"Again," Nancy appends.

"Exactly.

"It's happening again. The only question being what ‘it' is this time."

"I wish that were the only question," Nancy replies.

"How's about letting the other shoe drop, boss of mine?"

"Why, let's do it together, in chorus.

"Ready?"

And they recite in unison, "What are we going to do about it?"

They laugh, but it is brief and their eyes tell each other that this is no laughing matter. •

Randy Buck, owner of a football team, a baseball team, a health club franchise operation, and a string of gourmet restaurants, is rich, powerful-and a sexual pervert of the first magnitude.

He was the Seneschal, the sinister operator of a private club upstate known as Buck's Castle, a labyrinthine structure in which sado-masochism, bondage and discipline were practiced regularly by a large membership of perpetrators and victims.

Cynthia and Nancy had managed, at the risk of their lives, to destroy that operation, but not Buck, who escaped punishment by donating the odd structure to the state and subsidizing its conversion into an orphanage.

That was merely their first encounter with the madman.

The second was when he tried to kill Cynthia by poisoning her at a charity masquerade ball, with the help of Fiona Fairley, head of Fairley Palace Hotels.

Cynthia managed to switch drinks with him, in the event, but he was saved by being rushed to a hospital and having his stomach pumped.

A third adventure involved a pseudo-monastic order founded by Buck, staffed by sex offenders, called the Brotherhood of the Body, which specialized in kidnapping runaway girls and doing the obvious with them.

Cynthia and Nancy, again at great personal risk, managed to destroy this operation, with the help of a dominatrix, Vanessa, whom Buck had engaged to assist in the festivities.