In a voice as warm and honeyed as his eyes, the killer said, “I guess you got my letter. The postal service does a good job. I often think I could’ve been a postman. You meet a lot of pretty girls and all on a mail route, I guess, and you see where they live. Thank you for coming to visit old Ronny, Mr. Thorne.”
From the farther side of the wide table, David said, “I hope you haven’t brought me here just to toy with me further.”
A carefully constructed sadness reshaped Ronny’s expressive face. “I always been honest with you, Mr. Thorne. I couldn’t tell you where my girls are hid, because if maybe one day I got out of here and needed them. But everything else, I always been true with you. You’re a nice man, been fair to me. Now a thing has happened so where the girls are hid isn’t a secret I need to keep no more.”
“What happened?”
With his eyes and a tip of his head, Ronny indicated his right hand, which was heavily bandaged. “They mostly keep me solitary, you know. So I won’t hurt no prisoners, as if I got an interest in men, which is plain silly. But they also keep me mostly to myself also to keep me safe. There’s some in here, all bad men, bad as me but can’t admit it to themselves, which is their shortcoming, and they think what I done to my girls makes me unfit company. They want to prove themselves better than me by doing me damage. So one cut me with a makeshift knife. He don’t have it no more. He don’t have a left eye, neither. My hand will heal okay, but this thing happening made me see there’s no way I’ll have my girls no more. My days are numbered, thanks to some bent guard or another, which is all right, being as how I earned my end because of what I did. Old Ronny is weak when it comes to pretty girls, shamefully weak, and this here isn’t no world for the weak.”
“Bent guard?” David asked.
Ronny shrugged his big shoulders. “It weren’t no accident how he got near me. And nobody here has no makeshift knife that big and sharp unless someone on the other side of the bars wants him to have it. Sad as it is to say, I think maybe one of them newer guards here is from a family where I stole one of my girls. Busy as I was when I was having all my fun, there’s bound to be lots of family members out there. This had to happen sooner or later. And it’ll happen again. I see that now. Old Ronny might have a month, maybe a year, but he don’t have no lifetime, Mr. Thorne. So what I want is you and me do a deal.”
“What deal?”
“You know I’m an indigent. It embarrasses me to say, but I got nothing to my name, I’m poor as dirt.”
“I send five hundred a month to your account.”
Tears, as though of gratitude, welled in Ronny Jessup’s eyes and slid down his cheeks. “You do, Mr. Thorne. Like clockwork every month, and life would be dreary without it. I’m forever grateful for your generosity. If you could see your way to making it a thousand, old Ronny’s last days would be better than he deserves. It wouldn’t be no long obligation. Like I said, my days are numbered, a year at most. If you could agree to do such a very Christian thing for me, then I’ll pay you back with what you want to know.”
David closed his eyes and took slow deep breaths to repress his anger. Ronny Jessup’s feelings were easily hurt. If he felt abused, he would withdraw for days, weeks, nursing his bruised feelings. David didn’t have weeks. Maddison, in the grip of some cruel master whom she had no choice but to obey, also perhaps didn’t have weeks. He couldn’t learn the truth of Maddison until he knew the truth of what had happened to Emily. He felt the vise of fate closing its jaws around him, around him and her.
“All right. A thousand a month to your account. But how do you know I’ll keep my promise once you’ve told me?”
Ronny’s tear-slick face formed into a broad smile worthy of that superb character actor, Thomas Mitchell, from the era of great films. “Bless you, Mr. Thorne, but I know your word is gold. You’re not like me, you keep your promises. You’re a good man.”
The obsequious flattery offended David, but he didn’t say as much. “Where have you hidden them?”
The quality of the killer’s smile changed from faux gratitude to genuine delight in his cleverness. He leaned a little forward in his chair, as much as his restraints allowed, and he whispered, although in this private conference room used by attorneys, no recordings were made. “Them pretty girls are hid under the house, Mr. Thorne, right under the noses of all the so-smart police that looked for them and didn’t find them.”