like a bad meal she had swallowed and couldn’t get back up.

Sarah crossed quickly to the entrance, her heels clicking against the pavement. Inside, Little Sprouts was winding down for the day. Plastic bins of toys were lined up against the far wall in neat rows. Only a handful of children remained. They sat scattered among the small tables where they colored or played with blocks. The overhead lights cast a warm glow across the room, and the faint scent of finger paint and apple juice hung in the air.

Sarah smiled at the young woman behind the front desk, a college-aged girl with a ponytail and a lanyard full of keys around her neck. “Hey, I’m here for Lucas.”

The young woman looked up from her clipboard with a pleasant expression that shifted and looked apologetic. “Oh, Ms. Park, Lucas was actually just picked up a few minutes ago. Your brother came for him.”

The words landed like a fist to the sternum.

Sarah did not have a brother.