The next day I was up at dawn, at the Arthur house by seven-thirty. The scene had been transformed overnight. A sheriff's deputy now stood guard at the kudzu gate, others at the front and back doors. A generator had been activated, and every light in the house was on.

When I arrived, George was helping McMahon load books and papers into cardboard boxes. Bobby was covering the mantel with white powder. As I passed on my way to the kitchen, McMahon winked and wished me good luck.

I spent the next four days like a miner, descending to the basement at dawn, surfacing at noon for a sandwich and coffee, then descending again until after dark. Another generator and lights were brought in to iluminate my underground world, so day and night became indistinguishable.

Tommy Albright arrived on the morning of day one. After examining and photographing the bundle I was certain contained George Adair, he released the body for transport to the Harris Regional Hospital in Sylva.

While Maggie worked the decomp stain inside the courtyard wal, Stan helped me photograph the celar floor. Then we exhumed the alcove burial, slowly exposing the corpse, recording body position and grave outline, and screening every particle of dirt.

The victim lay facedown on a gray wool blanket, one arm twisted beneath the chest, the other curled around the head. Decomposition was advanced, the organs soup, the head and hands largely skeletonized.

When the remains were fuly uncovered and documented, we began removal. Transferring the cadaver to a body bag, I noted that the left pants leg was badly torn, the leg missing below the knee.

I also noticed concentric fractures in the right temporo-parietal region of the skul. Linear cracks radiated up the sides of the central depression, turning the whole into a spiderweb of fragmented bone.

'Somebody realy blasted this guy.' Stan had stopped screening to look at the skul.

'Yes.'

My outrage was building as it always did. The victim had been dealt a skul-shattering blow, then dumped in a hole like last year's mulch. What kind of monster did such things?

Another thought pierced through my anger.

This corpse was buried only inches below the ground surface. Though putrefied, considerable soft tissue remained, indicating a relatively recent death. Did earlier victims lie beneath? In other alcoves? I kept my eyes and mind open.

Maggie joined us in the basement on day two, having excavated a ten-foot square to a depth of twelve inches around and below the courtyard stain. Though the job was tedious, her efforts paid off. Two isolated teeth turned up in the screen.

While Stan finished sifting dirt from the alcove burial, Maggie and I probed every inch of the celar floor, testing for the presence of buried objects and for differences in soil density. We found eight suspicious locations, two in the original alcove, two in the main chamber, and four in a dead-end tunnel off the chamber's west side.