Page 63 of The Guilty Trial

“Exhibit 48 will be exposed as false.”

Sarah screamed until her voice gave out, but the thick concrete walls contained the sound, and no one came.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Maple View Transitional Housing

Tacoma, Washington

Allie’s eyes burned. She blinked against the grit that had settled behind her lids sometime around three in the morning and never left. Beside her, Jason gripped the steering wheel of the Charger with both hands. Neither of them had slept. After Park’s disappearance the day before, the entire team had worked through the night alongside Tacoma PD, with every available resource thrown at a single, desperate objective: find her alive.

Traffic cameras yielded nothing. Cell tower pings on Park’s phone had gone dead within an hour of her last known location. Every law enforcement channel in the state had broadcast a BOLO on Pym, and still there was nothing. Park and Pym had vanished as if the earth had opened and swallowed them both.

Allie kept thinking about Lucas. Park’s son was with his father now, asking where mommy was, and no one had an answer for him. The thought of that little boy waiting by a door that wouldn’t open made something twist low in her stomach.

The clock ticked, and every hour that passed made the silence more damning.

Jason turned onto a street lined with low-slung commercial buildings and aging apartment complexes, pulling into the lot of Maple View Transitional Housing. It was Pym’s last known address.

The building was a two-story beige structure that looked worn but maintained, with cracks in the stucco where rain had worked its way beneath the surface. A few residents stood near the entrance smoking. They stopped talking as Allie and Jason crossed the lot. One man tracked them with flat, incurious eyes before turning back to his cigarette.

Inside, a reception desk sat behind a Plexiglas partition. The facility manager looked up from his computer as they presented their credentials. He was a stocky man with a receding hairline and a name tag that read Dale.

“Arthur Pym,” Allie said. “He was a resident here after his release from St. John’s. We need to see his records.”

Dale adjusted his glasses and turned to his monitor, typing with two fingers in a deliberate hunt-and-peck rhythm. The screen reflected off his lenses as he scrolled. “Pym, Arthur. Yeah, here he is. Checked in after his hospital discharge.” He squinted at the screen. “Only stayed one week though. Then he was gone.”

“Did he leave a forwarding address?” Jason asked.

“No, sir. Nothing. Just packed up and left.” Dale leaned back in his chair. “That’s not unusual, honestly. A lot of guys who come here are just passing through. They stay until they figure out their next move, and then they disappear.”

“What do you remember about him?” Allie asked.

Dale rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Quiet. Very quiet. Kept to himself completely. Never saw him in the common areas or the dining room. He kept odd hours too. I’d see him leaving late at night, coming back early in the morning. Some of the other residents mentioned it, but he never caused any trouble, so I didn’t press.”

“Anything else stand out?”

“He was obsessively clean. Like, more than normal. We do inspections every couple of days, and his room was always spotless. His bed was made with hospital corners and nothing was ever out of place. The housekeeping staff actually commented on it because they barely had anything to do when they went in there.” Dale shook his head. “Nice enough guy, I guess, but he gave off this energy that made people keep their distance. You know the type. Polite, but hollow. Maybe on edge deep inside.”

The description tracked with everything they knew about Pym’s obsessive compulsive patterns and his meticulous approach to the killings.

“Did he have any visitors while he was here?” Allie asked.

Dale’s eyes drifted toward the ceiling as he considered the question. “Maybe once or twice, I saw a woman meet him in the parking lot. They didn’t come inside. She’d pull up, he’d get in her car, and they’d leave together. Come back a few hours later.”

“Can you describe her?”

“Not really. It was always in the evening, and the parking lot lighting out there isn’t what it should be.” He gestured vaguely toward the front windows. “Slender, blonde. That’s about all I could tell you. I never got a close look at her face.”

“Did you see the car? Make, model, color?”

Dale shook his head slowly. “Sedan of some kind. Dark color, maybe blue or black. I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying much attention. Like I said, Pym kept to himself. Nothing about the visits raised any red flags at the time.”

Allie noted the details, thin as they were.

“Can we see his former unit?” Jason asked.

“Sure, but it won’t do you much good. There’s a different resident in there now. Nothing of Pym’s is left.”