The door was hinged on the kitchen side. He opened it wider, pulling it toward him, and saw that the two deadbolt locks were blind set, with no escutcheon, keyhole, or knob on the cellar side. If a captive had escaped her cell, she could not have gotten through this barrier with other than an axe.

David wondered why Ulrich had not sold this door of doors when he’d sold those from the cells below. Perhaps even in this callous and shameless age, there were not sufficient connoisseurs of cruelty with whom to place all the available product.

David stepped onto the landing and flipped the wall switch. Light bloomed on the stairs and below. Ronny Jessup had installed tinted bulbs from which issued a rose-colored glow.

For minutes David stood at the top of the stairs, considering the place below as not a hard passage of his life to be endured, but as a scene in a novel. Writing fiction, he maintained control, had the final decision on what events would occur and what their meaning would be, as in life he nearly never did.

When he felt a calm at the center of his mind, when the silence of the house became a deeper silence, he went down the stairs.

| 17 |

At the foot of the stairs was a steel-bar gate, at the moment standing open. Beyond the gate lay what Ronny Lee Jessup called the “receiving room.” He had finished the block walls with plasterboard painted a glossy waterproof white and had applied multiple coats of sealant to the concrete floor to make it easier to clean when one of his games got messy.

He had relied on his physical advantage, his size and great strength, to subdue a woman initially, but then used chloroform to keep her quiescent during transport. He bought acetone from an art supply store, bleaching powder from a janitorial supply, and brewed the chloroform himself from acetone by the reaction of chloride of lime. While maintaining his captive in sedation, Jessup carried her through the house, down the stairs, into the receiving room, where he placed her in a lounge chair.

He had then secured the gate to the stairs with a combination lock to which only he knew the five-digit release code.

If he’d needed to bind the captive’s hands and feet, then as she lay in the lounge chair, he cut those bonds. He applied no more chloroform. He removed her jacket or coat if she wore one, took off her shoes to deny her the chance of delivering an effective crotch kick, and waited for her to awaken.

When she was fully conscious, he explained that her life would now last only as long as she pleased him and was of use to him—unless she was smart enough, in the next fifteen minutes, to find her way out of the cellar maze by the secret exit.