In his 30 years with the Arkham police, Inspector LaRoche had seen this kind thing on a handful of occasions.  The "ritual sacrifice" of some small animal, strange writings on the walls or floors, melted candles and maybe a bloody knife or axe.  The uneducated, decadent hill folk that populated the backwaters of the Miskatonic River sometimes wandered into town on some inscrutable errand, carrying their degenerate superstitions with them.  In most cases, the appalled owner of whatever inn, shed or carriage house played host to the absurd ceremony, was mollified with a promise to redouble police efforts to exclude the rabble from Arkham's genteel confines, then, once the mess was removed, the whole affair quickly forgotten.  The rest were attributed to one or another of the countryside's itinerant and feeble-minded rustics, who when apprehended, were given a few nights in the city jail and told not to return.  

 

This case, however, was different.  This was a human "sacrifice" and not just any human.   This was the Mayor's son and the strange markings scrawled on the walls and carved into the corpse resembled those LaRoche had remembered seeing in Miskatonic University's copy of the repugnant "Necronomicon."    For this reason, specialists from as far away as Boston and New York have been called to Arkham to help solve the horrible crime. 

 

These specialists, however, will have to be discreet.  The Mayor's son, it seems, kept intimate company with members of some of New England's most prominent families....old families, with dark pasts.