Chapter 11
“I landed hard on my stomach,” Tess remembers. “There was no space to turn around. Just solid rock, inches from my face.”
Just imagining it gives Washington a chill.
“I tried to push myself up into a crawling position, but the ceiling scraped my back. I couldn’t stretch my arms.” She steadies
her voice. “I blinked, but my eyes were full of mud. It was cold, wet, pitch-black. I didn’t know how long the Drainpipe was,
or how far I’d slid, or how close he was behind me. My ears were ringing, but I could hear him moving somewhere above me,
his boots stomping. He was screaming, swearing, pissed that I’d gotten away. I think I’d landed maybe five or six feet down,
just out of his view.”
A few hard-fought seconds of safety.
But Tess would’ve also been helpless, wedged upside down inside the chute. She was sealed in on all sides by rock. From such
a vulnerable position she would’ve been unable to fight back or even see his attack coming.
“I couldn’t breathe. I cried out, and my own voice sounded deafening, trapped inside the tiny space with me. I screamed and
screamed, breathing my own reused air, on and on until my throat was raw. It felt like drowning, but it never ended. I remember
wanting to die.”
The survivor hesitates.
“And then . . . I saw that red glow again. Lighting up the walls around me, getting brighter. And I heard shuffling, scraping sounds. I knew he was cramming himself down the tunnel after me, following me down. I couldn’t see him, but he was close.”
She shudders, reliving the nightmare in tactile detail.
“I felt a breeze on my bare ankle, just above my sock—he was right there, right there, crawling behind me—and I kicked at him. I had to go deeper. I threw myself down the narrow tunnel, fighting to stay ahead
of him, using big rocks as handholds and footholds to pull myself through. They cut me on all sides, tugged my harness, bumped
my helmet, caught on my clothes. I didn’t even have room to look back. But I could hear his breaths, these huffing pants like
an attack dog. I could smell his sweat.” She hesitates, as if afraid to say it. “And I heard . . . something else. This weird
metal ticking noise, right behind me.”
The detective furrows her brow. “Can you elaborate?”
“Like this.” Tess raps her knuckle on the hospital tray, as steady as a heartbeat.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Washington’s stomach twists. She knows what Tess was hearing. She already saw it this morning: a seven-inch KA-BAR combat
knife with a grooved metal handle. The official fighting knife of the US Marine Corps. The killer had carried it in his fist
as he chased her on hands and knees—and with every lurching motion, steel clicked on rock.
“I kept crawling,” she whispers, “trying to stay ahead of that sound.”
Wedged inside the tunnel, Tess would have had no defense against the killer and his knife.
If he’d caught her, she could have only kicked blindly, her face and vital organs out of his reach, but her lower body vulnerable as he stabbed and slashed, severing arteries in her ankles, inflicting enough damage to ensure she bled to death in the confined space. A truly miserable way to die.
He had a gun, of course, but he’d made the decision to switch to his knife. He’d probably (painfully) learned that a firearm
was near useless in a cave. Fired in open air, a .45-caliber report is over 160 decibels, loud enough to damage unprotected
ears. Indoors, sound bounces off walls and its power amplifies. The Drainpipe made this a thousand times worse: firing a gun
inside a shoulder-width crawlspace inches from your face would all but guarantee permanent hearing loss. Then there’s the
risk of a fatal ricochet. A single bullet could shatter into lethal bouncing fragments, turning the narrow tunnel into a meat
grinder. In all likelihood, he’d never planned to fire the pistol that day at all, carrying it as a backup and relying on
his own physical threat—until Allie and Tess refused to zip-tie themselves. Until they put him at an impasse, in his own words.
The killer’s gear was unconventional, but there was clear intent behind every choice. The rubber gloves, the reinforced balaclava.
Even that surreal colored headlamp, like something from a nightmare.
“Tess, why do you think his headlamp was red?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
“Well, it reminds me of something I honestly haven’t thought about for years,” Washington says, and shrugs. “I have an educated
guess.”
Tess glances up, curious.
“Back in the army, we trained for night patrols, walking in pairs through the forest, and we didn’t use regular lights. We
used special red flashlights.”
“Why?”
“Normal light causes your pupils to contract, letting less light in and erasing your night vision. But the human eye is much less sensitive to light on the red spectrum. So if you patrol with a red flashlight, your natural night vision stays intact, and your light signature is tougher for the enemy to spot.”
“Win-win,” Tess says.
“Exactly.”
This ambush had been intelligently planned, and the killer would know he couldn’t pursue Tess forever. An unwitting third
party—cavers, trespassers, an actual Green Ridge employee—could stumble across the dangerous scene at any moment. And the longer he remained at the Devil’s Staircase,
the more likely he’d unwittingly leave evidence connecting himself to the crime. Hair. Skin. Clothing fibers.
His time was limited, too. He knew it.
“I kept crawling deeper,” Tess says, “fighting to stay ahead of his red light. I was getting exhausted. I could feel him right
behind me.”
She was cornered inside a tiny tube, chased by a monster. That steel blade scraping rock behind her hiking boots, seconds
from plunging into her unprotected ankle.
Click.
Click.
“My hands were getting sliced up as I crawled. My helmet kept bumping. I was getting stuck on things, and I realized the tunnel
was narrowing around me, getting tighter and crowded with loose rocks. Some I could push away. Some were too heavy. I tried
to arch my back and squeeze between them, but I was running out of space. Ahead, with my headlamp turned sideways, I could
see the way forward was blocked.”
She takes a shivering breath.
“It was a dead end.”