He came close to the big maple, sidestepped around it — but no one was there.
A puff of night wind clattered branches overhead. They were sheathed with ice and made a dry rattle like skeleton fingers clicking together. Bill Scanlon stood waiting.
Then he relaxed. A cat with coal black fur and glowing green eyes spat at him and slunk away. It might have been an evil omen, but Scanlon wasn’t superstitious. He thought it was only the cat he had seen.
Pocketing his gun, he set off up the street again. There was someone on it he wanted to see — someone who might be a valuable witness in a mysterious murder and kidnapping in which the government was interested.
A shadow detached itself from the blackness of a house stoop opposite the maple. Slinking spiderlike, the shadow moved after Scanlon, stalking from tree to tree, hedge to hedge, and stoop to stoop, drawing closer — always closer.
Scanlon turned to stare again, but he saw nothing. The shadow was crouched as still as death. There was something deadly, something horrible, in the purposefulness with which it drew nearer.
Scanlon moved on. The person he wanted to interview lived on this block.
A twig covered with ice snapped behind him. He turned a third time, staring, his breath rising like steam in the cold night air.
Still no one was in sight, but the skin along Scanlon’s scalp began to tingle. He grasped the butt of his gun, holding it in his pocket, his finger crooked through the trigger guard.
On his left was a hedge of evergreens shielding the lawn of a darkened house. The evergreens were covered with hoarfrost. There was a gap between them that seemed as black as the cavernous opening in the front of a skull. Scanlon stared toward it for seconds.
Then the pupils of his eyes widened. He crouched, opened his lips as if to speak — but no words came.
Somewhere in the darkness behind the hedge there was faint, quick movement. It seemed no more than the blurring of a shadow against another shadow. No one appeared. No hand came into sight. But suddenly Scanlon uttered a hoarse, rasping gurgle and reached toward his throat.
His body jerked spasmodically. For a moment he gave the impression of a man dangling horribly at the end of a taut rope. His shadow writhed and leaped on the icy sidewalk beside him. He slipped, skidded, made choking sounds, his finger tightening involuntarily on the trigger of his automatic.
The gun belched flame in his pocket. It made a report that blasted the silence of the winter night. The bullet struck the icy pavement and whined away into the darkness.
Scanlon had both hands at his throat now. He appeared to be clawing invisible, horrible fingers away from his neck; appeared to be fighting a losing battle with some hideous unseen strangler who had held him in an unearthly grip.
But he wasn’t a man to give up easily. His struggles became more desperate, more frenzied. He tore at his coat, ripped open his collar with fingers as taut as talons. His shadow mimicked every movement he made, leaping like a dancer pirouetting to some mad, macabre rhythm.
Then at last he slipped and fell to the pavement, his face purpling, his eyes bulging out. He continued to writhe, but he made no sound now except the terrible wheezing of air fighting to escape through an aperture too small for it. The mottled, hideous purple of his skin deepened until his complexion had the hue of an overripe plum. Livid spots appeared on it where veins stood out. They seemed ready to burst sickeningly as blood pumped through them from his wildly laboring heart.
His movements grew slowly feebler. Then from his open mouth his tongue protruded grotesquely, horribly, as though he were mocking the unseen, silent thing that had struck him down.
ECHOES of the shot fired by his dying fingers whispered along the night-darkened street. A light flashed in a house diagonally across from the spot where he lay. A man came out on the porch, peered around, saw Scanlon’s body, and ran across the street to it.
For seconds the man stood bareheaded, staring down; then he turned quickly, his eyes dark with fright, and ran back into the house to the telephone.
Silence descended on the street again — a silence that was punctuated only by the skeleton clicking of the ice-coated branches. They seemed to be sounding a monotonous, macabre rhythm — a dirge of death.
The rhythm was interrupted at last by the wail of a police siren up the long street. Headlights flared on the icy pavements. A slim, green roadster shot into view. It was a radio cruiser come in response to the bareheaded man’s telephoned message to headquarters.
The cop at the wheel was leaning sidewise, staring out. He jerked the car’s nose toward the curb and brought it to a halt beside the body of Scanlon. He and his companion jumped out.
They bent down, opened Scanlon’s coat, and pulled papers from his pocket — then stared in surprise. The taller of the two cops spoke grimly.
“A Federal dick. Call headquarters quick. They’ll want to know about this.”
The other cop obeyed. He started at a run across the street, climbed the steps of the lighted house, and disappeared inside.
In twenty minutes the police cruiser at the curb was joined by a black headquarters’ car filled with detectives. It slid to a screeching stop. The men leaped out and crowded close around Scanlon, their breaths mingling in the icy air and their long overcoats making sprawled shadows on the pavement
They stared at Scanlon’s credentials and examined his body. Inspector John Burks, head of the homicide squad was among them — a tall man with snapping black eyes and jet-black eyebrows that contrasted sharply with his white hair. He began speaking in abrupt sentences.
“Strangled! Look at his face!”
A police sergeant flashed his light lower, then answered hoarsely, a note of fear in his voice.
“There ain’t no finger marks, chief. It’s like — like that woman who was killed last week, and those other guys — the taxi driver and the feller with him that they found in the vacant lot. Four of ’em murdered now — and all alike!”
Inspector Burks was silent for tense seconds. His thin face was working. His mouth was harsh. Four murders all alike! Four homicides as mysterious as they were horrible! Men strangled apparently by ghost fingers — their lives snuffed out by unseen hands. There had been no mark even on the white neck of the woman, the first victim. Yet her eyes, too, had been, staring and her tongue had protruded in that terrible mockery of death.
This was no ordinary murder case. It was uncanny, baffling, with the police already in a cul-de-sac from which there seemed to be no logical way out. A new and hideous crime wave was engulfing the city. Burks struck his clenched fist sharply against his palm.
“There’s a man I’d look for in this,” he grated. “A man who might do such things — the criminal who calls himself Secret Agent ‘X.’”
The sergeant bending over nodded somberly.
“Right, chief. It’s the kind of screwy job he might pull. But he’s a tough man to lay hold of. He never looks the same twice.”
“He’ll slip up,” said Burks harshly. “He’s almost done it a couple of times. And if — if he pulled this job — by God, I’ll land him in the hot seat.”
Burks’s eyes had an eaglelike fierceness as he stared down at the face of the dead Government operative. The distorted features and grotesquely mocking tongue of Scanlon seemed to speak of hideous things.
The medical examiner was still going over the body. He shook his head slowly.
“No doubt about it — it’s strangulation. You’d think a slipknot had been tied around his throat, or fingers held there — except that there are no marks.”
“Except!” Burks echoed the word bitterly. The ice-coated branches that were like bony fingers above his head scraped together in a sound reminiscent of soft, sardonic laughter.