Page 72 of The Guilty Trial

“Because we played by the rules. Torrino didn’t.”

“Exactly.” Thorne’s voice was heated now. “His damn defense team tore us to pieces. Somehow got to our key witnesses.”

“And those cowards recanted everything,” Reeves recalled.

Thorne seethed at the memory. Their carefully collected evidence vanished from storage. The jury acquitted him in under four hours, and Torrino walked out of that courtroom and went right back to business.

“Bastard got away with everything,” Thorne said. “I wasn’t going to let that happen again. What I did, I did for the good of every citizen in my district.” He pointed his finger at Reeves. “And you were supposed to keep Pym in line. You had one job.”

“And I did it. Pym complied.”

Thorne reminisced on his feeling of satisfaction when the jury came back with the verdict and then later, when the judge handed down the sentence. Torrino went to prison for life. His organization crumbled. “We made the entire Puget Sound region safer, dammit.”

He returned to his chair and shook his head wearily. “And now, one by one, Pym is making us pay for what we did, and everybody he leaves behind brings the FBI one step closer to the truth.” He glared at the marshal. “You were supposed to make sure nobody would ever know.”

Reeves came to his feet. “So what do you want to do about it?” He kept his voice controlled, but the anger at Thorne’s accusation seeped through.

Thorne placed both hands flat on the surface in front of him. “I worked my entire career to reach this position. I am a presidential appointee to the highest prosecutorial office in this district. I have given everything to this job, and I will not let some psycho madman take it away from me.”

Reeves waited.

“Find him,” Thorne said. “Find him before the FBI does.”

“And then what?”

Thorne held the marshal's gaze. “Make sure he never talks. If Pym tells the FBI what really happened during that trial, what we asked him to do, what you forced him to do, we’re all finished. Torrino walks, and you and I take his place behind bars.”

Neither man spoke for a long moment. Reeves's face had gone still, the muscles around his eyes narrowed.

“If Pym talks,” Thorne repeated, “we are all toast.”

Reeves nodded once, slowly, as though confirming something he’d already decided. “I'm already working on it.”

Thorne stared at him for a beat.

Reeves picked up his coat from the chair and shrugged it on. He moved toward the door, then paused with his hand on the knob.

“Elias.”

Thorne looked up.

“We're past the point where this ends cleanly. You understand that.”

Thorne didn’t respond. After a moment, Reeves opened the door and stepped into the hallway. The latch clicked shut behind him.

Thorne stood alone in his office. Through the glass, ferries crossed Elliott Bay in slow, deliberate arcs. Traffic crawled along the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Somewhere below, people walked to work and bought coffee and checked their phones, unaware of the man standing high above them whose world was collapsing in on itself.

He picked up the silver pen from the floor and placed it back on his desk, aligning it precisely with the edge of his leather blotter. It was a small, automatic gesture, the instinct to impose order on a situation that had long since spiraled beyond his control.

He had convinced himself years ago that bending the rules to stop Torrino had been justified, that the ends had justified the means, that putting a violent criminal behind bars for life was worth whatever compromises they had made along the way. He had told himself that story so many times it had become indistinguishable from truth, and it became a foundation he had built everything on top of.

But four bodies and an FBI investigation had a way of stripping the insulation from a lie. And as he thought about his dead colleagues, about the repercussions of their decisions, Elias Thorne was certain of one thing.

He was not going to outrun his sins.

Chapter Forty-Two

Tacoma Brick Works