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.
Jessup had told David that, when giving what he called this “orientation speech,” he had often wept with the terrified captive, and sometimes wept even when she didn’t. It was such a terribly sad moment, Mr. Thorne, very damn sad and exciting all at once. This was no doubt true, for he was a homicidal psychopathic sentimentalist with an intense and disorganized emotional life.
It was not true, however, that the captive might find a secret exit. There was no secret exit from that prison, only the stairs beyond the gate.
You’d be surprised, Mr. Thorne, how nearly all them believed it, poor things. How much they wanted hope when they should have known there weren’t none. Broke my heart every time, it really did.
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.