Chapter 24 #2
And, as she hadn’t had the heart to tell her son, humans are just as capable of sudden, seemingly unmotivated, and self-defeating
evil.
Tess shakes her head. “Allie’s dead. I saw it happen.”
“Memory can be unreliable, Tess.”
The survivor shifts forward in her bed, her too-starchy sheets crinkling, her muscles tensing almost imperceptibly. Her gaze
meets the detective’s. “I know where you’re going with this.”
“Do you?”
“And I’m telling you, you’ve taken a wrong turn. Whatever the feds think they saw is a mistake. I lived with Allie and her
family for years. I know her, maybe better than anyone. She wasn’t a criminal. She wasn’t leading some secret life under Ethan’s
nose. She was a genuinely good person.” Tess is searching her memory for examples. “When . . . when we were younger we used
to play this drinking game with her cousins called Changeling—”
Washington jots this down. “Changeling?”
“It’s like a monster in disguise. And whoever is randomly selected to be the changeling has to play it cool and shift the
blame onto someone else. And Allie always lost. Always. She was a terrible liar, and I could always read her like an X-ray.
That’s her flaw: she was too honest.”
“Were you jealous of her?”
This catches Tess off guard. “Sometimes, sure.”
“Her success?”
“Just . . . her.”
“Her life?”
“The person she was. Completely fearless.” Tess smiles wistfully. “I mean, she’d already died once before—what did she even
have left to be afraid of? Nothing seemed to stop her. I used to think she was like a shark, like she’d die if she stopped
moving. She could walk into a bar anywhere in the world without knowing a word of the local language and make friends. She
could load her carry-on with two changes of clothes, her passport, and her toiletry bag and just go. The people she met, the places she wrote about—her life seemed too amazing to be real, like she was the main character in
a movie.” Tess shrugs, almost embarrassed. “I think that’s why I finally broke down and agreed to go caving with her.”
Washington narrows her eyes. “She asked you?”
“And I said yes because I wanted to break out of my comfort zone, to try something a little dangerous, to feel like Allie,
maybe, for a few hours.”
“That reminds me.” The detective lifts a page. “When entering a cave, how many people do you need, at minimum, to make it
a safe group?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“Two?”
“Three,” Washington answers. “No fewer. So if someone falls off a rope or gets pinned by a big rock, one person can go to
the surface and call for help while the other can stay with the injured person. Four people is better, but three is the absolute
minimum. That’s quoted directly from the National Speleological Society’s website.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You wouldn’t. But Allie would have.”
Silence.
“And she took you, an amateur, alone into your first cave. She knew there’d be ropework involved, confined spaces, dangerous
falls, and she still declined to bring a third person along for safety. Why would she do that?”
Tess sighs. She wants to argue, but she has no answer.
Allie is charming and charismatic, but those who suffer from antisocial personality disorder often are. They can learn to
navigate social interactions like any other complex system, memorizing the accepted dance moves and drawing upon their often
high intelligence to mimic and persuade. It’s been said that one in every hundred individuals is a sociopath. And, despite
decades of negative stereotyping, most sociopaths and psychopaths aren’t even criminals at all. Many are aided by their natural
antisocial traits to become high achievers in sales, the legal profession, and executive business management.
But . . . why would a woman who’s visited six continents and works her own self-designed dream job wake up one morning and
decide to murder her best friend? In Washington’s experience, the people who possess the most tend to also be the most afraid
of losing it. Tess worked part-time as Allie’s assistant—could she have witnessed something damning in the books somewhere?
Maybe Allie paid Jacob to murder Tess as a cover-up. And then there’s Allie’s mysterious recent behavior to consider—chief
of all her trip to Costa Rica, cut conspicuously short.
“What happened to her in Costa Rica?”
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
“You never pressed?”
“I respected her privacy,” Tess says. “She always respected mine.”
Stymied silence.
But the pieces are all there, Washington knows.
The survivor looks uneasy, her face going pale. It’s understandably sickening to consider your best friend might have tried
to have you murdered—and if so, she’s now lost Allie in two distinct ways. The shock and grief must be unfathomable. Washington
leans forward to squeeze Tess’s wrist. Her flesh is soft, her lacerations still scabbing.
We’ll solve this, you and I.
Together.
Tess bites her lip. “I saw her die.”
“Maybe you saw what she wanted you to see.”
“I know her.”
“My old partner used to say that no one ever really knows anyone,” Washington says. “It sounds nihilistic, but it’s true.
It’s a reality of being human. You just have to accept it and think of people in layers, like a Russian nesting doll. We all
have exterior versions of ourselves, polite and polished and professional. The whole world knows that layer of Allie, the
smiling, globe-trotting influencer. And there are interior layers, the parts of ourselves we only show our closest friends
and family, and then even deeper, the secret person nested inside. The true self. Who we are in the dark, when no one’s looking
and the lights are out.”
Tess nods.
“So, who was Allie in the dark?”