“Kiss her good, Dave, and she’ll be yours again.” When David turned away from the table, Jessup said, “Thousand a month now. Old Ronny done right by you, like I promised.”

“You get nothing more. Not a penny.”

Jessup spoke quietly, with equanimity, with seeming confidence that the threat of defunding him would not be fulfilled. “Don’t go breaking your promises, Dave. You know how that turns out. You know how that turned out for sweet Emily, you breaking your promises. You break your promise to Ronny, it’ll turn out worse for you than me.”

At the door opposite the one at which the guard stood, David pressed a call button to summon an escort to accompany him out of maximum security.

“Old Ronny knows more than you do, Dave. Old Ronny hasn’t told it all. You’ll come back when you understand. You’ll come back to hear more, but there won’t be no more without you pay my account.”

| 68 |

In the rental GMC Terrain Denali. Interstate 80 west from Sacramento and then south to Oakland, across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. The city was dressed in a ragged shroud of fog less white than it should have been, as if the mist had not come off the ocean but had issued out of the soiled streets where in recent years human waste had become such a problem that the government provided maps denoting areas to avoid for health reasons. Then out of the fog and south on US Highway 101.

David Thorne knew where he was going, what he intended to do, but if he did it, he would risk venturing further across the border of sanity than he’d already gone. After his visit to the Zabdi house in Montecito, he’d descended into denial that was a kind of madness, born of love and desperate hope. But to descend farther was perhaps to have no way back. Nevertheless . . .

If he reported to the authorities what Jessup had told him, they would act, but with bureaucratic sluggishness. They would take a week, a month, perhaps longer, to mount the effort to revisit the former Jessup residence and descend into the secret chamber. After all, from their perspective, there was no emergency. Jessup had been imprisoned for years. His reign of terror was long at an end. None of the women he preserved was in danger, for none was alive.

Before they acted on David’s information, they would talk to Jessup. Angry at having his income cut off, he might very well lie, say he’d never told David any such thing. That would add a few days of delay. As might Stuart Ulrich, the current owner of the property, who would argue for guarantees against damage and for remuneration.

No one but David would have any sense of urgency.

Maddison had still not called. Nothing in voice mail.

It’s too dangerous for both of us in the current atmosphere.