Chapter 14
“That’s unfortunately correct,” Washington says. “Inside the suspect’s vehicle, we found your phone and Allie’s, both smashed
to bits. But first, he’d used them to send these two text messages.”
She slides a piece of printer paper across the tray table. Tess reads it, then looks away in revulsion. Bastard.
With his prey cornered inside the cave, the killer would need to buy himself more time. After (presumably) studying the women’s
phones and learning about each of their lives, he’d texted Ethan from Allie’s phone and Tess’s manager, Sandra, from her own.
The cover stories were tailored for each: Ethan was told that Allie and Tess’s caving trip had morphed into an impromptu camping
trip at Blue Lake (where cell signal is of course nonexistent). Tess’s manager, meanwhile, was told that Tess had contracted
a nasty stomach flu and would be absent for the next few days.
It’s disturbing how capably he’d managed to mimic the women’s individual voices. Allie’s text to her boyfriend was cutesy
and funny, while Tess’s message to her boss was terse and professional. This killer was diabolically intelligent.
In fact, he was too intelligent.
No random stranger should have known so much about Tess and Allie both—the passwords to their phones, their mannerisms, the
people in their lives—to act out such a convincing deception. Her gut tells her there’s another layer here.
Over three decades, nearly every criminal Detective Washington has tracked has turned out to be disappointingly stupid.
There’s always an inconvenient cell tower ping, or a stray fingerprint, or a surprise cameo on a traffic camera.
Force a liar to repeat their story and cracks will show.
Pick at those flaws long enough and the whole thing will collapse.
TV dramas love to show detectives cornering their prey in big, cinematic moments of revelation, but it’s really a thousand smaller moments accumulated gradually by the steady grind of procedure, examining conflicting statements from all sides, ruling out every dead end.
That’s the true discipline: a long, steady feat of patience and endurance.
Her old partner used to quote Elvis: Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t going away.
“This guy was a step up,” Washington says. “He wasn’t acting on impulse. He planned ahead. He made preparations. And when
you turned out to be more difficult to kill than he’d expected, he proved he could improvise, too.”
With two clever text messages, he’d bought himself at least several days before anyone noticed the two women were missing.
He was back in control.
“While I waited in the tunnel, I imagined Allie’s voice in my head, encouraging me, guiding me.” Tess flashes a pained smile.
“I swore she was still with me, somehow.”
With her index finger, she’s tracing something on the hospital tray table. Three repetitive motions, three sides. A triangle.
“I know I’m just being wishful.” Her smile wilts. “I was alone.”
“You’re a survivor, Tess.”
“Allie used to say something like that.”
“She knew you best.”
“Maybe.” She shrugs. “I couldn’t stop thinking about one of Allie’s favorite memories. She’d always described it so vividly
I felt like I was there, too, even though we weren’t friends yet. I can remember it, even though I wasn’t there. That’s how good a storyteller she was. She was camping with her parents somewhere by Steens
Mountain, I think, and early in the morning they shook her awake, and they led her out of the tent into the sunrise to see
dozens of wild horses grazing at the edge of the meadow. Her dad had whispered in her ear that every horse on the continent
was owned by someone except for a few feral herds that still roamed free—no more than a few thousand. These were old breeds
brought over from Europe by Spanish conquistadores centuries ago, their manes untrimmed, no shoes or anything. They’d never
been touched by a human and never would. Allie always said she envied them.”
Tess hesitates.
“When I think about Allie now, I think of those wild horses I’ve never seen. That’s what she always wanted to be.” She looks
up at the detective. “I like to imagine she got her wish.”
Washington nods. If only.
But she knows better.
For a long moment, the only noise is the gentle scrape of Tess’s finger on the hospital tray table. The same soft motions
over and over, like a motor tic.
The detective switches off her voice recorder. “I need to call my boss.”
“Wait.” Tess snaps back into awareness. “First, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“I have to know. It’ll bother me if I don’t ask.” Her finger stops tracing, and she gazes at Washington with hard focus, that
ruptured bloodred eye unblinking. “The asshole who murdered my best friend. What have you learned about him?”
The suspect’s name is Jacob Herman.
Thirty-six years old. Caucasian. Six feet tall, over two hundred pounds. Callused hands, bristly beard, tanned skin. He’s
also surprisingly, even unfairly, handsome, like a reincarnated James Dean. His last registered address is a trailer park
in Thermopolis, Wyoming, but according to the property manager he hasn’t lived there for years. His true residence is unknown,
like nearly everything else about him.
Jacob is a walking shadow.
Everything recovered from his heavily modded Jeep Grand Cherokee points to cold-blooded preparation. He’d worn rubber gloves
and covered his face with a hard-plated balaclava, likely to avoid shedding skin cells or hairs. He’d brought two rolls of
duct tape, two cloth head bags, and a pack of white zip ties. In a leather sheath he carried that steel KA-BAR knife. And,
of course, in a crotch holster he carried the .45-caliber Colt 1911 that Tess had witnessed firsthand, its serial numbers
diligently filed off. He’d wisely chosen not to bring a phone, likely aware that his carrier’s GPS data could be used to place
him near the murder.
Other items found inside his vehicle suggest the spartan lifestyle of a man living comfortably off the grid: a light fiberglass
kayak on the roof for fishing, a propane camping stove, and a citizens band radio mounted to the dashboard. The floor was
littered with yellowed paperbacks—some Nietzsche, some Jack London, and a surprising amount of Tom Clancy. The Sum of All Fears was on the console with its spine bent halfway in, right at the chapter where a terrorist’s nuclear weapon incinerates the
Super Bowl.
Whatever his background, Jacob Herman came to the Devil’s Staircase fully equipped to commit a violent crime. And according
to Tess, he was already waiting for his victims at the cave entrance with a Green Ridge cover story prepared—before he shot
Allie in the head.
This doesn’t add up.
Washington misses her old partner. She misses working with a partner, period, and not being relegated to a support role on
a four-person team. The lieutenant running the case is educated and pin-sharp, but he’s also thirty-five. He wants to be a
congressman, not a cop.
“Something is wrong.” She paces in the hospital hallway with her phone to her ear. “This is more complicated than we thought.”
“How so?”
“What Tess saw . . . it doesn’t make sense.”
“You think she’s mistaken?”
“I think there’s something bigger happening.”
If ideas come too easily, they’re not really yours. If answers come too easily, you have to ask why. Occam’s razor is not
your friend.
Washington thinks back to the first wellness check she’d made during her first year in law enforcement. She’d rung the doorbell
at an unassuming house, and an elderly man had answered. Back then he’d reminded her of her own grandfather, although he hadn’t
been much older than she is now. Apparently his adult children had been concerned about his growing isolation after his wife’s
death, but the guy had smiled and insisted he was just fine. He showed her the truck he was busy restoring in his garage,
an old F-series pickup. The wiring had been chewed up by mice, he’d explained, and the carburetor was gummed up with ancient
gas, but he’d been working on it for months as a way to process his grief, and he was close now to taking it on the road.
Layla—then only a deputy, so heartbreakingly young—shook the old man’s hand and wished him luck.
Twenty-four hours later he was dead.
Never make assumptions. Ever.
“For starters, I don’t buy this as a random attack,” she tells the lieutenant.
“A killer doesn’t just gear up, rehearse a cover story, and wait inside a cave in the woods for two strangers to walk in.
Jacob Herman couldn’t have known Allie and Tess were coming that day unless he already knew who they were. ”
“Focus on your witness,” he says.
“We need to look at Allie much more closely. Her past, her associations. And that boyfriend of hers, Ethan—”
“For now,” he reminds her, “just focus on your witness.”
She can hear the polite denial creeping into his voice.
No disrespect, but . . .
Fucking schoolboy. It may be his case, but he’s barely running it, happy to send three worker drones out to gather information
and type it up for him so he can review it all at once. It’s lazy, compartmentalized work. She knows that the rest of the
team sees her as a sad, lost dinosaur, and she was sent to Sacred Heart because Tess’s witness statement was expected to tie
the whole thing up—not raise new and urgent questions.
God, she misses her partner.
“Hopefully Tess can help me.” Washington looks back. “I’ll keep you posted.”
Returning to Tess’s room, she pulls up her chair and restarts her audio recorder. “How famous is Allie Merritt, exactly?”
“Last year she made Forbes’s 30 Under 30,” Tess says. “And Keep Calm gets almost a million unique visitors a month.”
“I assume that’s good?”
“It’s outstanding.”
“She started it herself?”
“From the ground up, when she was eighteen.” Tess smiles, both proud and wistful. “Ever since she was little, she’d always