Chapter 17
The detective nods. “Clever.”
“I promised myself I’d get that footage to the police. Whatever the cost.” Tess hesitates, afraid to say the second part.
For Allie.
Washington can’t help but be impressed. Tess had tricked the killer into playing his hand, and he was completely unaware of
it. She’s a skilled liar.
“Very clever.”
“I tried to think of what Allie would have done,” she says, “and do that.”
She’s tracing triangles on the hospital table again, that same nervous motor tic. If she keeps at it long enough, her finger
might wear down to the bone.
“I thought about swallowing the memory card,” Tess adds. “So even if he killed me, too, and some coroner had to find the footage
in my stomach during my autopsy, the cops would still know what happened to us. They’d have his face.”
A GoPro’s memory card must be at least an inch by an inch, maybe bigger—would it even fit down a human throat? Swallowing
an angular plastic chip would be painful. But it might be the only way to preserve objective proof of what happened. A memory
card could survive for months or even years inside a corpse’s stomach.
Washington winces. “Hell of a plan B.”
“I liked plan A better.”
“Survive?”
She nods. But then she seems to reconsider.
“It wasn’t just about surviving,” she admits. “Slowly, I was realizing . . . I didn’t just want this man to go to prison,
where they’d clothe him and feed him and he could get old and fat reading books. That wasn’t enough.” She takes a breath.
“I wanted to kill him.”
“I would, too,” Washington says.
Tess seems surprised to hear this. Maybe these days it’s unprofessional for an officer of the law to acknowledge that some
people really do need killing. After an uneasy pause, the survivor asks, “Do you do a lot of homicides?”
“It’s almost all I do.”
“What’s it like?”
“It ages you,” Washington says. “I’m actually forty-one.”
“No.” Tess ignores the joke. She’s after something else, something on the edge of her tongue. “I mean . . . what’s it like
to catch the person responsible for taking a life?”
The detective hesitates, searching for the right words.
Tess waits.
“Most of the time, they catch themselves,” Washington says. “They sit down in a little gray room with me for hours, and slowly,
with great effort, they dig their own graves. I just hand them the shovel and listen. Everyone wants to tell their story,
and every story needs an audience. I give it to them. I smile and empathize and build rapport until they think they can tell
me anything. And with every word, every detail, they keep digging themselves deeper and deeper, until they’re too far down
that hole to climb out. And by the time they realize I wasn’t really their friend at all, they’ve already given me everything
I need.”
“So bad guys talk themselves into prison.”
“I keep them talking.”
Tess grins. “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.”
“Exactly.”
Small wins are exhilarating in the moment, but the killer would’ve still held every advantage over Tess. And he still had
that .45-caliber pistol. If she remained so stubbornly difficult to kill, Jacob would eventually weigh the risks and decide
he’d rather just be half deaf for the rest of his life. With every passing minute she pushed him inexorably toward that decision.
The standoff was temporary.
That gun in Jacob’s holster was a ticking time bomb.
“Jesus.” Washington rubs her arms, surprisingly cold. “Through all of that, I don’t know how you managed to stay calm.”
“I was scared shitless.”
“I mean, you were composed. You improvised and adapted.”
She shrugs. “Fear is power.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s . . . something Allie used to say.”
“Fear is power?”
“Whenever I was nervous, which was often because I’m a bit of a wreck, she’d always tell me, Remember all the things your body does when you’re afraid.
” Tess smiles, channeling her best friend’s confident voice.
“Your pupils dilate so you can see better.
Your breathing gets more efficient so you can run faster. Even your immune system
gets better. She always told me it’s okay to be afraid. Because being afraid doesn’t make you weak. It actually makes you stronger.”
Nevertheless, the physical and psychological strain of crawling inside the Drainpipe had to be overwhelming. Tess couldn’t
have been far from an adrenaline crash. Fear may be power, but the body can’t stay on high alert forever.
“And the killer?”
“He kept picking at me, trying to get under my skin. He told me it didn’t matter how long I stayed alive. He’d outlast me, wait for me to die of suffocation or thirst or hypothermia. He kept singing that stupid song, just the chorus, like it was all he knew.”
The man downstairs, he waits and he waits.
“Maybe,” Washington says. “But there’s an implication there, too. Whether he meant to or not, he was giving you information.”
Tess’s finger stops tracing.
“Do you understand where I’m going with this?”
“I’d assumed he was bluffing,” she says, “trying to scare me.”
“And that’s still possible.”
“But?”
“But I think there’s more to it.”
A multiday siege on a cave would be a stretch for a lone killer. When, exactly, had Jacob planned to sleep? How would he keep
eyes on Tess and ensure she didn’t escape through a side passage? How would he guard the entrance to prevent witnesses from
stumbling across the scene? The cave was simply too much square footage for one man to control.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not trying to alarm you,” the detective says. “But as hard as you fought that day, I think you only saw part of the picture.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I think there was a second killer involved.”
The techs are calling it the mystery hand.
A partial glove print—in dried blood, no less—found on the suspect’s Jeep. Even in the photographs sent to Washington’s phone,
it’s clearly too small to be Jacob’s.
Someone else was present that day, even if this mystery hand (she hates calling it that) is the only supporting evidence thus far.
This unidentified person might have cleaned the crime scene to hide their own involvement, and they’d almost succeeded—if they hadn’t missed the one-inch gap under the Jeep’s rear door handle.
“But I never saw a second person,” Tess says. “I only saw him.”
“I think whoever helped him helped from behind the scenes. Out of view.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s the puzzle.” Washington smiles gently. “But we’ll solve it together, Tess. You and I. Your job is
to tell me everything you saw and heard on that day. Every detail you can remember, no matter how small. And while you do
your job, I’ll do mine. Together we’ll attack this thing from two directions: past and present.”
Tess says nothing.
This is a major revelation for her, and it’ll take time to settle. Washington can see the survivor reframing her thoughts
now.
She glances toward the hallway. “That means the second one is still out there.”
“Yes.”
“Right now.”
“You’re safe, Tess. That’s a promise.”
She nods, unconvinced.
“But this is why I need your help.” Washington sets her pen down. “I’m starting to suspect that Jacob Herman was only acting
under the direction of someone else. Someone masterminded this attack, and Jacob only carried it out. And it’s our responsibility
now, for Allie. To do right by her, we need to find the true killer.”
For Allie.
“Okay.” Tess swallows. “Where do we start?”
“Well, it’s probably someone who knows you both. Someone who knew you’d both be at the Devil’s Staircase, alone in the woods and far from help.”
Tess nods. She’s mentally scanning her friends and acquaintances, everyone she’s ever wronged in her life. But she’s always
been a loner. It can’t be a long list.
“Maybe someone wanted Allie dead, and you were just there.”
“Like who?”
“You’re clever. I think you already know.”
“Apparently I’m not that clever.”
“I think the answer has been right here in front of us the entire time.” The detective flips back through her notes. “Let’s
revisit the start of the day, when Allie first picked you up from your apartment. Remember? There was one person who’d had
that mysterious disagreement with her. One person who knew exactly where you and Allie would be that day, and maybe even exactly
who was waiting for you at the cave. Maybe he’d stayed home to avoid witnessing the murder firsthand, so he’d appear innocent.”
Tess freezes, a dawning realization.
“Not possible,” she says. “It couldn’t be Ethan.”
“Are you sure?”
Tess looks at the detective head-on, a rare moment of eye contact, and something changes in the recycled air. Washington realizes
this survivor is even sharper than she’d realized—she’s intuitively sensed information is being withheld from her. “What aren’t
you telling me?”
“I’m sorry, Tess—”
“Just tell me.”
“I’m truly sorry you have to find out this way.
” She feels a weight on her chest as she speaks.
“We found Allie’s Outback where she’d parked on that dirt road, as you probably figured.
And a preliminary search found something interesting: a Bartell’s receipt in the cupholder, dated for a week earlier.
She’d bought pregnancy tests. Six of them. ”
Tess blinks.
“Did Allie tell you she might be pregnant?”
She can only shake her head in slow, robotic motions. It’s like the floor has dropped out beneath her and opened up a terrible
new dimension to her grief. It’s quietly shattering.
“Did Allie want kids?”
“She never wanted kids,” Tess says. “Ever.”
Washington recalls the bumper sticker in the corner of the Outback’s back window: No Baby on Board, Feel Free to Crash into Me.
“Because her entire career is built around travel, right? Having a baby could change the trajectory of Keep Calm, or even force her to abandon her brand completely.” She chooses her words carefully. “I think that morning, when your intuition
told you something was weighing on Allie’s mind, that was it. I think that’s what she so desperately wanted to talk to you
about but felt like she couldn’t.”
It all fits together, even if Tess wishes it didn’t. Washington can see the pieces assembling themselves behind her eyes,
slow acceptance of a new truth. Her best friend had been a few weeks pregnant when they entered the cave together.
Before it all happened.
“Like I said, we’ll solve this from the past and the present,” Washington says. “You and me, Tess. Between us, we have all
the pieces.”
“Why Ethan, though?”
“Well, that’s the thing.” The detective looks her dead in the eye.
“Maybe kind, gentle Ethan Ramirez, the nice-guy pediatrician who sends Allie photos of used dental flossers in parking lots, wasn’t quite the person she thought he was.
Maybe that feeling in your gut was right to dislike him, even if you never knew quite why.
You want to know a guy’s true colors? Tell him he’s going to be a dad.
Maybe when Allie told him the big news, he decided he didn’t want a baby—or even a pregnant girlfriend. ”
Silence.
“And maybe he was willing to pay someone to make his problem disappear.”