He felt his stomach contract with fear, and ignored the throbbing of his head to sit up and seize on the tether. He tugged at it, with no result; it wouldn't break or pull loose. He could feel the knots, but the thing was made of what felt like leather, and he couldn't even get the knots to loosen. He looked around the ground next to him for something to cut it with, but there was nothing there, not even a shard of gla.s.s or a sharp rock. The ground for as far as he could reach had been literally scoured. There were four sticks with feathers stuck along the edges lying next to him, but nothing useful.

He cast about frantically for help or whoever had put him here. This place looked like a park And parks were patrolled. The cops went through every park in Dallas once an hour.

"Help!" he yelped, so scared his voice jumped an octave. He got halfway to his feet, clawing at his tether. "Somebody help! I've been mugged somebody help me! Police! Fire! Help!"

"No one will hear you," a deep voice said behind him, startling him into silence, "or heed you if they heard you."

He wrenched around on his knees, the sandy soil grating against his skin.

Out of the shadows beneath the trees behind him stepped a figure so strange Dwight was halfway certain he must be hallucinating it.

The man was wearing a loincloth a bit longer than Dwight's. His armbands and anklets were made of flowers instead of feathers. He must have been wearing forty pounds of elaborate metal jewelry, jewelry that gleamed silver in the moonlight. And his eyes peered out from the shadows cast by a bizarre helmet-like headpiece, like nothing Dwight had ever seen before. It seemed to be shaped like a snarling cat's head, with the man's face coming out of the open mouth.

He was carrying sticks like the ones lying in the dirt beside Dwight except that instead of feathers, the edges were set with bits of something dark that glittered in the moonlight.

"What what do you want?" Dwight stammered. "I'll give you whatever you want, anything you want. I've got money I've "

"I have what I want," the man interrupted, with heavy calm.

"But "

"You are here for another purpose. You are a man in a position of power; you must have had courage to fight your way to that position. You are here to prove that courage."

"What "

The man moved to the edge of Dwight's patch of bare earth, his sandals making a grating sound in the sand, and toed the feathered sticks.

"Take up your weapons," he said, "and defend yourself."

Dwight scrambled backwards until his back encountered the cold, smooth boulder. He edged into its protection, mouth dry and heart pounding with fear.My G.o.d, I've been caught by some kind of nut "I I " he stuttered.

The man came toward him and struck him lightly with the stick he carried. The blow looked almost playful but Dwight felt sharp pain and looked down, startled, at his shoulder. There was a long gash there, and blood welling up and glittering blackly in the moonlight.

Suddenly it began to hurt a lot. He nearly vomited. His stomach turned over, and he gasped as he swallowed down the bile of fear.

"I said to defend yourself." The man hit him again, opening up another gash to match the first.

"Comport yourself with honor."

Dwight whimpered, and cowered into the shadow of the boulder.

The man's eyes glistened wetly in the moonlight, and he smiled. It was the most terrible smile Dwight had ever seen.

Terror overcame him. He flung himself, groveling, at the man's feet, blubbering like an hysterical child, begging for mercy.

"Please " he wept shamelessly, "Please, I've never done anything I don't know how to fight I've never hurt anyone "

He ignored the nagging memories of the careers he'd destroyed or tried to to get his current position. He pushed out of his mind the recollections of the hours he'd stolen from the private lives of the people beneath him That wasn't hurting anyone. That was just good business; good management. Any good manager would have done the same.

The warrior spat at him, impa.s.sively. The blob of spittle struck his cheek; he winced, but he was too frightened to wipe it off.

"Dog. Son of dogs," the man said. "You shame your family; you shame your G.o.ds. If you will not delight the Great One with your courage, then you must pleasure him with your pain."

He made an abrupt summoning gesture, and from out of the shadows behind him ran four wildly garbed young women, bedecked with flowers and feathers, wearing headdresses even more astonishing than the warrior's cat-helmet.

My G.o.d, it's a Manson-cult

Before Dwight had a chance to react, they had seized his arms and legs, and were dragging him back to the boulder, sand grating in his cuts and getting into his eyes and mouth.

He tried to fight them, but they were far stronger than they looked. He accomplished nothing more than getting more dirt into his mouth.

They dragged him onto the boulder, and it sc.r.a.ped the skin from his back They stretched him out over the top of it, one on each limb, pulling his arms and legs so far apart he thought he was going to scream. They had him pinned, back bent over the rock; spread-eagled, unable to move enough to see anything except sky and tree branches and the heads of his captors.

The warrior loomed over him; in his right hand there was a knife-shaped object that glittered blackly in the moonlight.

"What " that was all Dwight managed to get out.

The man studied him for a long moment, then reached out with the glittering thing, and drew it in a slow, deliberate line down the middle of Dwight's chest.

After that, all he could do was scream in agony.

Mark felt vaguely sick. This is number seven and it doesn't get any easier with repet.i.tion.

Diana had gotten into his Ghia and tranced out, was the closest Mark could come to figuring out what she'd done. It was a funny kind of trance, though; not like anything he'd ever seen her do before.

She was sort-of "there" and sort-of "not there."

She'd told him, in a foggy, preoccupied voice, to start driving. After about ten minutes she'd told him "left" then "right." He'd gotten the idea in fairly short order. Any time he'd ever been with her in the past, she'd always known where she was going. This time, she was evidently having trouble pinpointing her goal. So she had turned herself into some kind of detector; circling in on whatever she was sensing.

That had been a couple of hours ago; about the time that he figured out that Bachmann Lake Park was probably their destination, they'd gotten an "all points" on the radio in his car.

He and Diana had arrived on the scene at about the same time as the first squad car.

There wasn't much doubt in his mind that the victim had quite literally been sacrificed. What was left of him was lying spread-eagled and stark naked across a huge flat boulder a boulder whose shape made it a kind of natural altar. In due course his belongings all of them, including wallet and pocket-change were discovered neatly folded and stacked, under a nearby bush. So robbery was out as a motive.

Mark figured he either died of shock or blood loss. Either would have done the trick. He had been mutilated with some incredibly sharp instrument, and with an almost artistic precision. Only "swimming" through a vat of broken gla.s.s could have produced lacerations so extensive.

The coroner agreed with Mark about the lacerations, but disagreed about the actual cause of death.

He felt that the poor fellow had still been alive when his heart had been neatly removed from his body.

Maybe even conscious.

The heart was lying in a little depression in the boulder, next to the victim's head.

The park patrol was a couple of rookies more used to dope dealers and muggings than anything like this. One of them was still over in the bushes, throwing up. Mark had taken charge as soon as they arrived on the scene, much to the intense and obvious relief of the two patrolmen. He had made sure that the area around the body stayed unmolested until the arrival of the Homicide squad and the coroner. Once they arrived, Mark stayed out of the way. He was not a Forensics man; his forte was legwork. These days even detectives specialized.

The boulder and its burden were the center of a pool of glaring white light now, light so bright that the entire scene looked phony, like a movie setup. Mark found it easier to think of it that way; he wondered with macabre curiosity what the Parks Department was likely to do about the boulder. It was sandstone and the victim's blood had soaked into it so deeply that there would be no removing the stains. Would they leave it for the curious to gawk at, or would they break it up and remove it?

Mark had seen more than his share of ghastly corpses in his time; it was only the tortured expression branded on the man's face and the extent of the mutilations that disturbed him. He was somewhat queasy, but under control. The same could not be said for some of his colleagues several of those who had arrived before the Homicide squad had joined the first officer in the bushes.

What rather surprised Mark was that Diana except for a p.r.o.nounced pallor seemed about as unaffected by the grisly scene as he was. Once he had established the appropriate perimeter, she had gone straight to the edge of it and begun examining everything as minutely as she could from the distance permitted her. Mark watched her for a moment, trying to figure out just what she was up to.

She stood carefully and quietly at the border of string that marked the point-past-which. She made no attempt to get any closer, or to touch anything but she spent long minutes studying the body, what portions of the boulder she could see, then finally getting down on her knees and examining the ground with the same care as the Forensics experts.

They had regarded her with some suspicion but when she made no moves to interfere, and no comments and when, in fact she had un.o.btrusively pointed out a bit of something they had overlooked they began to regard her as possibly one of their own.

About that time Mark's boss arrived on the scene.

He was a balding, overweight man, incongruously dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. He looked far more like a particularly dull and dense redneck county sheriff than the owner of one of the sharpest minds Mark had ever worked under. It was an image he took pains to cultivate. Being consistently underestimated gave him a h.e.l.l of an edge in interdepartmental politicking.

After making his own examination of the body and the proceedings, he wandered ponderously over to Mark's side.

"That your pet expert on wackos?" he asked, nodding in Diana's direction and taking out a cigar. He did not light it; he was trying to quit smoking, and claimed that just holding the thing in his teeth helped curb his craving for tobacco.

"Yes sir "

"Huh." The cigar migrated to the other side of his mouth and he nodded, thoughtfully. "More brains than I'd'a thought, just to look at 'er. Got sense enough not t' touch anythin', and not t' get in th' boys' way."

He watched as Di made a close examination of the mutilations on the victim's legs. "More guts, too.

M' wife'd been halfway t' the Panhandle by now."

"She didn't get where she is by being squeamish," Mark felt compelled to point out.

"Yeah, Hartford PD sets pretty high store by 'er." The Chief clasped his hands behind his back, and continued to watch her. "I was kinda disinclined t' believe everythin' they told me, them bein'

d.a.m.nyankees an' all, an' her bein' a Yank too but I think I'm changin' my mind."

Mark thought about what he knew about her. "Diana has that effect on people," he agreed.

At that point she got up from the ground beside the boulder, and walked slowly toward them, one eyebrow rising inquisitively when she saw that Mark had company.

"Diana Tregarde," Mark said as soon as she was within earshot, "Chief of Detectives Samuel Clemens Grimes."

She took the outstretched ham masquerading as a hand with no sign of hesitation, and Mark could tell by the slight widening of the Chief's eyes and the slow smile that she had returned his attempted squeeze with interest.

"Any relation to Mark Twain?" she asked as he released her hand.

"Somethin' distant on m' mother's side; she slapped it on me t' annoy some uppity aunty of hers back East," the Chief replied with perverse pride. "Well, missy you bein' the imported expert, what y'all think?"

Diana gave Mark a look that held just a hint of amus.e.m.e.nt and that said quite clearly, I'll tell you more, later.

"I have absolutely no doubt that this was a ritual sacrifice, with all that implies," she said slowly so slowly that Mark got the distinct impression that she was choosing each of her words with utmost care.

"I think it was very carefully planned and executed, possibly with this specific individual in mind as the victim. I also would judge that it wasn't timed randomly I think whoever did this had some specific goal in mind."

"Like what? What th' h.e.l.l good's a stiff t' anybody? Unless y' think this ritual stuffs a cover-up fer a paid hit."

Diana looked at the Chief, measuringly. "Try to think like someone who'd do this sort of thing for a moment there are any number of traditions that place a very high power value on a ritual sacrifice carried out with precision and according to a ceremony as involved and elaborate as a Catholic High Latin Ma.s.s."

"Huh. So why?"

"If you think of magical power as a tangible force and these people do you want to acc.u.mulate as much of it as you can without having to give anything up yourself." She made a half shrug. "There are two traditional ways of raising power, both involving sacrifice. The first is self-sacrifice: abstinence, chast.i.ty, the acc.u.mulation of power by not using it for the pursuit of pleasure. That's the kind of thing that a Buddhist monk, a Shaolin priest, or a real yogi would do. And that's the hard way; it isn't in these people to do anything the hard way. So the other way to get power is to take someone's power from them. The easiest way to do so is to murder with as much pain inflicted as possible."

"So you don't think this was just some isolated nut?" Mark prompted. He knew that, like himself, the Chief was convinced that they were dealing with a group, but it was interesting to see how he was taking what Di told him and integrating it with his own suspicions. Mark could almost see the wheels going around in the Chief's head.

"No nor do I think this is some cult that's sprung up on its own," Di replied soberly. "Everything points to a group with an established and elaborate ritual to complete."

"Like what? What's tippin' you off?"

Di waved her hand at the boulder and its burden. "Just about everything over there. The mutilations, for instance; they're absolutely symmetrical to fractions of an inch; the order in which they were made argues for following an established pattern. The area around the boulder is completely clean of any sign of footprints; they obviously cleaned up after themselves. There were a couple of flower petals I couldn't identify what kind and bits of feather in the gra.s.s beyond the dirt, which leads me to think that the victim was decorated and the decorations removed to avoid their being traced. The petals were fairly fresh, so they probably weren't from anything brought into this area during the day, and there's nothing in bloom around here, so it looks as if whoever did this brought them and remembered to remove them. That's the kind of thing amateur Satanists and the like don't think of doing. They tend to be very sloppy and sometimes they even leave things behind on purpose, since one of their goals is to terrify the believers and nonbelievers alike. It's part of their power trip to frighten people."

The Chief chewed on the end of his cigar, thinking furiously. "All right, missy," he said after a long pause. "I'll buy what you're sayin'. You do seem to know "

"I've made something of a study of it," Di said modestly. "I managed to point the Hartford cops in the right direction once or twice, anyway."

"Okay then you tell me is this Satanists an' witches? We got some kind of coven thang going here?"

Mark choked, and quickly turned it into a cough as both of them glared at him. Di had told him the very night they met that she was a practicing witch. "Fam-trad," she'd said, "Which means 'family tradition.' I was trained by my great-grandmother; the psi-senses skipped two generations in my family. It was kind of funny; Mom was raising me as a good little Episcopalian, and Grandy was giving me another sort of education altogether and although it may seem to be a contradiction, in her way she was as devout as Mom. Grandy's generation kept everything as secret as in the Burning Times.

Well, witchcraft is about the only way I know of to train psychics; at least they're the only folk around with a fully developed course of education."

Di did not seem in the least discomfited by the Chief's question, nor did she read him the same lecture she'd given Mark when he'd confused witchcraft "Wicca" she called it and Satanism. "It doesn't correspond with any ritual of dark witchcraft or Satanism that I've ever heard of," she said, shifting restlessly from foot to foot with an un.o.btrusive swaying motion, the only real sign that she was deeply disturbed. "For one thing, it's the wrong time of the month; both types of cult would have set this at moon-dark, and we're halfway between full and last quarter. For another, both place a great deal of emphasis on binding a blood-victim, and the only place I saw the mark of tethering was on his right ankle."

"What if they're mavericks?"

She shook her head, tucking a flyaway strand of hair back in place. "I told you, this kind of sacrifice has to follow strict formulas, or the pract.i.tioners consider it ineffective. Blood-sacrifice has to take place at the dark of the moon, otherwise the power just isn't released properly. Now there is a superficial resemblance to certain Druidic rites but "

"But " prompted the Chief.

"Well, the sacrifice in that case either has to be a willing victim, in which case he would have been a member of the order, and he'd have been drugged to keep him from feeling pain "

"Well, that sure don't match this."

" or he's an oathbreaker, a violator of the laws which again would mean that he would also be a member of the order. They just don't do this sort of thing to nonmembers."

The Chief looked speculatively in the direction of the corpse, now shrouded and soon to be taken away, and shook his head with a little regret. "No sign of that; Mr. Rhoades was a good Freewill Baptist boy, an' what time he didn't spend in church or with 'is fam'ly 'e spent at work."

"Well, there's also something like this in Norse ritual a punishment for someone who has truly made an implacable enemy of a cult-member."

"Now that sounds promisin'," the Chief said, nodding. "From what I make out, Mr. Rhoades wasn't too well liked by his people. Seems he's been pushin' 'em pretty close t' the breakin' point."

Di sighed and shook her head. "The problem there is that if he had angered some practicing Norse pagan cult, they'd have either hung him from an oak, or performed something on him called the 'blood eagle.'"