Chapter 27
I know how we’ll kill her.
Her voice echoed in Jacob’s mind as he drove back. Usually while off-roading he liked to sing along to oldies channels or
chat up truckers on his CB, but this time he drove in anxious silence. He chewed aspirin while the Jeep’s shocks rolled and
bounced. Every motion vibrated the broken bones in his hand.
It’ll work, she’d assured him. It’s certain to work.
For all the things that had gone catastrophically wrong today, at least the cave was suitably isolated. The nearest dirt road
was a fifty-minute hike, and the nearest paved highway was considerably farther. Even with his four-wheeling beast of a Jeep,
his little shopping trip into Flour Gold had eaten up almost two hours. His face and license plate had been captured on at
least two cameras back there, too. He didn’t like it, but he’d had no choice. Like any survival situation, every action was
now a trade-off. Lighting a fire costs matches and fuel. Boiling potable water costs time. Building shelter costs calories.
You make your decisions and commit to them. Let fear paralyze you, and you’re already bug food.
When he returned to the Devil’s Staircase, the sun was low in the sky. This time he didn’t bother hiding his Jeep in the brush
by the streambed. He gunned the engine and drove right up the hillside. One more good rock climb.
At the cave’s entrance he saw Babygirl seated on a mossy boulder with her legs crossed in a meditative pose, looking a bit too relaxed for guard duty. Jacob set the brake and stepped out. “There’s no chance she can climb out, right?”
“Zero.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s almost fifty feet straight up. The walls are slick as ice. Yes, Jacob, I’m sure.”
“And Worse Than Death?”
“Not an option for her.” She didn’t elaborate further, like it was a secret. “Trust me.”
Jacob wasn’t so sure. He’d already gotten his fingers bent backward today by a skinny little thing he’d thought he could handle.
He wouldn’t make the mistake of underestimating their target—never again—and he wouldn’t trust she was dead until he saw a
body.
He opened his Jeep’s back door and showed his haul. The hoses looked like neatly coiled snakes: three hundred-footers, two
fifty-footers, and three twenty-five-footers. Mismatching brands, some green, some brown and black. He hoped they would be
enough.
She chewed her lip. “How many feet, total?”
“Four hundred and seventy-five.”
She flattened her paper map against the door and traced with a gloved finger. She was checking the distances, adding up surveyed
measurements. “That should reach down to the Drainpipe, at least. Maybe farther.”
“Far enough?”
She refolded the map. “It’ll have to be.”
First, Jacob would remove his Jeep’s catalytic converter and affix a hose directly to the exhaust manifold.
Then they would uncoil the eight hoses as far into the Devil’s Staircase as their lengths would allow, joining each one end to end with airtight seals of heat-resistant tape.
He’d check every foot for kinks or leaks.
Lastly, he’d return to the surface and start the vehicle’s engine, flooding the enclosed space with suffocating exhaust.
The air would turn to poison.
Same basic concept as a gopher bomb. As a kid, Jacob remembered helping his dad asphyxiate pests with a hose fitted to his
truck’s tailpipe (Easier than the .22, he’d say with a wink). This cave was much larger than any rodent warren, of course, but Jacob could run his engine for hours.
He had a jerrican in the back, and he could make multiple trips to Flour Gold to refuel. He could take all night, or longer.
It’d been a hell of a day, no question. Their victim had escaped her preplanned death, fighting back with rope and momentum
and startling grit. It didn’t matter that Jacob was near certain he’d already fired his Colt 1911 to empty—they had to assume
she had a loaded gun with at least one round remaining. She’d dug herself into the earth like a tick, deeper than Jacob could
follow her. She’d made herself untouchable, or so it seemed.
No one is untouchable, Babygirl had whispered in his ear. We can’t follow her down there, but we don’t have to. We’ll suffocate her instead. We’ll kill her from up here without touching
her, without even leaving a mark on her body.
All from the turn of a key.
I told you. It’ll work.
She really did scare him sometimes. He never would have imagined a gopher bomb on such a scale, but she was a creature of terrifying ingenuity.
She could think laterally around any problem.
Jacob knew every inch of her body, but he couldn’t begin to comprehend the things that happened inside her head.
She was a master of the oblique solution, the kill without contact.
He was starting to feel better.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s gas the bitch.”
Tess was running out of time, Washington knows.
Her only route to the surface led through an infamously narrow passage called Worse Than Death. But that wasn’t her only problem.
“I kept looking.” Tess studies the hospital room’s pastel walls. “Everywhere was a dead end. Every side tunnel led nowhere.
I found a smaller chamber that turned into a low crawl, but a few feet in, it shrank too tight to fit and I had to backtrack.
I kept feeling with my hands in the dark, checking every inch with my glowstick. But there was no breeze. Nowhere to go.”
With her index finger, she traces a nervous triangle on the tray.
Slowly accelerating.
“I know . . . I knew I had to be missing something. I was positive the way into Worse Than Death was down there with me somewhere, but I couldn’t
find it. No cracks to squeeze through on my knees, no crevices or secret gaps. Just cold, wet rock. Everywhere.”
Up on the surface, the killers were racing to implement their deadly plan. Funneling the internal combustion engine’s exhaust
down into the cave would rapidly choke out the available oxygen—but the true danger Tess faced wasn’t asphyxiation.
It was the carbon monoxide.
With every breath the odorless, tasteless “suicide gas” would accumulate in her bloodstream, bonding and adhering to her cell walls.
If red blood cells are essentially buses transporting oxygen throughout the body, carbon monoxide is an imposter quietly sneaking aboard to steal seats, and every seat taken is one fewer for life-sustaining oxygen.
You may feel like you’re breathing normally, but you’re actually suffocating inside your own body.
Modern automobiles are built with emission control devices to convert carbon monoxide into less toxic components, but Jacob had been aware of this and knew to remove his Jeep’s catalytic converter.
In such a tightly confined space as the Chimney, the invisible gas would reach lethal levels within minutes.
In high enough concentrations, just a few breaths can be fatal.
Washington knows this firsthand.
The day after her very first wellness check on that kind elderly man who showed her his beautifully restored classic F-series,
young Deputy Washington was dispatched to conduct another wellness check. It was to the same address, presumably called by
the same concerned family member. She remembers climbing those concrete steps under the same blue sky and ringing the same
doorbell—but this time, no one answered. The interior lights were off, and the windows were opaque with a sooty haze. She
broke a window. The acrid air inside made her gag. Every room was smoky and dim, but she found the old man’s naked body on
his living room floor, his arms folded over his chest like a mummy, his hairless head reclined on two pillows. In his garage
he’d chosen to leave his classic truck idling overnight with every window and door shut.
She remembers hearing her own dizzied voice echo back at her on the radio, coughing as the sirens wailed closer. I dragged him outside. No pulse. I don’t . . . I don’t understand.
The corpse’s skin had been colored with what the paramedics called blood livores.
To her inexperienced eyes it had looked like a full-body sunburn, covering every inch from his sunken chest to his ankles.
Cherry-red livores are a common postmortem indicator of carbon monoxide poisoning, but somehow this was worse than any photograph she’d seen before or since.
The man’s flesh was colored so vibrantly he’d looked like a cartoon character, painted as Technicolor red as the old truck that killed him, silly in a nightmarish way.
And in the shock of the moment, of realizing she’d spoken to this man hours before he killed himself and missed every sign, Deputy Washington hadn’t even realized how much carbon monoxide she’d inhaled herself, until she collapsed on the lawn beside his body. The paramedics had to take her, too.
From sixty seconds inside that house.
Just a few breaths.
“There was nowhere to go,” Tess remembers. “It was like I was buried alive and Worse Than Death didn’t exist at all. I was
starting to panic. I lost control and screamed at the walls around me. And I threw my glowstick.”
Her voice lowers to a whisper.
“It landed in the water and started to sink.”
Silence.
“And . . . it confirmed my hunch. Because the green light kept sinking, sinking, until it was almost completely gone under
the dark water. But it stopped at the bottom, at the deepest part of the pool, and it illuminated a tiny black hole in the
bedrock. Maybe a foot and a half wide, at most. Barely the size of an air vent.”
Washington feels a growing coldness inside her chest.
“It was right there all along.” Tess exhales. “When I’d first landed down there, I had no idea I was treading water a few
feet above it.”
Worse Than Death was underwater.
The maze of ten-inch squeezes and bone-dislocating bends is already infamous—but with recent rain and snowmelt coming off the mountains, the entire lower crawlspace was also submerged in frigid water. Impossible to survive.
“I was trapped.”