It was a most grisly scene. Blood-soaked pillows and covers, a young woman's body sprawled on the bed, covered with those grotesquesly bloody sheets, and her head, eyes open, looking to the ceiling, resting on the pillow. The face was contorted into a fearsome grimmace, as if crying out in terror and pain.

"How can anyone be this cruel?," I asked Holmes. "The animal in man is sometimes stronger than the human, especially when huge sums of money are involved, or the passions of love and revenge are strong," he replied, speaking softly so as not to disturb the sorrowful scene before us.

"We must be professional about this, Watson. It is our duty to those artists still alive and now living in fear for their very lives. Tell me what you see about this hideous murder."

As difficult as it was, I immediately began to examine the neck area where the head had been attached. I was almost sick from the horror, but was surprised at how clean the cut was, how surgical and how obviously not effected with any surgical tool I knew. "Holmes! I cannot, for the life of me, understand how this beheading has been rendered."

"Piano wire, Watson. The poor unfortunate girl's head was severed with piano wire.

"Holmes! Surely you don't expect me to believe for a moment that you already know that for a fact.

He stepped across the room, immediately in front of the sofa to a most minute spot of blood, from which extended an almost invisible wire. Then got down on all fours and began pulling the wire from under the sofa. It snagged for a moment, and a quick tug brought out a blood-stained pair of leather gloves and a long strand of the finest shining wire I had ever seen. "Perhaps this is missing from the practice piano?," commented Holmes.

Holmes spoke partly to me, but mainly thinking out loud to himself. "Whoever committed this heinous crime must have been in such a hurry that they felt secure just tossing this under here, not worrying about who might find it. Actually it puts us no closer to our murderer...or does it?"

We both understood that time was not on our side. The severity of the murders had increased from poison chocolates to a shot in the back to murder by drowning and now beheading. The madman, whoever he was, was becoming more desparate by the hour. We rushed to secure the remaining 11 pianists in this fiendish place.

Proceed to Part Ten