Page 30 of The Guilty Trial

“Fair point,” Marze agreed.

Allie stared at the numbers she had written on the paper: 14, 35. They looked random, but she knew better than to assume randomness in a case like this. They were symbolic and meant something. Serial offenders, particularly those who ritualized their murders, assigned meaning to their actions. The question was what meaning these numbers held for the killer.

“Could they be dates?” Marze suggested.

“I’m guessing they’ve got something to do with a case they both oversaw,” Jason offered. “Assuming that’s the connection.”

Allie circled the numbers on her paper, studying them from different angles. Jason’s suggestion felt logical. Both victims had spent their careers immersed in the federal justice system. If the killer's motivation stemmed from a case they had worked on together, marking them with related numbers would fit the profile of someone seeking to make a statement.

“In the meantime,” Marze said, “we keep building the profile. We know he's intelligent and organized. And it seems like he’s got a score to settle.”

Allie looked down at the stack of case summaries still waiting to be reviewed. There were hundreds of cases, thousands of defendants, a web of legal proceedings that stretched back five years. Calling it the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack felt like an understatement. But buried somewhere in these documents was the connection they needed, the case that linked Sterling and Vance to their executioner.

Her back ached from hunching over the table, and the coffee in her cup had gone cold hours ago, but right now, none of that mattered.

Chapter Sixteen

FBI Field Office

Tacoma, Washington

Allie dropped her files onto the conference room table harder than intended. The morning hadn’t turned up anything new. She and Jason had spoken with Judge Vance's friends and former colleagues who'd offered nothing but shock and condolences, their faces mirror images of bewilderment and grief. Everyone said the same thing: Vance had been perfectly normal in his final days.

Jason pulled out a chair across from her. “So many dead ends this morning.”

“All of them.” She rubbed her eyes, trying to reset her focus. They'd spent hours chasing information that led them nowhere.

Now they faced a challenge that refused to go away: Data. Mountains of it.

Brandy stood at the head of the table with her signature Ferrari red moto jacket draped over the back of a chair. She pulled her bright red hair into a messy bun, strands escaping around her face. Next to her, in tortoiseshell glasses, sat Mia Quinn, a data analyst who was helping sort through the courthouse records. She was the perfect foil for the effusive cyber expert. Mia was quiet where Brandy was loud, methodical where Brandy was intuitive, but together they made a formidable team. Allie was happy to have them along for the ride.

The two women had laptops open, a wall-mounted screen glowing behind them with what looked like spreadsheets and case files organized into color-coded clusters.

“Okay, so here's what we've got.” Brandy gestured to the screen. “We pulled everything from the courthouse on Vance's case files and cross-referenced them with Sterling's prosecutions. Mia's been helping me work through it all.”

Mia nodded as she tapped on her keyboard. The screen shifted to show a web of connections between cases, dates, and names—lines connecting prosecutors to judges, defendants to verdicts, creating a visual representation of years of federal prosecutions. “There's a lot to work through. We've been trying to pare it down to something more manageable.”

Allie studied the screen with a low sense of dread building in the back of her mind. The sheer volume of information was overwhelming, each case representing hours of investigation, days of trial, and an untold number of lives permanently altered. Sterling had tried cases in Vance’s courtroom for years. How many defendants had they put away? How many enemies had they made?

“So, what's our approach?” she asked.

“We're moving forward on the assumption that the killer targeted the victims based on joint cases they worked,” Brandy said. She clicked to a different view, highlighting overlapping prosecutions. “And that the numbers branded onto them are likewise connected.”

“We decided to begin with the highest profile cases and work our way from there,” Mia said.

“Define highest profile,” Allie said.

Brandy clicked through several screens. “We focused on cases that made news, had significant financial impact, or involved defendants with resources and motive to hold a grudge several years later. Eventually, we had five cases that stood out.”

The screen changed to display those five in bold letters. Allie leaned forward, reading each one carefully. Five cases out of how many? The narrowing felt both necessary and risky. What if they were wrong? What if the killer's motive lay in something smaller, something they were dismissing as insignificant?

“Now this wasn’t intentional, but each one of these features a different type of crime. The first is public corruption. Pierce County officials were caught red-handed taking bribes from developers,” Brandy pulled up the first case summary. “Sterling prosecuted, successfully, and Vance presided.”

“I remember that one,” Jason said. “Eastman did a great job pulling it all together.”

“Which proves that he excels at more than just golf,” Allie joked. “Which, by the way, is getting out of hand. Do we really need a putting green in the office?”

Jason shrugged. “It’s fine by me.”