For years he had avoided this man-made hell. He had come today only after ginning up the expectation that he’d recognize a subtle clue to the whereabouts of the additional fourteen mummified victims Jessup claimed to have hidden at some second site separate from this property. I need to have my fourteen hidden, Mr. Thorne, to keep from having to steal new girls when I’m free again. If Emily was among those fourteen, and if her remains could be identified, she could be laid to rest at last under a stone that bore her name. But there was no clue. If there had been, it would have been found by the platoons of law enforcement that had scoured these chambers for evidence. He had harried himself here to stave off despair, but had opened his heart to it instead.

| 18 |

The quiet calm at the center of David’s mind gave way to a chilling uneasiness. His ability to set aside his profound personal interest—the consideration of Emily’s fate—and explore this hideous place as if it were a scene in a novel began to desert him.

When a character like Ronny Lee Jessup had been at work here, such a scene in fiction would not have unfolded in silence, but would have been furnished with grievous sounds. David was a writer of considerable imaginative power, and now he heard the cries of the enslaved women as they cowered behind their cell doors and listened to Jessup chase down and violently rape or murder one of their own.

In a sudden sweat, he exited the mummification room and moved along a narrow passage, anxious to exit this rose-colored realm. He thought he was near the receiving room at the foot of the stairs, but he didn’t come to it as quickly as expected. The killer’s modest playground seemed to metastasize into a vast and baffling labyrinth of tentacular corridors, undulant and ever changing, torn bits of dollar bills fluttering around his feet, too little treasure for him to buy his Gretel from the ranks of the swaddled dead. It would not have surprised him if he turned a corner and came face-to-face with the hulking form of Ronny Lee Jessup, the past having become the present, the imagined screams now as piercing as if they were real.

He was so relieved when he burst into the receiving room that he let out a cry of his own. He threw open the steel gate, climbed the stairs, and pushed through the upper door into the kitchen.