Chapter 35
“Tess arranged her best friend’s murder.”
It was always her.
“We’ve had it backward. It was Allie who escaped the ambush with her helmet camera. Allie who broke Jacob’s fingers with rope.”
Washington catches her breath. “And Allie who finally shot the bastard in the throat.”
Silence.
“And with Jacob bleeding to death, Tess knew she was in deep trouble. She couldn’t hide what happened to her hired killer,
but she’s smart. To conceal her involvement, she came up with a new story. A version of the day where she’s the hero.”
Finally, the lieutenant speaks. “Clever.”
“Not just clever. Ingenious.”
Their perfect murder might have fallen apart, their designated victim might have fought back and kicked the designated killer’s
ass—but cunning Tess DeWater still found a way to land on her feet. She’d surveyed the crime scene, adjusted the evidence,
and created a new cover story that explained everything. She’d understood a constant as old as human history, from shipwreck
to massacre alike: the sole survivor gets to tell the truth.
The dead can’t speak.
Washington has her digital recorder in her pocket.
She’s captured ninety-six minutes of Tess’s lies, every detail chosen for maximum effect.
The survivor’s performance from her hospital bed was flawless—her tears, her regrets, her survivor’s guilt, the expertly calibrated waver in her voice.
The unmistakable raw talent of a pathological liar.
“Tess had to make sure we never found Allie’s body. So in her story, her best friend took a bullet to the head. Then she made
sure to suggest to me, several times, that the killer dumped Allie’s body in some lake with chicken wire. It was all a misdirect, so we’d send our divers out
there for months and search the wrong places, so we’d never find Allie’s remains at all.”
“And we’d have to accept Tess’s story.”
“Exactly.”
Throughout the survivor’s statement, an attentive listener might’ve detected subtle contrivances in Tess’s storytelling—nothing
impossible or unlikely enough to challenge, but merely convenient. When Tess fought back in the tunnel, why did she conveniently have Allie’s knife and rope? When she tricked the killer, why
did she conveniently have Allie’s baggie of spare memory cards? And when she ultimately shot him, how did she, an out-of-practice
amateur, conveniently land that difficult shot?
It was really Allie all along. Fighting for her life.
“Holy shit,” the lieutenant says.
Washington feels her skin tingle with adrenaline. She’s always had a knack for remembering faces, but Tess has become a worrying
hole in her memory, like trying to remember a dream. Dark hair? Pale skin? Small features? Her classmates used to call her
Wednesday Addams—but Christina Ricci or Jenna Ortega? Tess is an optical illusion, solid enough to touch when seen from one
angle, intangible from another.
“I don’t see a motive,” the lieutenant says. “Why murder her best friend?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Tess had admitted herself that she was jealous of Allie’s wealth, her prestige, and her jet-setting life with Ethan—honestly, who wouldn’t be?
—but Washington senses the women’s friendship has other, hidden depths.
She thinks of Stimpy chewing Ren’s head to a skeletal nub, the shock and grief in her son’s sobs and the hamster blood on his trembling hands, the sudden pivot to violence after years of peaceful cohabitation.
No one ever really knows anyone, her partner used to say.
“Whatever her reasons,” she says, “Tess masterminded the attack.”
“If you’re right.”
“I am.”
“Or she’s just Jacob’s puppet—”
“Do not make the mistake of underestimating this woman. Everyone who’s underestimated Tess has paid for it. I’ve spent an hour and
a half in a room with her. I’ve looked her in the eye. She’s one of the best liars I’ve ever seen.”
Over the past ninety-six minutes she’d watched Tess tell her thrilling final-girl tale from a hospital bed. Washington herself
had played the role of audience, gasping and cheering the self-described heroine at all the correct moments—building trust,
feeding the survivor’s vanity, letting her get comfortable and believe she was in the clear while Detective Washington quietly
assembled the true picture in her mind.
Never interrupt your enemy while they’re making a mistake.
And now, finally, it’s time to go on offense.
Her walkie-talkie crackles. “Baker-twelve, we’re at the hospital. South lot.”
“Hang on.” Washington holds her phone to the side of her face, her walkie to the other. “Baker-twelve, stand by in the parking
lot. They’re going to discharge Tess any minute. I’ll send her down the south elevator to you.”
“Baker-twelve copies.”
From the fourth-floor window by the nurses’ station, she watches the roof of a marked vehicle glide under sodium vapor lights to park at the roundabout. Light bar dark, engine silent. A sleek predator in wait, occupied by Deputies Harris and Dunn.
She waves to them. “Baker-twelve, be ready.”
Then, speed-walking down the hallway, Washington switches back to her phone. “I’ll take Tess myself. I’ve got a marked unit
outside to transport her to—”
“No. Not yet.” The lieutenant’s voice is solid brick.
“What?”
“Layla, wait.”
She halts. From here, Tess’s room is five down.
“Call off the deputies,” he says. “You’re moving too fast. We need to work as a unit. First, let’s all sit down tonight and
listen to your audio. You locked Tess into her story, and now we need a strategy to break it. I fully agree with you—Tess
was involved and we can prove she lied—but right now, she thinks you swallowed it whole. Her guard is down. If you rush us
to the next step, we lose that advantage. And . . .” His voice tightens with strained etiquette, a politician boxed into an
uncomfortable corner. He’s reluctant to say it, but he has to: “And no disrespect intended, Layla, but you’re not at your
best anymore.”
There it is.
Oh, fuck you.
“Time is running out.” She swallows a ball of white-hot anger and glances back to Tess’s room. “Any second now, they’ll sign
her discharge papers—”
“Then let her go home. We’ll prep tonight and break her story tomorrow.”
“It has to be now.”
“When we make arrests,” he says, “it’ll be my call.”
“This is a mistake.”
“I’ll own it.”
“No disrespect intended, but you don’t understand this woman,” Washington says. “If we don’t take Tess into custody now, if we let her out of our
sight, she’ll disappear.”
Jacob fell to his knees. Blood surged through his fingers to the slowing beats of his heart, spattering heavily on the rocky
soil. He couldn’t stop it, any of it.
He stared up at her dizzily.
Who are you?
Who are you, really?
Babygirl—or Tess, or whatever she really was—watched him fade with wordless disinterest. She’d gone blank, now a silhouette
in his red light. She stepped back so his blood wouldn’t touch her clothes. The air smelled like copper.
She was a creature, all right, and this mystery had enchanted him at first. She was a small-boned thing when he saved her
life at that margarita bar, petite like a doll—Babygirl, he’d designated her—and maybe that was his first mistake. He remembered the moment his fingers first touched the scaly flesh
on her back, like she was a shape-shifting alien caught mid-transformation. I’ll tell you later, she’d whispered in his ear.
And she did, eventually, tell him the story of how she single-handedly destroyed her mother’s life. How fourteen-year-old
Tess stood in her shower with grim determination and poured bottles of bleach down her own shoulders and back, twice a week,
for almost an entire summer. Just to get out of her mother’s tiny house with a leaky roof and bad water pressure, to get away
from the woman’s rules and chores, to be adopted by a new family, Allie’s family, with two parents and fresher groceries and faster wi-fi. She was a hermit crab, he’d reckoned, and she would always
want a bigger shell.
Even if adolescent Tess’s teary-eyed claims of abuse were just inconsistent enough that the charges were ultimately dropped—maybe her gruesome details didn’t quite add up, or maybe there were some flaws in her performance—her poor mother lost custody of her only child.
Then she lost her job and was shunned by friends and family.
Eventually she killed herself, Tess confided in him once, although she never explained how.
She’d outgrown her mother.
She’d outgrown her best friend.
Of course Jacob would be her next meal.
Now Tess paced with catlike footsteps, quietly surveying the crime scene she’d helped create today. She hopped from rock to
rock, her boots never touching soil or mud. Minimizing her footprints, Jacob observed thickly. Cute.
“It doesn’t matter,” he gurgled. “You’re going to prison anyway.”
“This is your fault.” Tess’s voice circled him, flat and hateful. “You never took this seriously. You parked your Jeep right
where she’d notice it. You waited at the entrance in plain view. You called me Babygirl right in front of her.”
All fair points. But none of it mattered now.
“The cops won’t believe you.” He forced a smile with unfeeling lips. “Whatever story you come up with won’t last five minutes
in an interrogation room.”
She kept pacing, in deep focus.
“They’ll eat you alive.”
She ignored him.
“You’ll crack under pressure. You’ll slip up and make a mistake, just like last time. You’ll be that scared little teenager
all over again, trying to send your mom to prison—”
“You’re wrong.” Tess crouched to meet his blurring gaze. “This time, it’ll be my word against three bodies. The truth is whatever I say it is.”
She smiled.
“And when I’m done, I’ll walk right out the door.”
Detective Washington enters the doorway with her phone clasped to her ear. She sidesteps a nurse and finds the recovery room
empty. The amenities are being rotated, surfaces sanitized, bedsheets stripped out. Tess DeWater is gone.
“Where is she?”
The nurse erases a whiteboard. “She’s been discharged.”