touched him. The man was dead. He had been dead for hours. McCann said:

"Mollie's husband. Look him over like you done the boss."

I had a curiously unpleasant sense of being turned on a potter's wheel by some inexorable hand-from

Peters, to Walters, to Ricori, to the body before me. Would the wheel stop there?

I stripped the dead man. I took from my bag a magnifying glass and probes. I went over the body inch

by inch, beginning at the region of the heart. Nothing there nothing anywhere…I turned the body over…

At once, at the base of the skull, I saw a minute puncture.

I took a fine probe and inserted it. The probe-and again I had that feeling of infinite repetition-slipped

into the puncture. I manipulated it, gently.

Something like a long thin needle had been thrust into that vital spot just where the spinal cord connects