Chapter 23
Detective Washington is losing her lieutenant’s patience. It’s late in the day, the unknowns are accumulating, and this phone
call is going significantly worse.
“It’s all in Tess’s statement.” She flattens to a wall as nurses wheel a bed past. “Just listen to what she’s saying and you’ll
see it, too. Have we questioned Allie’s boyfriend yet?”
“It’ll take time.”
“Whatever Ethan’s story is, we’ll need to compare it with Tess’s statement. Lay out his version and hers, side by side—”
“No disrespect, Layla, but I’ll handle the big picture.”
No disrespect. Again.
“Focus on your witness,” he repeats. “Finish up with Tess.”
“I’ll do that.”
After she hangs up, Washington curses under her breath. A nurse glances her way but pretends not to hear.
She may have been railroaded into a support role, but she still knows where this investigation is headed. With most of the
cave’s physical evidence contaminated by the rescue operation, the investigation will all come down to statements. Conflicting
accounts, different perceptions of one objective truth. And the human mind is the ultimate unreliable narrator.
On the way back to Tess’s room, words echo in her mind.
Apple. Chair. Umbrella.
From her cognitive exam, repeated once at the start of the appointment and then again at the end. A simple memory test. And of course they had to be basic words, written on a whiteboard in primary colors like a kindergartener’s homework.
Apple. Chair. Umbrella.
Washington wasn’t too proud to take a cognitive screening. She wasn’t bothered by the inconvenience of splitting up a busy
workday on short notice. She didn’t even mind that now, five days later, those three childish words are still engraved in
her mind like a chorus to a maddening song she can’t forget: Apple. Chair. Umbrella.
What bothers her is that at the start of the test she’d been given five words to remember, and she’d retained only three.
As she returns to Tess’s room and restarts her digital recorder, Washington is starting to feel like she’s grasping in the
dark: “Did Jacob say anything else? While you were trapped down there, treading water—did he say anything else that suggested
why he was really there, or who he was working for?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Try to remember everything, Tess.”
God, she wishes she could enter this survivor’s mind and know what happened for certain. Play back, pause, rewind, like Allie’s
all-important GoPro camera. Study every detail embedded in her memory. All the grit and tactile sensation.
Free-falling dozens of feet into subterranean water would have been an out-of-body shock, and Tess has the bruises on her
thighs and forearms to prove it. So much sliding, jumping, dropping, spiraling to new depths. So much letting go. How many stories underground was she now? Twenty? With this final calculated risk, she’d left the killer injured and stymied,
her own certain death leveraged into a stalemate.
But there’s another layer here.
Washington knows it. And it’s time to take a calculated risk of her own.
“Something is bugging me,” the detective admits. “It’s been under my skin ever since the killer cornered you and Allie in
the tunnel. And I’m sorry, Tess, but . . . I’m going to have to ask you something uncomfortable.”
Tess nods, uncertain.
“Let’s take it back to the moment you saw Allie die. I need you to concentrate and search your memory. The shock and emotion
of the moment might have tricked you, made you misremember, so try to focus on specific senses. Only things you saw and heard.
When this stranger put a gun to Allie’s head and pulled the trigger, did you instinctively look away?”
This is a jarring question, and Tess has to think. Then, reluctantly, she nods once.
“Did you see her blood?”
“No.”
“Did you see the hole in her head?”
“No,” Tess says. “Why are you asking me this?”
“Because my team has searched every inch of the Upper Vault, where you saw the murder happen. And . . . well, Allie’s body
isn’t there.”
The temperature of the room seems to change.
Tess blinks. “No blood?”
“Nothing.”
“Have you searched the lakes?”
This being the next logical step. While Tess was cornered underground, the killer would have had several hours during which his movements were unaccounted for—plenty of time to make Allie’s body disappear.
Down the valley are Blue Lake and Lake Jackson, twin glacier basins dozens of square miles across and more than seven hundred feet deep.
It will take months or even years for divers to scour both lakebeds, and if Allie’s remains are down there wrapped in chicken wire, as Jacob claimed, there’s a high chance they’ll never be found at all.
This explanation is entirely possible.
Plausible, even.
But Washington already knows: Allie Merritt isn’t at the bottom of some lake.
“Why?” Tess looks at the detective head-on, her voice wavering with a sudden dread. “What other possibility is there?”
Jacob leaned away from the precipice, cradling his broken fingers, and glanced back to his girlfriend. She’d finally caught
up, wiping mud from her kneepads.
“Well?” she asked, frowning. “Is she dead yet?”