Chapter 33
This fatal shot was fired from some forty feet below.
“I thought I’d missed at first,” Tess says. “I wasn’t sure I got him.”
“You got him, all right.”
It wasn’t a direct hit—the jacketed round had only grazed the killer’s neck and exited below his jaw. But it had still dealt
its intended damage. The bleeding would have been relentless, impossible to stop without immediate medical attention.
The autopsy is still in progress, but the medical examiner estimates Jacob died within thirty minutes of taking that glancing
hit. Before succumbing to blood loss, he’d managed to stagger back up to the surface with the GoPro in his hands. At last
he’d recovered the damning footage, at the cost of his own life. Jacob’s blood trail would lead to just outside the cave entrance,
where his body was found slumped in his Jeep’s driver’s seat.
Good riddance.
Not every death is a tragedy. It’s not an investigator’s job to make personal judgments, but Washington can’t deny the visceral
satisfaction in seeing Jacob slain by his own gun.
“That was a hell of a shot, Tess.”
She nods.
“The distance. The angle. The low light.” To say nothing of the speed and coordination required, all from an out-of-practice shooter. With that daring Hail Mary of a shot, Jacob Herman was eliminated from the world.
“It doesn’t matter.” Tess sighs. “Ethan bled to death anyway.”
“You did everything you could for him.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
“I think you’re a hero.”
She winces at the word. “All I did was survive.”
“Tess, survival is victory. Maybe you think you don’t deserve it, or maybe you’re beating yourself up for fighting back because that’s how the
world tells women to feel when they take charge of their fates. You aren’t disposable. You don’t owe anyone anything. No one
else was looking out for you that day. Your last best hope was you.” She glances at the waxy chemical scars on Tess’s exposed shoulder. “Fourteen years ago, you survived your mother. And maybe
that’s what made you strong enough to survive this, too.”
Another contemplative nod.
“Jacob was a monster. And you stopped him.”
“I wish I could’ve saved Ethan, too.”
“I know,” Washington says. “But maybe you saved the next person.”
“You’re right. That doesn’t help.”
The detective manages a gallows laugh.
For a long moment, no one speaks. Somewhere down the hall, a monitor beeps and a nurse’s rubber clogs urgently squeak on tile.
“Okay, Tess. I’ll say this once, because I think you’ve earned it.
” Washington sets down her notepad and exhales.
“You know the curse of being good at something? You’re asked to keep doing it.
Homicides are my thing. No thefts, no narcotics, nothing else.
If someone isn’t dead, my phone doesn’t ring.
My partner and I would rotate to Multnomah, Clackamas, Jackson, anywhere someone was having the worst day of their life.
And a few years ago I was talking to a man who’d lost his teenage daughter on her walk home from school.
Just a half mile between her bus stop and her house, a ten-minute walk up a gravel road, and someone found her body on a mattress by the river with her hands cut off and cigarettes put out in her eyes.
And I was sitting there in a dining room, speaking to a grieving father who was still processing the fact that he would never see his daughter, Isla, go to college or build a career or get married, and while we were talking his phone vibrated with a text message.
It was just someone from the funeral home confirming they’d received the girl’s body for burial preparations, but the way they’d worded it—We have Isla here—I saw it in his eyes, this awful lurch of hope.
You feel before you think. It’s how our brains work. A part of him thought,
for a split second, that this whole nightmare was just an awful mistake and Isla was somehow alive. And that stupid text message,
the emotional whiplash of it . . . God, I just wished I could fix it, so badly.”
She swallows something heavy.
“So I can’t stop. I feel like I’m not done yet, even though I know my body is. It’s like a score I have to settle with the
universe, maybe. Just once I want to sit down with a victim’s parent or wife or child and look them in the eyes and tell them,
I have something incredible to show you. Your lost person is alive and okay, and it’s not a misunderstood text message. You’ll
see them again and touch them again. I want to bring someone back.”
She smiles, her vision glassy.
“That’s why I haven’t retired yet, I guess. I’m holding out for something impossible.”
“And then?”
“Then”—Washington shrugs—“I’ll stop working for free.”
As Tess finishes her statement—the harrowing details of her survival in the depths, her dizzy and half-remembered conversations with paramedics, her journey to this very hospital bed—Washington finds her thoughts drifting to Allie instead.
She senses yesterday’s violent standoff at the Devil’s Staircase isn’t over. It’s only entered its next phase.
The survivor gathers her thoughts. “That’s . . . everything, I think.”
“I appreciate it, Tess. Truly.”
Every word spoken in this ninety-six-minute interview has been recorded, and the detective’s carpal muscles ache from six
pages of handwritten notes. Her mind is buzzing. It’ll take hours to sort and fully digest, to compare with the rest of the
team’s questioning, to match up with the bullet fragments and spent brass and blood droplets found inside and outside the
cave. And of course, to track Allie’s true path through the day.
Near Jacob Herman’s body, a GoPro camera was found discarded on the ground with its MicroSD memory card removed. The all-important
footage was missing. Presumably, Jacob had destroyed the chip like the others—or someone took it.
The day is a bloody puzzle, and it’s still missing a critical piece.
“We’ll find Allie,” Washington says. “I promise.”
Tess nods, unconvinced.
She’s survived hell already. Her body is a patchwork of freshly scabbed cuts and purple bruises, an eardrum ruptured, a wrist
and an ankle sprained. Still, hospital staff are optimistic. She’s proven she’s tougher than she looks—Tiny but tenacious, one nurse had remarked—and they plan to discharge her tonight.
“I’ll be in touch if I need anything clarified.” Washington closes her padfolio and stands up on sore knees. “What’s next
for you?”
“Sleep. For a month.”
“You earned it.” She squeezes her wrist. “And thank you again, Tess. For everything.”
The survivor smiles.
“If you remember anything else, you can reach me at any time.” She lays a business card flat on the plastic tray. “Call my
cell. Not the office.”
“Thanks.”
“If you feel unsafe, call me immediately.” She rests a palm on her holstered weapon. “I don’t care if it’s just a bad feeling or an eerie noise outside
your apartment. Trust your gut, Tess. Your intuition is what kept you alive in the Devil’s Staircase. If you get the slightest
suspicion your life might be in danger, the sheriff’s office has resources to protect you.”
A nurse enters and steps between them to recheck Tess’s vitals. The clock is running out, Washington knows, and it’s time
to wrap this up. The survivor’s discharge paperwork will be signed soon.
Still, she lingers in the doorway for a moment longer. “You’re like me, you know.”
“I doubt that,” Tess says as the nurse wraps a blood pressure cuff around her arm.
“I mean it.”
“How so?”
“We’re both underestimated,” Washington says. “And maybe you’ve gone your whole life believing it’s a weakness, but it’s not.
It’s a strength, Tess. It’s how we win, even when the odds are against us. We adapt, we pivot, we surprise. And ultimately,
we trick our enemy into defeating himself.”
Her phone vibrates in her pocket. A call incoming.
“Or,” she adds, “herself.”
Speaking of being underestimated?
The most crucial insight into Allie Merritt wouldn’t come from Tess at all but from Ethan—the poor, uninvolved boyfriend who
drove all the way out to the Devil’s Staircase on a bad feeling and paid for it with a knife to the gut. The phone call was
from a man Washington had been trying to contact for hours, an emergency surgeon up at Providence Portland who also knew his
coworker Ethan socially, and with a shaky voice he relayed the disturbing things Ethan had told him. The details are shocking
but not exactly surprising.
This statement confirms suspicions she’s had from the very start.
It all finally fits together now.
She dials her lieutenant’s number, but her thumb hovers over the call button. She rereads her notes and chugs the rest of
her coffee, even the gritty black sludge at the bottom. She knows exactly what she has to do. Like the heroine cornered at
the bottom of the Chimney, the killer’s stolen pistol gripped in her knuckles. Sights aligned, a single .45-caliber cartridge
seated in the chamber, waiting for the killer to expose himself for just a moment.
I can do this.
The badass woman in the cave had managed to hit her target, if only barely.
So can I.
Washington takes a breath and presses the call button. She imagines Jacob Herman, dealt a fatal bullet, clutching his throat
and staggering up to the surface with time most definitely not on his side. He’d had less than a half hour to live.
But a lot can occur in thirty minutes.
When the lieutenant answers, she speaks first: “I know what happened.”