Page 76 of The Guilty Trial

Allie's phone buzzed on the table. She didn’t recognize the number, but the area code was local. She held up a hand and answered.

“Agent Bishop? This is Linda Hayes. I'm returning your call.” The woman sounded slightly out of breath. “I'm so sorry it took me so long to get back to you. My boyfriend and I were camping up near the Olympic Peninsula, and there's no cell service up there at all. I just got back into range this morning and got your messages.”

Allie kept her expression neutral, aware that the entire table was watching her. “Ms. Hayes, thank you for calling me back. I appreciate it. I need to ask you about Arthur Pym.”

There was a brief silence on the other end. “Arthur.” Another pause. “Okay. What about him?”

“When was the last time you saw him or spoke with him?”

“Oh, let’s see. It has to be over two years,” Linda said. “I visited him at St. John’s for a while, trying to be supportive, but he eventually asked me to stop coming. That was…yeah, two years now. Maybe November, December. He said he didn't want me to see him like that. I respected his wishes.”

Allie's stomach dropped. “Ms. Hayes, have you visited Arthur at St. John's at any point this year?”

“This year? Absolutely not.” Linda did not hesitate. “I haven't been back to that hospital for two years, like I said. I moved on with my life. I have a boyfriend now, Chester Shone. We've been together about eight months.” She paused. “Why? What is this about?”

“I’m afraid I can't go into specifics right now, but I appreciate your time and your willingness to answer my questions. If I need to follow up, would you be available?”

“Of course.” Her voice sounded tenuous now. “Whatever you need.”

Finishing the call, Allie set the phone down and looked at the faces around the table. Jason's brow was knitted into a frown. Marze hadn’t moved.

“That was Pym's former girlfriend,” Allie said. “She says she hasn't seen him or spoken to him in years. She hasn’t set foot in St. John's at all this year.”

Jason puffed out a long, frustrated breath. “But what about the visitor logs?”

“I know we have to confirm everything she said, but my gut is telling me someone else has been visiting Pym using her name,” Allie said. “All we really know is a woman with blonde hair signed in on multiple occasions this year. Whoever she is, she had access to Pym during the months he was planning these murders.” She looked at Marze. “We need to find out who she really is.”

He rubbed his hand across his mustache. “So Pym is dead,” he said, “and we still don't know who was pulling his strings.”

“No,” Allie said. “We don't.”

The case wasn't closed yet.

Chapter Forty-Four

U.S. Attorney's Office

Seattle, Washington

Thorne sat alone in his office with the door closed. The mahogany desk in front of him was polished to a mirror finish, and in its reflection, he could see the blurred shape of his own face looking back at him. He raised his eyes to take in the bookcases lined with legal volumes he rarely touched anymore and framed photographs with governors and senators. At one time, he knew he’d earned it.

Now he wasn’t so sure.

Jake Reeves had called him in the middle of the night telling him Pym had been killed during a confrontation with law enforcement. The specifics were still being sorted out, but the outcome was final. The former evidence custodian who’d spent years in a psychiatric facility, who’d emerged to murder four people with obsessive purpose, was gone.

Thorne had thanked Reeves for the call, hung up, and sat on the edge of his bed in the dark for a long time.

Now, hours later, he leaned back in his leather chair and pressed his palms together in front of his chin. The tightness that had lived behind his sternum for weeks was loosening. Pym could never confess now. There would be no testimony before a grand jury, no recorded statements handed over to investigators, no courtroom spectacle in which a broken man pointed a trembling finger at the architects of his destruction. The narrative was clear. A disturbed former federal employee had committed a string of murders and had been stopped by law enforcement. That was all anyone would ever need to know.

The FBI would pull on threads in the trial evidence that no one was alive to confirm.

Thorne stood and walked to the window. He placed one hand against the cold glass and watched a ferry push through the chop toward Bainbridge Island.

His relief felt shallow. There was a hollowness beneath it, a cavity where something more honest should have been.

Four people were dead because of choices he made five years ago.

Thomas Sterling. Judge Harold Vance. Bob Halloway. Sarah Park. He worked alongside all of them, shook their hands, shared meals and legal strategy and the particular camaraderie that existed among people who believed they were fighting on the right side. And every single one of them had died because of what he had convinced them to do.