You Can't Catch Me(71)

JJ agrees, and so we spend the next hour clearing the scene. I pull a tarp from my pack, and we put Jessie on it so her blood stops oozing into the ground. JJ takes the latrine shovel I also brought to dig up the earth around Jessie’s head and walks it into the lake to let it disappear. Then we repeat the scene at the clearing in the woods where Jessie fell the first time. It takes a while to locate the spots of blood, and we can’t be sure we’ve gotten all of them, but it’s the best we can do under the circumstances.

We don’t talk much. JJ dumps the dirt in the water, letting it darken and then dissolve, and I toss the stone I was holding and the one that she struck her head on as far away as possible. Then we both take a swim, scrubbing the dirt and blood from our bodies and cleaning out the scrapes we’ve collected as best we can with a tube of biodegradable soap, using up every drop. My fingernails are caked with dirt, and maybe more, so I find some sand to use as a scrub and work them until they’re clean and my fingers start to prune. The water is cold, and by the time I’m satisfied that I’ve gotten myself as clean as possible, I’m shivering.

When I head back onto the beach, JJ’s got her shirt wrapped around her waist, and the rest of her clothes are drying on a log near the fire that she’s built up again. Her prosthetic arm is resting next to it. Her hair is spiked and her breasts are lying flat against her chest. I can see the ridgelines of her stomach muscles. She looks like an Amazon—not someone to be trifled with.

I guess we both look like that now.

I wrap the other towel around me and sit on the log. The fire is hot and starts to warm me quickly. JJ takes a seat next to me and I check my watch. It’s six thirty.

“We need to get going so we have enough time to get back while it’s still light out,” JJ says.

“How long did it take us to get here?” I look across the lake. Our beach seems far away and deserted.

“About an hour. But we were also racing. And I don’t know about you, but I’m worn out. I think we should leave at least an hour and a half to get back. Especially since we’re also going to have to tow the extra paddleboard.”

“We could leave the body here,” I say.

“I think that’s a bad idea. The animals might dig her up, and people come over here.”

I put my feet out in front of me. They’re full of scratches. My whole body is. “The lake it is, then.”

“Agreed.”

“Then tomorrow, we go to the local cops to tell them that Jessie ran away.”

“And say what, exactly?”

“We tell them the truth. Not all of it, of course, but enough of it that our story will check out. I lost my money, I went searching for the bad guy, met Jessie who presented as another victim, we teamed up, found you, and then came here because there’s another Jessica living here. Turns out, Jessie was the bad guy all along, which we figured out when we found her Molly ID and the other stuff in her bag. When we confronted her about it, she ran away.”

“You think it will work?”

“It’s taking a page out of her book, right? How she was hiding in plain sight the whole time. How hard are they going to look for her?”

“We could try telling them it was self-defense,” JJ says.

“Too risky,” I say. “If they don’t buy that, then I’m going away for a long time. You too.”

“You’re right. I want to get our money back, though. How are we going to do that?”

I face a grim thought. “We’re going to have to use her fingerprint to get back into her accounts and then change the password to give us time to figure it out.”

“We need to keep this as simple as possible,” JJ says. “A lot could go wrong.”

“Yes. And then we need to pray that no one ever finds the body.”





Chapter 33

Someone Always Has to Do the Dirty Work

We decide to wait till twilight to do the deed. There’ll be less chance of us being seen then, when we dump her body in the lake.

“We’ll have to weigh her down,” JJ says.

“à la Virginia Woolf?”

“Who?”

“An author who killed herself by filling her pockets with stones. She wasn’t found for almost a month. And then her husband buried her body under her favorite tree or something.”

“People believed that story?”

I shrug. “She suffered from depression.”

“Sounds like her husband killed her, then covered it up.”

“I guess that’s possible. Regardless, that was in a river. Think about how deep this lake is. Plus, there must be lots of fish in there.”

“Do fish eat humans?”

“Some must.”

“All right, let’s go find some rocks.”

The shore is full of them. I dump out the backpack and we fill it with rocks. JJ hauls it to where we’ve left Jessie, about two hundred yards from the beach in the woods where she can’t be seen from the water in case someone goes by, and dumps it out. Jessie’s board shorts have deep pockets, as does her sweatshirt. We fill them both with the heaviest rocks we can fit inside. Then we wrap the tarp around her and tie it off with the rope from the ankle leash from her paddleboard. We bring her board into the woods, then work together to lift her onto it so we can use it as a stretcher.