From the Hummer driver’s reaction you might have thought the cop had suggested setting the Pope on fire. “You can’t let that son of a bitch just go like that!” he screeched. “That goddamn asshole dinged up my car!”

And the cop, bless him, simply stared at the man, dripped a little more water, and said, “May I see your license and registration, sir?” It seemed like a wonderful exit line, and I took advantage of it.

My poor battered car was making very unhappy noises, but I put it on the road to the university anyway-there really was no other choice. No matter how badly damaged it was, it would have to get me there. And it made me feel a certain kinship with my car. Here we were, two splendidly built pieces of machinery, hammered out of our original beautiful condition by circumstances beyond our control. It was a wonderful theme for self-pity, and I indulged it for several minutes. The anger I had felt only a few minutes ago had leeched away, dripped onto the lawn like canal water off the cop. Watching the Avalon’s driver swim to the far side, climb out, and walk away had been in the same spirit as everything else lately; get a little bit close and then have the rug pulled out from under your feet.

And now there was a new body, and we hadn’t even figured out what to do about the others yet. It was making us look like the greyhounds at a dog track, chasing after a fake rabbit that is always just a little bit too far ahead, jerked tantalizingly away every time the poor dog thinks he’s about to get it in his teeth.

There were two squad cars at the university ahead of me, and the four officers had already cordoned off the area around the Lowe Art Museum and pushed back the growing crowd. A squat, powerful-looking cop with a shaved head came over to meet me, and pointed toward the back of the building.

The body was in a clump of vegetation behind the gallery. Deborah was talking to someone who looked like a student, and Vince Masuoka was squatting beside the left leg of the body and poking carefully with a ballpoint pen at something on the ankle. The body could not be seen from the road, but even so you could not really say it had been hidden. It had obviously been roasted like the others, and it was laid out just like the first two, in a stiff formal position, with the head replaced by a ceramic bull’s head. And once again, as I looked at it I waited by reflex for some reaction from within. But I heard nothing except the gentle tropical wind blowing through my brain. I was still alone.

As I stood in huffish thought, Deborah came roaring over to me at full volume. “Took you long enough,” she snarled. “Where have you been?”

“Macramé class,” I said. “It’s just like the others?”

“Looks like it,” she said. “What about it, Masuoka?”

“I think we got a break this time,” Vince said.

“About fucking time,” Deborah said.

“There’s an ankle bracelet,” Vince said. “It’s made of platinum, so it didn’t melt off.” He looked up at Deborah and gave her his terribly phony smile. “It says Tammy on it.”

Deborah frowned and looked over to the side door of the gallery. A tall man in a seersucker jacket and bow tie stood there with one of the cops, looking anxiously at Deborah. “Who’s that guy?” she asked Vince.

“Professor Keller,” he told her. “Art history teacher. He found the body.”

Still frowning, Deborah stood up and beckoned the uniformed cop to bring the professor over.

“Professor…?” Deborah said.

“Keller. Gus Keller,” the professor said. He was a good-looking man in his sixties with what looked like a dueling scar on his left cheek. He didn’t appear to be about to faint at the sight of the body.

“So you found the body here,” Deb said.

“That’s right,” he said. “I was coming over to check on a new exhibit-Mesopotamian art, actually, which is interesting-and I saw it here in the shrubbery.” He frowned. “About an hour ago, I guess.”

Deborah nodded as if she already knew all that, even the Mesopotamian part, which was a standard cop trick designed to make people eager to add new details, especially if they might be a little bit guilty. It didn’t appear to work on Keller. He simply stood and waited for another question, and Deborah stood and tried to think of one. I am justly proud of my hard-earned artificial social skills, and I didn’t want the silence to turn awkward, so I cleared my throat, and Keller looked at me.

“What can you tell us about the ceramic head?” I asked him. “From the artistic point of view.” Deborah glared at me, but she may have been jealous that I thought of the question instead of her.

“From the artistic point of view? Not much,” Keller said, looking down at the bull’s head by the body. “It looks like it was done in a mold, and then baked in a fairly primitive kiln. Maybe even just a big oven. But historically, it’s much more interesting.”

“What do you mean interesting?” Deborah snapped at him, and he shrugged.

“Well, it’s not perfect,” Keller said. “But somebody tried to recreate a very old stylized design.”

“How old?” Deborah said. Keller raised an eyebrow and shrugged, as if to say she had asked the wrong question, but he answered.

“Three or four thousand years old,” he said.

“That’s very old,” I offered helpfully, and they both looked at me, which made me think I ought to add something halfway clever, so I said, “And what part of the world would it be from?”

Keller nodded. I was clever again. “ Middle East,” he said. “We see a similar motif in Babylonia, and even earlier around Jerusalem. The bull head appears to be attached to the worship of one of the elder gods. A particularly nasty one, really.”

“Moloch,” I said, and it hurt my throat to say that name.

Deborah glared at me, absolutely certain now that I had been holding out on her, but she looked back at Keller as he continued to talk.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said. “Moloch liked human sacrifice. Especially children. It was the standard deal: sacrifice your child and he would guarantee a good harvest, or victory over your enemies.”

“Well, then, I think we can look forward to a very good harvest this year,” I said, but neither one of them appeared to think that was worth even a tiny smile. Ah well, you do what you can to bring a little cheer into this dreary world, and if people refuse to respond to your efforts it’s their loss.

“What’s the point of burning the bodies?” Deborah demanded.

Keller smiled briefly, kind of a professorial thanks-for-asking smile. “That’s the whole key to the ritual,” he said. “There was a huge bull-headed statue of Moloch that was actually a furnace.”

I thought of Halpern and his “dream.” Had he known about Moloch beforehand, or had it come to him the way the music came to me? Or was Deborah right all along and he had actually been to the statue and killed the girls-as unlikely as that seemed now?

“A furnace,” said Deborah, and Keller nodded. “And they toss the bodies in there?” she said, with an expression that indicated she was having trouble believing it, and it was all his fault.

“Oh, it gets much better than that,” Keller said. “They delivered the miracle in the ritual. Very sophisticated flummery, in fact. But that’s why Moloch had such lasting popularity-it was convincing, and it was exciting. The statue had arms that stretched out to the congregation. When you placed the sacrifice in his arms, Moloch would appear to come to life and eat the sacrifice-the arms would slowly raise up the victim and place it in his mouth.”

“And into the furnace,” I said, not wanting to be left out any longer, “while the music played.”

Deborah looked at me strangely, and I realized that no one else had mentioned music, but Keller shrugged it off and answered.

“Yes, that’s right. Trumpets and drums, singing, all very hypnotic. Climaxing as the god lifted the body up to its mouth and dropped it. Into the mouth and you fall down into the furnace. Alive. It can’t have been much fun for the victim.”