Page 78 of The Guilty Trial

The muffled scream came through the opening as the door swung wide. Donatella turned her head a fraction, then squeezed the trigger.

The sound was enormous in the enclosed space, a concussive crack that slammed through Thorne's eardrums and turned the air to static. The bullet caught him in the chest, and the impact drove him backward against the credenza. His legs buckled. His hand swept across the polished surface of his desk, scattering the pen and a stack of papers as he went down. The ceiling swam above him, the recessed panels blurring at the edges of his vision.

He heard a second sound, heavier, more chaotic. A man's commanding voice, a scuffle, and the distinctive thud of someone hitting the floor. The gun clattered across the room and spun to a stop somewhere beyond his line of sight.

Understanding came in fragments. Someone had tackled Donatella. Thorne assembled the information from sounds he could barely process through the ringing in his ears. He had the vague thought that the FBI must have come back to ask more questions.

He tried to draw a breath and found his lungs wouldn’t cooperate. The pain was spreading now, radiating outward from the center of his chest in waves that grew sharper with each heartbeat. He pressed his hand against the wound and felt the warm slick of blood between his fingers. His shirt was soaked.

Above him, voices multiplied. His assistant screamed for someone to call 911. Footsteps pounded in the hallway. Thorne stared at the ceiling and listened to it all as if from the far end of a long corridor. The sounds thinned and stretched as his vision narrowed.

He thought about Park. About the look on her face when he asked her to coach those witnesses and the hesitation in her eyes before she agreed. He thought about Pym, sitting in a white room at St. John's, muttering exhibit numbers to himself for years because Thorne had decided the rules did not apply to him.

He thought about Donatella Torrino, who gave years of her life to proving what he had done and had finally decided that the only justice left was the kind that came from a gun.

The pain was receding now. His hand was still pressed to his chest, but the pressure felt distant, as if it belonged to someone else. The ceiling above him had gone soft and indistinct, and the voices in the room were fading into a hum that could have been anything at all.

Thorne closed his eyes and felt the floor tilt beneath him, and the last thought he had was not about legacy or reputation or the career he’d given three decades to building. It was far simpler than that, and far too late to matter.

He thought about whether he deserved this.

Chapter Forty-Five

FBI Field Office

Tacoma, Washington

Donatella Torrino sat across the table with her dark hair pulled back and her expression calm. She'd waived her right to an attorney, and the recording equipment was running. Allie studied her for a moment before speaking. Donatella's fingers were laced on the table as she sat there with rigid posture.

Allie opened the case file in front of her. “Why did you shoot Elias Thorne?”

Donatella's gaze didn’t waver. “Because he orchestrated the conspiracy that tore my family apart.” She could have been reciting her own address. “He manufactured the case that sent my father to prison to die and led to my brother’s death. Thorne deserved to answer for what he did.”

“How did you know?” Jason asked her.

“I attended every day of the trial.” Donatella's eyes moved to Jason, but nothing in her body language changed. “I already told you when you came to speak with me at my boutique. I sat in the gallery and took detailed notes. Witnesses changed their stories between depositions and the trial. One man testified about meetings he initially said he never attended. Another suddenly remembered details about financial transactions that he'd been vague about under oath six months earlier. Exhibits appeared at convenient times. The defense raised objections about chain of custody, about documents that showed up late in discovery, about testimony that suddenly became more specific and more damaging than anything those witnesses had said before.” She paused. “Judge Vance dismissed everything, every single challenge.”

Allie kept her expression neutral, but the account tracked with what they’d already uncovered. Donatella had been sitting in that courtroom watching the same corruption play out in real time, and no one had listened.

“You're saying the defense tried to fight back,” Allie said.

“Their attorney, Carmichael, filed motion after motion. He argued that key exhibits had been tampered with, that the chain of custody had gaps. Vance shut him down every time. By the end, the defense had stopped filing because there was no point.”

Allie let a beat pass. The recorder hummed on the table between them. “Tell us about Arthur Pym.”

Donatella's mouth tightened briefly before she answered. “After the trial, I researched everyone involved. The prosecutors, the judge, the clerks and technicians who had touched the case. I wanted to understand how it happened, and how they built their verdict on lies and got away with it.” She straightened. “That's when I discovered Pym. He was the DOJ custodian assigned to my father’s exhibits, and he suffered a breakdown after the trial. He was committed to St. John's Psychiatric Hospital in Seattle.”

“And your father?” Allie asked. “What did he tell you about the case against him?”

“My father was adamant. Said said he never shot anyone with that .38. He said it over and over, to his attorney, to anyone who would listen. No one did.” Donatella's voice carried a harder edge that had not been there before. “So I dug into Pym's background. I found out that he had a girlfriend, a woman named Linda Hayes, and I used her name. I signed visitor logs as Linda Hayes, wore a blonde wig, and visited Pym four times between January and July.”

“And what happened during those visits?” Jason asked.

Allie watched Donatella's face as she answered, looking for a crack, a flicker of shame. But there was none.

“I convinced him that he could correct the record. Pym was haunted by what had happened during the trial. He believed the prosecution had forced him to participate in the corruption, and the guilt had been eating at him for years. His obsessive-compulsive disorder made him susceptible. The idea that the exhibits had been tainted and that everything needed to be set right—it consumed him.”

“What do you mean by that?” Jason asked.