Page 66 of The Guilty Trial

Allie putted again. In.

Hannah was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Do you want to hear something that might make you feel better about where you are right now?”

“Probably.”

“Three years ago, I was working a counterintelligence case. We had a possible asset compromise, and for about nine days, we couldn't find the thread. We had everything— documents, intercepts, travel records—and we couldn't see what was connecting it. I was ready to tell my supervisor we had the wrong theory entirely.”

Allie set another ball down and waited.

“Day ten, one of our analysts pulled a financial record we'd already reviewed twice, and there was something in the formatting that nobody had caught. A timestamp that wasn't in the right time zone. Turned out the records had been generated domestically and backdated to look like they came from overseas.” Hannah shook her head. “The whole thing unraveled in about four hours once we had that. Nine days of nothing, and then four hours.”

Allie looked at her. “You're telling me to be patient.”

“I'm telling you the wall is usually right before the break.” Hannah nodded toward the putter in Allie's hand. “Also, that's Eastman's favorite one. Don't let him catch you with it.”

The conference room door opened, and Marze appeared in the frame. He nodded for Allie to join him. She handed the putter to Hannah and followed him inside.

The table in the conference room was covered in the same strata of paper it had accumulated over the past week, a geological record of the investigation laid out in manila folders and printouts and handwritten timelines. Jason was at one end with his legal pad. Allie plopped into her usual seat beside him.

“Walk me through what you found,” Marze said.

She laid it out for them: what she'd discovered in the custody logs, the places where the documentation didn't add up, and the pattern that emerged when you looked at all of it together, one that pointed not to isolated clerical error but to something coordinated.

“A conspiracy,” Jason said when she finished.

“That's the word.”

Marze stroked his mustache. “To pull something like that off, you need more than one person looking the other way. You need people actively participating. The evidence custodian, sure, but also whoever directed him. The prosecutors who introduced the exhibits. The judge who ruled on every challenge to their admissibility.”

“And presumably whoever was coordinating it from the top,” Jason said. “Someone had to decide this was worth doing. Someone had to believe it was worth the risk.”

“Why?” Allie said. “That's what I can't get past. These are career prosecutors and a long-serving federal judge. Halloway had a clean record. Park had a pristine academic background. These are not people who take stupid risks.”

“Nobody takes stupid risks,” Jason said. “They take risks that don't look stupid from where they're standing.”

“So what did it look like from where they were standing?” Allie spread her hands. “What was compelling enough to get this many people to go along with it? What does Sal Torrino have that changes the calculus for that many people at once?”

Whatever the answer was, it had compelled enough people to risk their careers to get Torrino. That was the part she couldn't see yet, and she suspected it was the part that explained everything else.

Marze's phone rang.

He pulled it from his pocket and glanced before answering. “Marze.” He listened. Allie watched the set of his jaw shift, the muscles along the line of his cheek slowly go taut. He turned slightly away from the table without moving from his spot.

“On our way.”

He lowered the phone and set it face down on the table. His eyes moved around the room without settling on anyone. Then he shook his head once.

Allie's stomach dropped.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Commencement Bay Waterfront

Tacoma, Washington

Tacoma PD already had their perimeter tape run by the time Allie, Jason, and Marze arrived. Cruisers were parked at angles along the access road, their lights cycling against the warehouse walls. Beyond the tape, the old docking infrastructure stretched into the bay. Its weathered planks were warped and split, and the mooring posts were rusted down to bare metal. Shuttered warehouses lined the shore, their loading doors sealed with chains and their windows long since broken out. Whatever commerce had once moved through here had moved on decades ago and never looked back.

A patrol officer met them at the perimeter and lifted the tape without a word.