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pulled up at the bottom of the gangway, Drummond hopped out and headed up the stairs two at a time. At the door to the aircraft, the stewardess stopped Drummond for just a minute—long enough for the captain to announce his arrival on board over the PA system. Immediately the passengers broke into cheers and applause, and Drummond could feel the back of his neck burning red.
    As the commotion died down, the stewardess led Drummond forward into the first-class cabin and put him in one of the thick leather seats.
    "Can I get you anything else, Mr. Drummond?" she asked with a Pepsodent smile.
    Drummond looked at the empty seat next to him. "Yes, there is. If you don't mind, would you please ask Mrs. Bea MacDowell to join me?"
    * * * *
    Some seven thousand miles to the east, a black BMW jounced over the rough forest track toward a clearing at the edge of the woods. Half a dozen assorted police vehicles were already drawn up in what had become an impromptu parking area, and fluorescent orange pylons supporting festoons of wide yellow tape fenced off a crime scene. Easing the BMW up to the barricade, Vienna Police Inspector Markus Eberle switched off the engine and stared at the cluster of policemen standing near a small tan tent at the far edge of the clearing.
    Funny, he thought, how the living huddle together trying to ignore the dead.
    Through the streaked windshield of the BMW, he could see the torso of the headless man not far from the tent, chest-down on the muddy, blood-soaked turf. The feet were wearing socks. A few meters away from the body, more pylons and yellow tape corralled what was probably the victim's head.
    Shaking his head, Eberle got out of the car. A few heavy drops of rain fell from the graying sky, peppering his Burbury with golden-brown spots as he picked his way across the muddy ground toward the policemen clustered by the tent. Most of them wore extremely grave expressions, and a few looked sick to their stomachs. They stepped back as he approached, and Eberle got his first glimpse of the girl's body draped across the sagging tan canvas.
    Despite nearly a decade working homicide, the unexpected sight of the body, its head cocked back at a crazy angle and a jagged purple wound gaping at the throat, momentarily froze Eberle in his tracks. The victim looked no more than seventeen or eighteen, her lifeless green eyes staring up at the dark gray clouds that moved with resolute swiftness across the sky, away from the scene of the crime.
    Recovering from his initial surprise, Eberle took a deep breath and slowly surveyed the crime scene. The local police had made a thorough job of it—too thorough, in fact. In setting up the pylons and stringing out endless meters of the bright yellow tape with "polizei" neatly blocked on it in large black letters, they probably had trampled any clues into the mud.
    Eberle walked over to where the first corpse lay chest-down. It was hard to estimate how old or how tall the man had been, now that he was separated from his head. A few meters away, the head lay behind its own protective police barricade. Eberle walked over to the yellow tape and crouched down to get a better look at the victim's face.
    It was the face of a blondish young man in his mid-twenties. Normally clean shaven, the cheeks were covered with a light five o'clock shadow, and above the bluish-gray lips, a ginger-colored mustache drooped at the corners of the mouth. The blue eyes, like the eyes of the girl, were wide open in stark terror.
    Eberle crouched lower, then turned his head to see what the young man might have been watching in his last moments of consciousness.
    What was the last thing he saw? Eberle wondered. How long does the brain function, once the head is severed from the body?
    Certainly two or three minutes; there was enough oxygen in the brain to allow it to function for at least that long. Eberle remembered reading that, in France, after a criminal had been guillotined, the head was picked up