"You'll have to excuse me if I'm a little rushed, but I'm waiting for an important call from my daughter. What is it you want?" Well, it is about Sand..., I'm afraid," he said solemnly."About--!" A clammy iciness crawled up Alice's backbone, as if his tone and the use of I'm afraid precluded some tragedy. Her throat was suddenly dry, and the scotch pounded in her temples parasitically, but she managed to stammer: "Is--is she hurt? Has she had an accident? What's happened?" Oh, Sandy is fine,. I’ll be back in an hour.”-x-X-x-She was actually a little surprised at how easy it’d turned out to be. Perhaps she was just lucky. Either way, Hermione had almost immediately run into Hannah and Megan. Susan had been nowhere in sight, which was very good indeed, because it allowed Hermione to walk right out to greet the two witches with a smile on her face.They’d been surprised to see her at first, and there’d been a moment where they’d exchanged a look that had Hermione worried. But then. He screamed, of course. But there was no one near enough to hear him.Not even when the tenor of his screams changed significantly, as the forest fire he had started began moving toward him.There are many parts of the federal bureaucracy that don’t work very well. Most of us could make a list of ten such parts of that bureaucracy at the drop of a hat. But the National Forest Fire Service would not be on that list. That’s one place we taxpayers get a lot of bang for our buck.And this day was no. It seems that two men from the Denver area were kidnapped, then brutalized, and finally mutilated. These two particular unsavoury characters I had been keeping an eye on for probably a few months at that time; both of them had a record for violent assaults, one against his wife, and I knew they were scum, I just had nothing I could pin on them.Anyway whoever did that was the most painstakingly careful operator I have ever seen; there were no leads in the case at all; the two men had no idea who.