Tess was good at compartmentalizing, and she stuffed the encounter with Alana down deep when she returned to the station. She hadn’t been in her office long when there was a knock on the door.

“Hey, how are things going?” Steve Logan asked.

“Crazy.” She detailed for him her part of the investigation concerning Tami so far. “We think she went in the water at the Stairsteps.”

Steve whistled. “Wow, and she survived the Stairsteps, then the creek, then the river all the way through Shady Cove?” He stopped to consider this, and it struck Tess hard as well. Tami being alive was a true miracle.

He continued filling her in on Tami’s condition. “She’s on the edge, had obviously been knocked around by the current. Besides having two bullet holes, her face, hands, and legs were scraped up, so she probably grabbed at bushes along the bank in several different places before she came to the launch ramp.”

Tess gritted her teeth, the thought of Tami being shot twice causing her anger to ramp up. She’d have to return to the Stairsteps, do a better search. Though she’d looked around the area, they hadn’t known Tami had been shot and had not searched specifically for shell casings. Did they miss discarded brass?

“Did she say anything about the shooter?”

“No, but according to the medics who brought her in, at first she was mumbling—delirious, I guess you’d say. She was repeating lessons from water survival courses.”

“You’re kidding.”

He shook his head. “I took the same classes. You live near a river like the Rogue, you need to learn safety. She kept repeating, ‘Feet forward, head up, try for the side.’ If that’s what she was doing all night, then it probably is what saved her life. I imagine that also enabled her to stop herself at the boat ramp.”

Tess remembered those commands from when she’d taken a rafting trip. If you fell out of the raft, it was important to turn your body so your feet were pointed downriver, and to try to keep your head out of the water to breathe.

“Amazing” was all Tess could say.

“Yeah, she’s tougher than I thought. I bet she pulls through.”

“We’re sure praying for that.”

“I put a deputy on her door, didn’t think you could spare the manpower.”

“Thanks, Steve, I appreciate that. Do you have any idea what kind of weapon was used?”

“Small caliber. My guess is a .22 or .38. You recover any casings?”

“I’ll need to give the area a better look. That she’d been shot had not occurred to me earlier.”

“Let me know. I’ve asked the doctor to preserve any slugs if he’s able to recover them. I’ll call if anything else comes up.”