Chapter 32
“Something splashed in the pool behind me,” Tess says.
“What?”
“A pair of glasses.”
“You recognized them?”
She nods once. “They . . . looked like Ethan’s.”
Proof of life, Washington thinks, or something close to it. The foreboding opener to any hostage negotiation.
“Jacob . . . he’d dropped them down to me.” Tess shifts uncomfortably, like something is pressing down on her chest. “I couldn’t
see him up at the top. But he told me Allie’s boyfriend was here now, that Ethan was tied up on the surface and he’d been
stabbed. Bleeding badly.”
“Why did he come there?”
“I have no idea.”
“What else did Jacob say?”
“He demanded I give up the footage,” Tess says. “He told me he was going to start counting down from three, and if I didn’t
throw the camera up to him before he reached zero . . .”
Her eyes brim with tears.
“. . . he’d go back up to the surface and kill Ethan.”
Jacob shouted: “Three.”
His own voice swirled back up at him from the darkness. The woman below didn’t answer, and he didn’t dare peer over the edge. Not even for a second. Not now, while he was so close to winning.
He waited.
“Two.”
Still, only dead quiet below. The steady tick-tick of dripping water.
“I’m not an evil person. But I can be. And you’re giving me no choice.”
He thought of the restraints cutting into the flesh of Ethan’s wrists and ankles, the cloth bag Babygirl had zip-tied around
his throat because she couldn’t bear to see his horrified face. He’d looked like one of those poor bastards from Abu Ghraib.
“Honestly, Ethan seems like a nice guy. A doctor, a concerned boyfriend, a guy who sends pictures of used dental flossers.
He’s an innocent victim here. He doesn’t deserve this. And I hope you have a strong stomach, because his glasses were just
the beginning.”
He scraped his knife along limestone, a rusty chalkboard screech.
“Next, I’ll start dropping his fingers down to you. Then maybe his ears. His tongue. His eyelids. No me gusta! I’ll cut pieces off of Ethan Ramirez and deliver them to you one handful at a time, while you hide down there like a coward.
Tell me, please, how much of this poor guy’s suffering is your life worth?”
He caught his breath. Spittle hung from his lip.
“One. What’s your choice?”
“I knew he was lying to me,” Tess whispers. “He was desperate and running out of time. Whatever I did, he’d kill Ethan anyway.”
But a flicker of doubt invades her voice. Right?
Washington affirms with a sensitive nod.
“If I threw the camera up to him, he would just murder his hostage.” She steadies her breaths, a painful dialogue with herself.
“Then he would start the engine and kill me, too. He only needed the camera. I knew his tricks by then. He was a liar.”
Washington knows the type. She’s interrogated men like Jacob Herman before. They’re not particularly clever or persuasive,
but they’ll say whatever combination of words it takes to achieve the results they want. Such people can’t be negotiated with.
Any promise Jacob made was weightless, worse than nothing.
The instant Ethan’s life was no longer useful to the killers, he would die. The instant Tess no longer held the incriminating
video footage, she was dead, too. In such a soul-wrenching dilemma, there are no good choices.
Option one: give the killers the camera, sentencing both Ethan and herself to death.
Option two: refuse, and let Ethan die.
For a long breath, Tess is silent.
“If it were you,” she finally says, “would you have given him the camera?”
“It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t there.”
“I know . . .” Tess hesitates. “I think I know what Allie would’ve done.”
“What?”
“She would’ve known the right choice—the only right choice, and what Ethan would have wanted for her—was to keep the camera.”
This would have forced Jacob to make good on his threats.
Ethan’s final moments alive would have been nothing short of hell on earth.
But the only other option guaranteed death for them both.
This is not a choice Washington considers lightly, but setting aside emotion, the answer is clear: keeping the footage would have been the only way to keep at least one innocent person alive. Whatever the cost.
Hopefully Ethan saw it that way, too.
“Allie would’ve put the memory card on her tongue and swallowed it, so that no matter what happened to her, the autopsy would
tell the truth.” Tess pauses. “But . . .”
“What?”
She blinks. A tear darts down her cheek.
“What is it, Tess?”
“Imagining Allie’s ghost, always asking myself what she would do . . . it was a distraction.” She takes a breath, finding
the words. “One way or another, I’ve asked myself that question for half my life. And maybe you’re right, and I never knew
the real Allie Merritt at all. And this fictional version of her that I’d built up in my head was something I needed to overcome,
like a tumor I needed to cut out.”
She’s reached a new clarity.
“I’ve always lived in her shadow. I was so jealous of her, and in my jealousy I’d convinced myself that she was somehow greater
than human, and I was less than her. Not as brave, not as smart. Just a supporting character in her story. And I told myself
that to get through this moment, I wouldn’t try to be her. I was done trying to be Allie.”
Her voice hardens.
“I’d be me.”
After a long pause Jacob heard the woman’s voice echo from below, faint and beaten. “Okay. I’m . . . I’m throwing the camera
up to you.”
He exhaled. Thank God.
“Just please . . . please don’t kill Ethan—”
“I won’t,” he lied.
“Give me your word.”
“Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.” Jacob was speaking on autopilot, digging his boots in and hooking
his elbow around a protrusion of stone. He’d need to be careful not to lose his footing.
“Ready?” she called.
“Ready.”
Sure enough, a tiny shape hurtled straight up from below. The plastic gadget clacked against rock, bounced off the stalactite
ceiling, and before it could drop back down—Yes!—Jacob leaned out to swipe it from midair with his good hand. The woman’s GoPro was finally, finally, a solid object between his fingers.
“To catch the camera,” Tess says, “he had to lean out over the edge for just a second. I saw his headlamp, that floating ball
of red. I was ready.”
Her voice lowers.
“I aimed. And fired.”