During the fifteen minutes when the woman still might have had hope, he followed close behind her. From time to time, he snared her and removed—or tore off or cut off—another piece of her clothing, until she was naked when her time ran out.

At some point in her desperate search for an exit, she would try locked doors and hear the cries of the women imprisoned behind them. Perhaps her hope then diminished. And if she still held fast to hope in full strength after that, the bleakness of her situation couldn’t be entirely denied when she fled into the room where Jessup kept the wrapped bodies of his mummified future harem.

When the house had been heated and cooled, perhaps fresh air moved through this lower realm. But now there was a dank smell and the muskiness of mildew.

Before exploring farther, David returned to the stairs and gazed at the open door at the top. His psychological vulnerability encouraged a sense of physical jeopardy as well.

Whatever he might be, however, Stuart Ulrich was not the serial killer who had ruled this domain for almost twenty years.

Anyway, David had wired the man twenty-two hundred dollars for this tour and had spoken to him more than once on the phone. If he disappeared, there was a trail to follow.

It made no sense to fear that Ulrich would imprison him. The apprehension he felt, the claustrophobia, wasn’t occasioned by any risk he faced, but by empathy for the women who had perished here—and by the dread that Emily Carlino might have come awake in this receiving room with the sweet taste of chloroform on her tongue, under the pitying, hungry, honey-brown stare of Ronny Lee Jessup.

The seven rooms that Jessup added to the original four were not connected by one straight hallway, but rather by a warren of narrow passages designed to facilitate exciting chases and tense hunts. The cunning architecture made it difficult for David to know whether he was revisiting a section already inspected. He took a pair of one-dollar bills from his wallet and tore them and dropped small pieces on the floor like Hansel on some macabre search for Gretel.

The rose-colored light bulbs were everywhere. Apparently, to Jessup’s eye, his naked prey looked most alluring in rose light.

The labyrinth had supposedly been kept immaculate when the killer played his games here. Now some of the plasterboard featured water stains. In places, mold grew in fractal designs, jet-black in this boudoir light, or webbed a wall in varicose-vein patterns.

Not only the beds and other furniture had been removed, but also whatever instruments or monstrous devices enhanced Jessup’s pleasure when using his captives. For that, David was grateful.

According to Jessup, the five cells in which prisoners had been kept plus the mummy chamber had been fitted with doors, though the five “playrooms” had been accessed through open arches. Even if the doors had brought Ulrich a handsome price, he’d sold only five of the six, for David came to one still on its hinges.