Page 75 of The Guilty Trial

Hagan poked his head through the door. He stood there for a moment without speaking, which wasn’t unusual for the taciturn agent. When he finally looked at her, the permanent scowl had softened.

“Glad you're okay,” he said.

Allie nodded. “Thanks, Hagan.”

He gave a single, curt dip of his chin and walked away. For Hagan, that was practically a speech.

By eight o'clock, the team had assembled in the conference room. Jason was already seated, a paper cup of coffee cradled between his hands. He looked as tired as she felt, the creases around his eyes deeper than usual. Marze stood at the head of the table with his arms folded, scanning the room as the last few agents settled in. Jason leaned back in his chair, and Brandy sat across from him with her laptop open in front of her. The mood was subdued but alert. Everyone looked wrung out.

“All right,” Marze said. He looked at Allie. “Let's hear it.”

Allie pulled out her phone and set it on the table. “When I went after Pym last night, I turned on my voice recorder. I wanted to capture whatever he might say if I caught up to him.” She paused and met the eyes around the table. “I got more than I expected.”

She tapped the screen and pressed play.

The recording opened with the sounds of her own footsteps crashing through brush, accompanied by sharp rasps of her own breath. The rub of her jacket distorted parts of the audio, and there were stretches where nothing came through but the snap of branches and the uneven rhythm of her running hard over bad terrain. Allie remembered the darkness, how completely the trees had closed out all light beyond the first few yards. Then the footsteps stopped, and Pym's voice came through, thin and fractured, but clear enough to understand.

He told her she didn’t understand what they had done. How Sterling had planted the gun, how Vance had signed off on warrants he knew were fraudulent, how Halloway had fabricated the financial records. He named Reeves next, the marshal who had threatened the witnesses, who had physically delivered the tampered evidence into Pym's vault. And then Thorne. The U.S. Attorney who had orchestrated everything from the top, who wanted the Torrino conviction at any cost.

Allie glanced around the table as the recording played, seeing her own anger reflected in the faces of those around her.

Pym's voice cracked as he spoke about the exhibit numbers, how they haunted him and how he couldn’t escape the ones that bore his signature. He said she told him it had to be done. Allie's own voice came through then, barely audible, asking who. Pym didn’t answer the question directly. He said he had to shoot her now.

The first gunshot was deafening on the recording. Several people at the table flinched. Jason’s hand jerked involuntarily toward his hip. The second shot followed a beat later, and then there was a heavy, wet thud as Pym's body hit the ground. In the stillness that followed, Reeves's voice came through.

“Bishop. You okay?”

Marze reached over and stopped the playback. Nobody moved.

“So we have Pym's confession on record,” Marze said. “He named Reeves and Thorne as co-conspirators in the original fabrication of evidence in the Torrino case.”

Jason was the first to speak. “This is unbelievable. Except it’s too believable.”

“It’s no wonder Thorne drove down from Seattle to offer us his full cooperation,” Allie said. She remembered him sitting in this very room, shaking their hands and assuring them he would provide anything they needed. “He got a lot of praise for putting Torrino away. Press conferences and commendations. His name was on every headline. Dismantling an organized crime empire made his career.”

“Maybe the risk was worth it to him,” Jason said, “if the alternative was another failed prosecution and Torrino walking free again.”

“That doesn't make it legal,” Marze said.

“No,” Jason agreed. “It doesn't.”

Brandy looked up from her screen. “So we're saying the Torrino conviction was built on fabricated evidence, and the people who fabricated it are the same people Pym was targeting.”

“Every one of them,” Allie said. “And Thorne signed off on the whole thing.”

Jason let out a long breath through his nose. “And Reeves, the man we put on protective detail for our witnesses. He was in the woods last night with a weapon. He insisted on being part of the operation.”

Allie had thanked Reeves for saving her life. If his shot had come half a second later, Pym's next round might not have missed. But Reeves had made sure he was at the Brick Works, had positioned himself where he could get to Pym first. “Pym was about to confess everything. Reeves put him down before he could say any more.”

“You think Reeves heard what Pym said?” Marze asked.

“No. I think he saw a chance to silence the one person who could expose him, and he took it as soon as he got close enough.”

Marze gave a thoughtful nod. “We need to move carefully. Reeves is a respected deputy marshal, and Thorne is a presidential appointee. This recording is powerful, but it came from a man who murdered four people. His credibility will be questioned by every defense attorney in the country.”

“The evidence will back him up,” Allie said. “The custody logs, the exhibit records, the chain of command, all of it. If we pull those threads now, with what we know, it'll hold.”

“It will have to,” Marze said. “Because the moment we open this, we're accusing a sitting U.S. Attorney and a decorated federal marshal of conspiracy and obstruction. There's no putting that back in the box.”