“But surely they wouldn’t have missed them,” David objected. “The police used cadaver dogs. They fluoroscoped the ground for hollow spaces in addition to the eleven rooms that were your . . . playground.”
The smile grew sly and more offensive, as if they were cronies. Jessup winked. “The one more room, with fourteen girls treated and wrapped and waiting for a new life, isn’t part of the basement and isn’t outlying from it. That special room is under the basement, Mr. Thorne, direct under where they found my nine wrapped girls.”
David found himself leaning forward conspiratorially. “Under the room with the blue eye that looks down from the center of the domed ceiling?”
Jessup nodded vigorously. “The very room where you yourself stood, Mr. Thorne. Under that very room.”
For a moment, the importance of what the killer said eluded David, and then his gut clutched as understanding hit him. He had not visited the murder house yet when he had most recently paid a call on Jessup, the previous Friday, and he hadn’t revealed to this man that he had any intention of going there.
“Ronny . . .”
“Yes, Mr. Thorne?”
“How do you know I went to your old house?”
“Oh, when you visited me last Friday, I already knew you was going there come Saturday. For some reason, you didn’t say, and I didn’t want to make a thing about it.”
“But how did you know?”
Jessup leaned back in his chair. “Mr. Ulrich wrote me about it back when you paid him to see the place.”
“Stuart Ulrich?”
“Yeah. Him that bought the place for taxes. He practically got it for nothing. Fact is, I’d call it stealing.”
In his mind’s eye, David saw Ulrich’s face, a visage straight out of some Blumhouse movie, with his high bulbous brow, the low wide jaw like a scoop, the gray eyes as bright as honed steel and every bit as probing as scalpels.
“Ulrich writes to you?”
“From time to time. Mr. Ulrich is a curious man. He wants to know a thousand things—each thing me and them girls did with each other, how I felt when I did it to them girls, what them pretty girls said to me, how I killed them, how I preserved the ones I killed, where the hidden are hid. But don’t worry none, Mr. Thorne, I never told him nothing. He stole the house for taxes, but he won’t give me a dime for my needs. He don’t care I’m indigent, the way you care. He’s no Christian.”
| 64 |
The painted eye on the ceramic tile inset in the domed ceiling of the chamber of mummification was the key to accessing the secret crypt under that room. With evident pride in his carpentry, masonry skills, and mechanical ingenuity, Ronny Jessup explained to David how the tile could be used to reach “my pretty future queens,” and described the explosive trap he had laid in the stairs that led down to them.
When David felt confident that he understood, he put on the table the manila envelope containing photos of Emily, including those that he had shown Jessup on his previous visit.
The prisoner stared at this offering with keen interest and licked his lips as if wetting the way for some delectable morsel.
“Ronny, will you swear to me that the missing fourteen are in that hidden room?”
“On my honor, Mr. Thorne.”
“In your freely given confession, you claimed to have abducted twenty-seven and murdered twenty-three.”
“That’s right. That’s what I confessed. They caught me fair and square. No reason to lie.”
“Of the twenty-seven, thirteen were found.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Among those fourteen in the secret chamber, is one of them Emily Carlino?”
Jessup raised his stare from the envelope and met David’s eyes. “That’s the one was so special to you.”
“Is one of them Emily Carlino?” David pressed.
A homicidal psychopathic sentimentalist with a vivid emotional life, a psychic vampire who fed on the emotions of others, which were for him a mild continuous orgasm, Jessup wanted this visitor to share the pain and grief, so that he might consume it and revel in it, and satisfy his appetite.
David was about to lay out a banquet for him.
“I can’t rightly say whether some Emily Carlino is among them. Like I told you last time you come here, my memory’s been getting kind of fuzzy. Maybe I remember nine or ten names of them fourteen. I don’t remember no Emily. Problem is, I had to kill some of them before I got a lot of use out of them. Some just didn’t have the right attitude, wasn’t fun enough. If I killed them too quick after bringing them home, if I didn’t get a lot of use of them, I don’t remember them so well, no matter how good they looked. But when they open that lower room, Mr. Thorne, they’ll know, ’cause I painted each pretty girl’s name on the slab where she lays wrapped, so I could resurrect them according to what I might have a taste for.”