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supposed to investigate the house—not tear it down?” he asked.
    Once more, she shrugged.
    â€œWell, I’ve gone this far…”
    That was true.
    Whack.
    He was about to stop her. He was going to step in and tell her that he’d been charged with being the head of the team.
    But the last whack did something.
    She had managed to get down about three feet. And that was all it took.
    He saw—a bone. A distinctive bone. A jawbone.
    â€œLet me,” he told her, taking the pickax from her.
    â€œWait! Careful,” she warned.
    He knew how to be careful. He used the pickax a bit away from the skull, and he used it with a strength it was simply biologically impossible for her to possess.
    In a matter of minutes, he had most of the skeleton showing.
    â€œIt’s Petti,” she said. “It’s Petti, and he was the first victim.”
    It was impossible to argue. It might have been someone else, but what did it matter? She had managed to discover a skeleton—almost complete, he was certain.
    â€œI’m going to call Devereaux—the local detective in charge of the case,” he said. “We’ll let him tend to the remains. Because, after all, actually, they are his.”
    Jackson eyed her as he dialed. Her discovery after being in the house a little more than an hour seemed uncanny.
    It made him think about his own experience as a boy. Made him think about the men in the Cheyenne Nation, the ones who talked about the things they had seen on their dream quests. Made him…damn uneasy.
    â€œI have a book,” she said, as if reading his mind. “A book on the murders. It was only logical to think that Newton had killed Petti, the man he bought the house from. He would have put him here, under the stairs, where it was unlikely that future digging might be done, just because of the awkwardness of the stairway.”
    â€œThe stairway is wood, it’s surely been repaired many times over the years,” Jackson said.
    â€œBut not moved, because there’s the doorway,” she pointed out.
    Andy Devereaux came on the line. Jackson told him whathad happened, staring at Angela Hawkins all the while. She looked back at him, never flinching.
    There were no sirens. Devereaux and a team of crime scene specialists and pathologists from the coroner’s office arrived quietly. Jackson watched while Angela gave her flat and logical explanation again, and then, as they stepped away to allow the crime scene unit and then the pathologists take over, she excused herself to wash up.
    He stared after her, shaking his head. The woman was a witch. She had been pleasant, serene and completely at ease, certain of herself as she had spoken to the detective. She was certainly beautiful enough with her golden hair and crystal-blue eyes, lithe figure and easy poise.
    That didn’t make it any better. She was calm now, but she’d been wielding a pickax with a vengeance.
    With an inward groan, he wondered what the hell it was going to be like when he met the rest of the team.
    Â 
    The bones had been taken by a pathology team that had been called in along with the crime scene unit, and after a great deal of discussion on exactly who should be collecting the bones. They were planning on sending the bones on to another team at the Smithsonian, a team that specialized in bones that were over a hundred years old.
    Frankly, Angela didn’t need any team to tell her a simple truth; the bones were those of Nathaniel Petti, the man who had owned the house before selling out to Madden C. Newton. But the exact cause of Petti’s death might be determined, and the man with such a sad life and death might be put to rest at last.
    Angela wondered if it was wrong to be starving after shehad just found the remains of a human being. But she was alive herself, and being alive meant that the machine must be fueled. She couldn’t wait for the last of the police—even though she