The low sky threatened rain. In the clouds, no shapes could be imagined other than clenched and menacing faces of fierce and inhuman configuration.
In the visitors’ receiving area of the most formidable of the maximum-security units, ceiling-mounted cameras watched as David presented photo ID, passed through a metal detector, and submitted to fluoroscopic examination.
Prison authorities, inmate Ronald Lee Jessup, and Jessup’s attorney had all approved David for periodic visits. They believed that he was researching a book on Jessup, which he wasn’t, but every month, he paid five hundred dollars to Jessup’s account, with which the prisoner could buy snacks and paperbacks and other items to make life behind bars more pleasant. As Jessup was otherwise destitute, these contributions alone ensured David’s welcome, although making the payments abraded his conscience.
They met in a room set aside for attorney-client conferences. The eight-foot metal table and two benches were bolted to the floor.
Prior to David’s arrival, Jessup had been transferred there, shackled to one bench and cuffed to a steel ring in the apron of the table. He could neither stand nor reach out toward his visitor with more than one hand.
An armed guard watched from behind a windowed door that would provide him instant access in the unlikely event of a crisis. The guard was so very still that he looked unreal, as if he were a robot that could be activated only if someone broke the glass behind which he stood.
David sat facing Jessup and put a nine-by-twelve envelope on the table. A guard had earlier inspected the contents.
Ronald Lee Jessup was a big but gentle-looking man with such a suggestion of witless kindness in his soft face that he could have played Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The media sometimes said his eyes were yellow, but that wasn’t correct. They were warm honey-brown eyes like those that might be sewn to the plush-cloth face of a stuffed-toy bear. They were also like such a bear’s eyes because they had little depth.
“Good morning, Mr. Thorne.” Jessup’s soft, musical voice was always a surprise. “It’s so kind of you to come and see old Ronny.”
“How are you today, Ronny?”
“I’m good. Are you good?”
“Yes, I’m doing just fine.”
“Glad to hear it. And thanks for paying to my account and all.”
“Well, that’s only what we arranged.”
“I bought more of them Louis L’Amour books. You like Westerns, Mr. Thorne?”
“I’ve not read as many as you have.”
Jessup’s smile was artless, self-effacing, without irony. “Well, I guess I got more time for it than you do. I like Westerns and all, ’cause the good guys always win, which is how it ought to be but mostly isn’t.”
Ronny Jessup often expressed gratitude for having been caught and imprisoned. He seemed to be sincere.
“You still making a book about me?” Jessup asked.
“Indeed I am, Ronny.”
“It’s taking a long time.”
“Anything worthwhile generally does.”
“I guess that’s true. Who do I know, like family and all, that you been interviewing lately?”
“I can’t tell you, Ronny. People get nervous if they think you know they’re talking about you.”
“Yeah, I forgot.” He shook his burly head. “That’s sad. There’s nothing I would do to them even if I could. All that’s behind me, like it never was.”
The house Jessup had inherited from his mother stood on six acres, a quarter of a mile from the nearest neighbor. The original basement had four rooms. A competent carpenter and excellent mason, he had expanded the basement outward from the house until he had eleven subterranean chambers.
When he’d been caught, four of the rooms were occupied by women he had abducted. One prisoner was brain damaged from physical abuse, and another had gone insane. Two were thought salvageable with sufficient time and therapy.
Five of the eleven chambers were cells. Five others were what he called “playrooms,” each with a cruel and chilling purpose. In the eleventh space were stored the bodies of nine women whom he had treated with his special concoction of preservatives and wrapped snugly in cotton windings to mummify.
David had never seen that place or even photographs of it. The architecture of the version in his dreams was unique to him, shaped by his fear and guilt.
Following his apprehension and arrest, Ronny Jessup freely confessed to a total of twenty-seven abductions, fourteen more than the four living women and nine corpses with which he’d been caught. He expressed remorse for his actions and didn’t seem to be inflating the figure to make himself more important. The police believed there had indeed been twenty-seven, although Jessup would not name the fourteen bodies that hadn’t been found or reveal when and where he had abducted each of them. He said they were his “future queens,” and that he alone had the right to their names.