Chapter 12
The cave-in, the incident commander had called it.
Ceiling collapses are part of a cave’s natural life cycle, Washington quickly learned. In this part of the Drainpipe, the
crawlspace is crowded with rock debris from one such recent collapse. The blockage is mostly football-sized rocks, but the
largest obstacle is a sandstone boulder roughly the size of a beach ball, perhaps four hundred pounds, that dislodged from
above and settled between two slanted walls.
To reach the trapped woman, rescuers had to negotiate several of these unstable areas. In the early hours of the search, one
member of the first team unwittingly nudged a boulder that happened to be load bearing. They’d been evacuating him from the
cave entrance when Washington first stepped off the ATV this morning, and she’d only glimpsed it: a sharp spear of gray white
protruding from the man’s bent forearm, oddly clean-looking under the blood-soaked bandages. This was a new world with new
rules, and under millions of tons of rock, human bones don’t stand a chance. All it takes is a little pressure in the wrong
place.
This dangerous landmark put Tess halfway down the Drainpipe. 130 feet, the detective writes.
In total darkness.
With a killer on her tail.
“There was a little gap underneath where the boulder had settled,” Tess says, demonstrating with her scabbed hands. “With my headlamp, I saw more space, more tunnel, on the other side. And I knew that if I squeezed just right, I might fit through.”
“How wide was the gap?”
“Maybe a foot.”
Jesus.
“I wasn’t sure if I could fit.” A wincing smile. “But I knew he couldn’t.”
The killer was broad shouldered, a muscular two hundred pounds, much bigger than Tess. As physically strong as he likely was,
he wasn’t built for tight squeezes. Certainly not twelve inches between slabs of solid rock.
This would be an advantage—if it worked.
“Thinking of what I’d have to do . . . it made me want to throw up.”
“Hell, it makes me want to puke.”
It would have been a nerve-racking test, to wriggle under the suspended block. Like all loose cave debris, it could’ve been
unstable. If it shifted only an inch, it could pin Tess in place and crush her lungs inside her rib cage—another truly miserable
way to die.
But the death that followed her was even worse.
“The red glow was brightening around me. He was catching up fast, crawling just a few feet behind me. I knew that if he touched
me, I was dead.”
His Marine Corps KA-BAR knife would plunge into the soft flesh of her legs, raking through tissue, severing arteries, and
scraping bone . . .
“I couldn’t fit through with all my gear,” Tess says. “So I took off my side pack and pushed it through. Then I rolled my
water bottle through. I had to slide everything through the tiny gap, as fast as I could.”
Go, Tess.
“My helmet, too. I pulled it off, pushed it sideways so it would fit.”
Go-go-go—
“Last, myself.” She steadies her voice. “I remembered what Allie told me. I flattened down to my stomach, exhaled all the
air from my lungs, and squeezed in.”
“I got stuck.”
She swallows.
“But I kicked and pushed hard—I had to stretch one arm out and twist my head sideways, scraping my ears against rock—and I
slithered through. On the other side, I tucked my feet out of his reach. There was just barely enough space to turn around,
so I reoriented my body and faced him through the gap. I realized how close he’d been.”
That ski-masked face, now stymied.
Her voice hardens. “And I realized . . . I had the advantage.”
The killer couldn’t reach her through the rockfall. What could he do now? By the skin of her teeth, Tess had outraced him
and ventured too deep underground to follow. She’d used the cave’s hostile geography against him.
“Good job,” Washington says. “You’d made yourself unreachable.”
“No. Not just that.”
“What?”
“He wasn’t staring at me. I realized he was staring at my helmet,” Tess says. “At first, I didn’t understand. Then I touched
it, and I felt the plastic mount on the front. Allie’s GoPro.”
Still recording.
Her voice shivers with adrenaline. “It had been recording the entire time.”
Ever since Tess and Allie had first entered the Devil’s Staircase that morning, every word, every breath, every detail Tess had craned her neck to see, the waterproof action camera had seen, too.
By her account she’d filmed glistening formations and abyssal drops, her mishap on the rope, her unresolved final words with Allie.
And the moment this man shot her.
In high definition.
Now Washington understands the true depth of the killer’s dilemma. According to Tess, she hadn’t just witnessed her best friend’s
murder—she’d unwittingly filmed it.
And she was wearing the recorded video footage on her helmet. No wonder this man chased her so aggressively down the Drainpipe—he
had no choice. He was locked into this high-stakes situation as surely as Tess was, and now he couldn’t reach her behind the
cave-in. Even if he fired his pistol through the narrow gap and shot the woman in the head (at the cost of his own permanent
hearing loss), the camera and its damning footage would still be unreachable on her body.
“I stared back at him,” Tess says. “I tried not to think about Allie. I told myself I’d grieve for her later, when no one
was looking. Face-to-face with her killer, I had to be strong.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“I told him . . . I’d filmed what he did to Allie. Every minute, every second, was on the record.” Her voice lowers. “I told
him that whatever happened, I’d make sure he went to prison.”
In a heartbeat, the terrified survivor transitioned from prey to hunter. She’d outwitted this dangerous man, captured him
on video committing murder, and the footage was right there on her helmet, just out of his reach. Washington can’t help but enjoy the woman’s victory, as tenuous as it may have been.
Tess only nods in slow, robotic motions. A tear rolls down her cheek.
For Allie.
Grief has aftershocks, Washington knows. They hit unpredictably when your guard is down. It can feel like a form of torture,
rediscovering your loved one’s absence from every tedious angle—when you find their favorite coffee creamer spoiled and forgotten
in the back of the fridge, when you realize you should probably delete their number from your phone. She can see it rippling
through Tess now, the same soul-deep shocks that would have first hit her in that tunnel: her best friend of sixteen years
was dead. The girl whose family took her in, the restless spirit who lived to explore the world and the places underneath
it, the larger-than-life, enigmatic Allie Merritt was gone forever.
“She’d be proud of you, Tess.”
She wipes her eye with her thumb. “I hope so.”