Page 65 of The Guilty Trial

“What about Park?” Allie asked. But she already knew the answer when he took a couple beats to answer.

“Teams are still searching. Nothing yet.”

The silence that followed said everything neither of them could bring themselves to voice. Every hour without contact made it less likely they would find Park alive.

She stared out the passenger window as Jason merged onto the highway. The gray November sky pressed low over the city, and the bare branches of the trees along the roadside looked like dark veins against the clouds.

Was Linda Hayes a victim or an accomplice? She visited Pym when he was at his lowest, when no one else would go near him. It seemed she had maintained that connection for years. Now she was somewhere in the wilderness with a man who might or might not be Pym, and Park was still in the wind.

Allie’s thoughts turned to little Lucas again. To a boy who was too young to understand why his mother hadn’t come home, who was asking questions that the adults around him couldn’t answer. She made a promise when she joined the Bureau that she would fight for the people who couldn’t fight for themselves, and right now, that meant finding Park before it was too late.

They had to find her.

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.”