Corpse by corpse, David Thorne circled the chamber and came heartsick to the fourteenth and final body. As with the previous thirteen, the name on the catafalque was not that of the woman he had lost. Not Emily Carlino.
Perplexed, he extracted the locket from his jeans and held it in his cupped right hand. It had been a custom order, crafted to his design. There couldn’t be another like it in all the world.
David swept the light around the room, from victim to victim. Could Jessup have misnamed one of them? No, not likely. He had so painstakingly painted their names, each letter artfully crafted. Ronny was an obsessive, with great attention to detail, which was one reason he’d been able to abduct so many women over so many years before he’d been caught. Furthermore, he believed in his powers of preservation and resurrection, and he fully expected to return here one day to enjoy his hidden harem; therefore, he would have taken special care in the wrapping and naming of each.
If Emily wasn’t in this lower crypt, and considering that she had not been found in the higher crypt years earlier, when Jessup was arrested, how had the killer come into possession of her locket?
Maybe he had stalked her unsuccessfully, meant to possess her, and regretted that he hadn’t been able to include her among the “stolen girls” in this room. If he had been lying when he said he didn’t know her name and didn’t recognize her from the photographs, if he’d been toying with David just for the emotional charge it gave him . . . then where was Emily?
Jessup had asked about the locket shortly after he’d spoken of the two women who escaped. He’d gone after one of them again, six months after she fled, and he’d gotten her on his second try.
The other one supposedly had fought him, hurt him, had broken a couple of his ribs with a pry bar.
Her and me got into it hard and fast, and I had to knife her a few times. After that, she weren’t worth bringing home.
Could she have been Emily? Could the locket have been torn from her in the struggle, and could Jessup have taken it with him when he had left her for dead?
I didn’t leave her for dead. She were dead already.
But if she had been dead and he’d left her wherever the assault had taken place, why hadn’t her body been found?
Where was Emily Carlino? Might she yet be alive? Might she somehow be Maddison Sutton, after all?
Here among these bundled women who had suffered so grievously, David’s spirit did not—could not—soar, but it lifted just enough for his despair to recede.
He became convinced that his dream the previous night, from Emily’s point of view, had indeed been induced by whatever means, perhaps with the intention of discouraging him from continuing his search before it led him back to the house on Rock Point Lane. Maybe much in the dream had been true, but she had not been abducted by Ronny Jessup. Maybe the maniac was telling the truth, maybe he had stabbed her and left her for dead. But if she hadn’t been dead, maybe she had made her way to Corley’s house.
His heart beat faster, spurred by fear and anger, but also encouraged by a fragile hope. He stood for a long moment, cherishing the hope, daring to nurture it.
He returned the locket to a pocket of his jeans once more and went to the stairs and climbed into the upper chamber.
The blue eye gazed down at the stepladder, on the pail rest of which one flashlight waited. The other Tac Light stood where he had left it, focused on the ceiling.
The space was sufficiently illuminated for him to see the scrap of paper skitter out of the passageway, through the open door, and across the concrete. A piece of the dollar bill that he had torn and dropped on his previous visit. Carried on a low draft, it fluttered six or eight feet into the room before it came to rest, quivering.
Until now, the stillness here had been complete. The cellar lacked windows. If there had once been air circulation through the venting, the heating-cooling system had not functioned in years.
He could imagine but one source of a draft: the door at the head of the cellar steps—and then only if an outside door on the ground floor had been opened, admitting the night wind.
He snatched the flashlight off the pail rest and doused it. He grabbed the Tac Light from the floor, extinguished that one, too, and slipped it into a jacket pocket.
Shielding the lens of the remaining Tac Light with two fingers to provide the minimum visibility he required, David stepped to the open door. He listened intently to a silence so deep that it seemed to deny the threat that the fragment of currency implied.
Abruptly the scrap of paper stopped quivering, as though the door that had admitted the draft had just been closed.