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.

The space beyond the threshold was about seventeen feet square and more detailed than other rooms. Sconces provided white light. The walls met at radiused corners rather than ninety-degree angles. In the center of the domed ten-foot ceiling, Jessup had embedded a ceramic tile on which was painted an eye with a bright-blue pupil.

The radiuses and the shallow dome created acoustics different from those of the other rooms. David’s footfalls made a hollow sound and echoed along the curved surfaces.

Three walls were painted concrete block, but the back wall appeared to be made of railroad ties from floor to ceiling. Along that entire expanse were three rows of platforms, three platforms per row, the first row a foot off the floor. They were like nine bunk beds, embedded in the wood wall, made of lumber but laminated with white Formica.

He puzzled over them for a moment before realizing that they were catafalques. Here, the nine mummified women had been stored in their windings to await some magical Egyptian reanimation, courtesy of a heretofore unknown resurrecting power of electricity.

There were stains and thin crusts of some unthinkable material on the Formica, though only here and there, not as many as he would have expected. The floor was clean. No mold grew in this room, as though the eye in the dome had the power to forbid its cultivation.