Chapter 10
“I’m so sorry, Tess.”
Nothing you say can help. Washington learned that decades ago. But you say things anyway because saying nothing is worse.
There’s something uniquely upsetting about witnessing death by gun violence, something only the initiated can understand.
The movies lie. Getting shot isn’t a sanitized off switch. The physics of a fast-moving projectile penetrating skin, tissue,
and bone are frankly horrifying. Even if shot fatally in the head, the human body takes a few seconds to fully die, and those
seconds can be sickening and messy: intact parts of the brain often struggle to reboot, lower functions of the body reflexively
cling to life, the eyes, nose, and mouth leak blood. Air wheezes out of slackening lungs in the victim’s recognizable voice.
Just by standing near the gunshot, Tess herself suffered a ruptured eardrum. This was to be expected after the killer fired
a handgun inside a cramped tunnel. Rock walls on all sides would have magnified the blast to an earsplitting volume. The survivor
likely doesn’t realize how fortunate she is to have received only minor hearing damage. If it could be any consolation, the
killer almost certainly blew out his eardrums, too.
By Tess’s account, this ski-masked stranger posing as a Green Ridge employee—“Jacob”—had followed the two women, eavesdropped on their private conversations, and finally, once deep enough underground and beyond help, chose his moment to attack.
From here on, every word matters.
Every detail.
Washington turns to a new page on her notepad and checks to ensure her digital recorder is still running. “Are you okay, Tess?”
The survivor’s face is bloodless. She studies the tile floor. “It’s my fault.”
“Look at me.”
“If I’d been faster, if I hadn’t frozen up like I always do, we could’ve both fought back and maybe we’d—”
“Look at me, Tess.” She slides her chair forward and meets the woman’s gaze. “If you’d tried to fight him he would have killed
you, too. Full stop. He had a gun. You had a pocketknife. The only person responsible for what happened to Allie is the man
who pulled the trigger.”
She says nothing.
“And this wasn’t a robbery, either. This guy wasn’t here for anyone’s PIN. He brought zip ties. He was there to make you both
disappear.”
Tess wipes her eye.
“And Allie saved you. She bought you a few seconds to escape. That’s her gift to you.” The detective reaches out to squeeze
Tess’s thin wrist. “Your best friend loved you, and in that terrible moment she proved it. She’s a hero. Don’t take that away
from her by blaming yourself.”
She keeps her voice low and comforting, but her mind races with new questions. The story has taken a hairpin turn, and the
real work begins now.
“Tess.” She leans in closer, her fingers interlocked.
“I can’t even imagine how difficult this must be for you and how painful it must be to relive the experience.
But you have to understand, I can’t do this without you.
I need your help. I need you to describe exactly what happened next.
After this stranger shot Allie in the head, how did you escape? ”
“I was cornered.” Tess rubs her eyes. “I couldn’t hide or fight. All I could do was run.”
“Run where?”
“Down.”
The detective draws a line on her notepad to mark a new depth, the point where the Devil’s Staircase becomes truly dangerous.
“He shot at me,” Tess says, “but I hurled myself down the tiny opening.”
A blind plunge.
Headfirst.
The Drainpipe, Washington writes. The winding, narrow crawlspace that Tess had been too frightened to enter before, now only the second-scariest
thing in her world.