Chapter 3
“Take your time, Tess. Every detail you can remember.”
Detective Washington has interviewed more survivors of traumatic events than she can remember. Domestic violence, car accidents,
suicide attempts, and even a mass shooting on a college campus. Already, she senses this young woman is somehow different.
“Honestly,” she adds, “I’m amazed you’re alive.”
The survivor nods.
Teresa “Tess” DeWater is now awake and under observation at Sacred Heart Medical Center. Doctors have identified a concussion,
a ruptured eardrum, a sprained ankle and wrist, and two bruised ribs. Her hands and elbows are torn raw, lacerations stitched
on her skin like cruel hashtags. Some have needed sutures, while others have been glued and butterfly bandaged. Her flesh
has swelled and darkened to a rotten purple in places. Presumably, these injuries weren’t caused by the cave alone.
She’d smiled politely and held still while Washington took pictures. Hold your wrists out, please. Lift your leg, please. Look directly at the camera, please.
After hitting her marks like a trained seal, Tess now reclines in her hospital bed with a blanket and a pulse oximeter on her finger.
She hasn’t touched the Starbucks cup on the flimsy tray in front of her, although Washington had called ahead to ensure the order was exactly right.
This woman survived a nightmare yesterday.
Most victims would still be unconscious, but somehow she’s awake and alert, ready to make a voluntary statement.
What was the incident commander’s word again? Sisu.
An oat milk latte was the least Washington could do.
“Your age again?”
“Twenty-eight.”
Washington doesn’t feel old when she speaks to young people—only when she sees other old people and realizes they’re younger
than herself. Stevens County has one of the oldest mandatory retirement ages in the state, but with decades of service in
her rearview, she’s also well aware that she’s past her pension’s mathematical break-even point. For years now she’s been
essentially getting up every morning to work for free.
“You and Allie left the city at seven that morning.” Washington checks to ensure her digital recorder is still running. “It’s
an hour drive, plus a fifty-minute hike. So that meant it was still well before noon when you’d geared up to enter the cave.
And that’s where you encountered this stranger for the first time.”
Tess nods once.
“When he spoke to you, did his little speech sound rehearsed? Anyone can toss around a few facts. At that point, did you suspect
he wasn’t really a Green Ridge employee?”
“I had a bad feeling, but I couldn’t confirm it.”
“Did he show any kind of identification?”
“No.”
“Did he have any equipment? Swabs? Dead bats in a bag?”
“Nothing we saw.”
“Do you think Jacob was a fake name?”
“I had a bad feeling about that, too.” Tess takes a breath.
“I think he was waiting for us, or maybe someone like us. He wanted to join up with us, follow us down into the cave. In the moment Allie thought he was just a harmless weirdo, the kind of guy she’s handled before.
But I think he was really sizing us up. Looking us up and down, studying our gear.
Deciding if we were . . .” She looks uncomfortable. “. . . worth it, I guess.”
Risk versus reward. The cold-blooded math of a human predator.
But a remote cave in lumber country, miles from the nearest access road, couldn’t have been the most enticing hunting ground
for a mugger or rapist. If he was waiting for his prey to come to him, he’d be waiting a hell of a long while. The Devil’s
Staircase is on private property, open to certified permit holders only, and the only visitors likely to come would be experienced
spelunkers traveling in groups. They’d be unlikely to carry valuables, making them poor targets for a robbery. There’s also
just enough cell signal at the surface that potential victims would be able to call for help. All drawbacks an opportunistic
predator would need to consider.
“And Allie?” Washington asks. “What did she think?”
“She told him to F off.”
“I like her already.”
Tess nods stiffly.
“Can you remember anything else from that first encounter? Anything else this guy said or did that can help me understand
what was happening inside his brain? Anything that might explain what happened next?”
The survivor shakes her head. She’s trying, but it’s all she can remember.
An investigator must be careful not to overdo it here.
All memory is filtered through the tissue of the beholder—in a real way, your recollection becomes a part of you—and as romantic as that may sound, it means your brain can easily overwrite the original with new memories.
The human mind is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and a careless interviewer might accidentally talk a witness into remembering something they didn’t see.
“What did he call you again?”
Tess grimaces, like she’s smelled something rancid. “Babygirl.”
“That’s right.”
“Something about it”—she rubs her scabbed arms—“makes me sick.”
“The name?”
“The way he said it. Like property, or a toy.”
Washington circles the word in her notes. She’ll run it through search engines later. There are few originals in the world,
and when someone says something memorably unique, it’s almost always lifted from a movie. But you never know. She wonders
how many women this guy might have addressed as Babygirl over his years—was it flirtation? An affectionate pet name? An insult? With the worst specimens out there, all three can be
true at once.
“He tried to hide it, but he kept staring at the cameras on our helmets,” Tess remembers. “I think he knew he was being recorded.”
It’s entirely possible, then, that those two GoPro cameras saved Tess’s and Allie’s lives in that initial encounter. The stranger
may have intended to attack both women in that moment, right at the cave’s daylit entrance—until he saw the two cameras and
decided to adjust his plan. What did he want from them? Why was he really there?
All unknown.
“Tess, I’m sorry for what I have to ask you now.” The detective takes a breath, aware she’s treading sensitive ground. “Do
you think there’s any chance that Allie’s insult . . . well, provoked the stranger into doing what he did next?”
Tess says nothing. Her lip curls, a microscopic spasm of grief.
No, not grief.
Anger.
“This was not Allie’s fault,” Washington quickly clarifies. “In no way am I trying to shift blame to the victim of a violent attack. And
I’m not judging Allie, either. When people are dead, it’s my job to ask every question. And what this guy said to you was
wildly inappropriate—so in my view, Allie responded appropriately.”
Tess half nods. Still, Washington senses the damage is done.
She doesn’t trust me.
“Allie never took shit from anyone, ever,” Tess says. “It’s something I’d always admired about her. I was jealous of it, even.
I could never do that. Whenever a situation turned confrontational, I always froze up like a deer.”
“But she stood up for you?”
“Since we were kids.”
“You were close?”
“Yes and no.”
“How so?”
“Our friendship was complicated.”
“Like sisters?”
“When I was fourteen, her family took me in,” Tess says. “I lived in their guest bedroom, right next door to Allie’s, for
four years. So yeah, we were like sisters. Literally.”
All friendships are complicated. But Washington senses there’s something especially significant under the surface here.
“On our way down into the cave, I was so upset with her.” Tess glances out the window, and Washington notices a ragged scab on the side of her head where it looks like a handful of her hair had been violently ripped out.
“That’s where Allie and I have always been so fundamentally different.
If it were just me there, I probably would’ve let that weird Green Ridge guy walk all over me.
I would’ve smiled and nodded and said whatever it took to de-escalate, to make him lose interest and move on.
But not Allie. She didn’t know any other way.
She was direct to a fault. She always stood up for me, and that time I criticized her for it. ”
An uncomfortable silence. The survivor’s left eye is bright red, the white entirely smothered with blood. A burst vessel.
Finally, Tess sighs. “What’s the word you used?”
“Provoke?”
“Maybe Allie did,” she admits. “Like stepping on a buried land mine.”
Washington nods gently. She’s reminded of her early years of traffic stops, the most statistically dangerous part of any officer’s
job. Rightly or wrongly, they condition you to see every interaction with a stranger as a small roulette spin. You never know
who you’re changing lanes beside. Saying the wrong thing to the wrong person can invite life-shattering consequences, and
Tess seems to acknowledge that, too.
She adds, “You can’t blame someone for stepping on a land mine.”
“Of course not.”
“I kept looking back,” Tess says. “As we went deeper underground, I couldn’t shake a gut feeling that the guy was behind us,
following us down.”
Although Washington was the first detective to arrive outside the Devil’s Staircase this morning, she was reassigned to a
support role within an hour. She’d barely had time to view the body or introduce herself to the rescue team. This was all
under the pretense of utilizing her superior information-synthesizing experience, but she’s not stupid. It’s about her age. Her lieutenant was worried a woman in her sixties might break a hip on the rough
terrain.
She’s used to being underestimated, and she even likes it.
But not being condescended to.
So here she sits instead, miles away in an air-conditioned hospital room with Tess. Washington has never actually set foot
inside a cave before, and at her age, she knows she likely never will. She’s watched a few horror movies of varying quality
and a documentary about the 2018 Thailand cave rescue, but she knows nothing can compare to the experience of the real thing.
The temperature, the odors, the textures. Your body must instinctively recognize the sheer weight of millions of tons of rock
and soil packed densely above your head. On some visceral level, you understand you don’t belong there.
“I’m curious, Tess. What’s it like inside a cave?”
She hesitates. “It’s . . . hard to describe.”
The highest level of the cave system is nicknamed the Upper Vault, at a depth of between twenty-five and a hundred feet. Experts
on the rescue team described it as a labyrinth of spacious catacombs containing stalactites, stalagmites, and even more mystifying
jargon like coralloids and speleogens. It sounded like a world from a science fiction novel. Washington tries to visualize it. “I’m assuming it was cold?”
“Yes.”
“And wet?”
“Yes.”
“And dark?”
“Very.”
“Was it like a maze, or more linear?”
“Both, in different places.”
These are all weak descriptors. Surely they can’t do the physical experience justice. Washington needs more. “What are the
walls like? The ceiling? The floor?”
Tess is silent for a moment. Her hair is still crusted with mud, hardened into knots. She studies the scabbed cuts on her arms, the blackened blood under her fingernails, and whispers something too faint to hear.
It sounded like: It’s not a human place.
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s what makes it so hard to describe. There are no walls or ceiling or floor.” Tess stares at a point just over Washington’s
shoulder as she speaks, giving the detective the unsettling feeling that someone is standing silently behind her. “All of
those surfaces jumble together. They’re human words, a human way of understanding an interior. Underground, you have to navigate
in three dimensions. There’s no floor plan, no logic. You crawl and climb and twist and drop. Maps can’t even prepare you
for it. Caves weren’t designed for humans. They couldn’t care less if there’s enough space for you to squeeze through. Lots
of them must be impossible for a human body to fit.” She takes a shivery breath. “And if you pretzel yourself deeply enough
into it, far enough down, you’ll stay there forever.”
In the rescue operation’s early hours, one of the team members had said something similarly ominous: Not all lost cavers are recovered. This is well-known within the caving community. Victims around the world remain wedged inside their final resting places
to this day, as unreachable as the frozen bodies atop Mount Everest.
“Allie always said, When you leave a cave, the entire world becomes new again.”
“Like a near-death experience.”
“Pretty much. And the entire time, while she led me farther and farther down, a part of my brain—the paranoid control-freak
part, the part that’s always afraid to leave my apartment and envisions flooding faucets and burning kitchens—imagined taking
a wrong turn somewhere and having to retrace my steps back. Or worse, adding to my mistake with another wrong turn, and another.
Losing my way back completely.”
The Devil’s Staircase is a complex web of tunnels, honeycombed with multiple routes, switchbacks, and hidden passages. The idea of becoming lost inside it unsettles Washington.
She draws a line on her notepad and writes: 25 feet.
Tess and Allie’s descent began here in the Upper Vault. From this point, both women’s fates were locked into a chain of events
that would culminate in the region’s largest underground rescue effort in decades. Boulders would be chiseled and lifted.
Pulleys would be installed. And, critically, only one woman would return to the surface.
What happened down there?
“Okay, Tess.” Washington leans forward. “Take a deep breath. Are you ready?”
She nods.
“What happened next?”