Chapter 47
It all happened twenty-four hours ago. It can’t be undone.
Allie’s fate is out of her hands.
Even now, after a decade, Washington has never forgotten the way that grieving father’s face had changed when he read the
funeral home’s clumsy, but well-intentioned, text message about his daughter’s remains: We have Isla here. The shock. The widening eyes. The heart-in-throat tremor of relief. For a miraculous split second, his teenage daughter was
alive again, and then she died a second time, like an unconscionably cruel joke.
God, she wishes she’d had the power to bring the poor girl back for real, in a way that wasn’t fleeting or illusory.
I have something incredible to show you.
If only.
If fucking only.
The interview room is starting to feel smothering. It’s been over an hour and the interrogation of Tess DeWater is going in
circles. This sociopath, this manipulative little shape-shifter who’s spent sixteen years secretly preying on the kindness
of her best friend, won’t surrender an inch. She already knows she’s staged the crime scene at the Devil’s Staircase perfectly.
She hasn’t left an iota of usable evidence behind.
Even the mystery hand glove print is a dead end, as she discarded her gloves to ensure there’d never be a forensic match.
A self-described worrier and control freak, she surely double-checked and triple-checked the bodies of Ethan and Jacob.
In her calculations, who else remains alive to challenge her story?
“I’m telling you the truth,” she repeats for what feels like the thousandth time, letting tears appear in her eyes. She’s
still playing her sole-survivor character, calibrated for maximum sympathy. Her breathy voice is convincingly timid and pathetic.
She’ll keep lying. She’ll dig in, deny, double down. Washington can’t help but find herself in awe of Tess’s cunning, the
intelligence and intent behind the performance. This shy girl with chemical burns on her back has been underestimated her
entire life, and she’s learned how to weaponize it. She preys on the well-meaning and compassionate. She knows exactly where
to insert her hooks.
Her lip quivers. “Do I need a lawyer?”
“That’s up to you.”
Worse, she seems to be acclimatizing to her new situation, finding her footing, gaining confidence. She’s done this all before,
hasn’t she? As a teenager she spent hours testifying under oath about her mother’s alleged abuses. As an adult, she’s an attorney
in training. Now those clear eyes are scanning the soundproof room, memorizing the camera placements, sizing up her opposition.
She’s about to make some moves of her own.
She asks, “What am I being charged with?”
“You haven’t been charged yet.”
“And if you can’t charge me, you’ll let me go?”
“That’s right.”
Tess nods slowly, considering this. She’s starting to sense vulnerability across the table. Eye to eye, Washington can almost
read the woman’s thoughts.
You don’t have enough evidence, do you?
Her voice might be a meek whimper, but her thoughts are steel.
You took me in on a hunch, overriding your boss, and you gambled it all on being able to break me in this room, on scaring me into confessing.
So how’s that going?
Law school doesn’t teach you how to be a lawyer, but it does teach you how to think like one, and that’s arguably more dangerous.
This woman has spent three years studying legal procedure. She knows she’s a formidable opponent.
“I thought . . .” Tess is playing dumb for the camera, but the detective knows her true intentions. “I thought you needed
evidence to arrest someone without a warrant.”
She’s thinking, I know you’ve overstepped.
Washington nods. “That’s true.”
“Probable cause?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve seen the affidavits you have to sign.” Tess pretends to think. “To clear the bar for probable cause, you need specific
facts to show, like, a fifty-one percent chance that the suspect committed a felony, right?”
“Something like that.”
“And there are consequences to making an unlawful arrest, aren’t there?”
“If it’s unlawful, sure.”
Tess looks across the table at the detective’s handwritten notes, reviewing the details she’s given thus far. An interrogator’s
job is to apply pressure to a suspect’s narrative, but Tess is too canny to fall into the usual traps. She even seems to invite
the challenge—if, she figures, Washington can even keep up.
You lonely, lost dinosaur. You missed the comet.
Tess already knows her story is airtight.
Her thrilling journey of survival could land its own Lifetime movie—after escaping the carbon monoxide and reaching the surface, she’d stolen Jacob’s jacket for warmth and set out to hike through the forest for help.
Faced with rain and low light, she’d taken improvised shelter under a fallen tree.
Then at daybreak she’d resumed her long trek through the wilderness, ultimately reaching a highway around noon to collapse dramatically on the side of the road.
The semitruck driver who’d stopped to help had feared she was dead at first, wrapped in a dead man’s blood-drenched jacket, her hair plastered with twigs and dried mud, one eye burst red.
She’s played the role flawlessly.
“I know the laws,” she says, “and I know you only have thirty-six hours to hold me without charges.”
Washington says nothing.
Tess’s lips curl into a microscopic smile, too subtle for the cameras to see. “And then you’ll have to let me go.”
I know you’re only playing a hunch, Layla.
I can still slip away.