Then a detective spoke, touching Burks’s arm.
“Who’s that guy over there?” he asked.
He was looking up the block at a figure that had suddenly appeared. A man swung into sight. He was tall, an overcoat flapped around his heels, and he was coming toward them across the street. Blunt features showed under a slouch hat. He was dressed like a young business man; but his eyes burned with a strange, vivid intentness. He walked up to the group of detectives around Scanlon until one of them stepped forward and barred his way.
“Keep back, guy! There’s been a murder. Who are you?”
The newcomer didn’t answer. He pulled a wallet from his pocket, fumbled in it and drew out a tattered press card.
“A news hound!” said Burks sourly. “How did you get wind of this so quick?”
The stranger uttered one word then, talking with clipped emphasis as though speech were precious.
“Radio,” he said.
“It’s tough,” snarled Burks, “when every Tom, Dick, and Harry listens in on police calls. Headquarters will have to use code for everything if they want to keep the riffraff away.”
THE man with the press card ignored this harsh comment. He pushed closer to the dead man until another detective barked at him to keep back.
When he glimpsed Scanlon’s face, he gave an abrupt, horrified start. The hot flame of some deep emotion sprang into his eyes. His hands clenched at his sides. He breathed quickly, deeply. Then, as if afraid he might be betraying himself, he set his face muscles into masklike inscrutability.
He stood silently staring down at the features of Scanlon, but the strange, burning light in his eyes did not abate. Then he asked a few pointed questions which the detectives answered sullenly.
“If you print any phony story about this, I’ll have your hide,” said Burks harshly. “This is murder — the fourth one like it. Something big is up, see? You’d better be damn careful what you hand out in that lousy sheet of yours.”
The man with the press card nodded somberly. He took another long look at Scanlon’s face as though that face, even with the distortions that hideous death had wrought, were hauntingly familiar. His gaze wandered over Scanlon’s twisted, crumpled body.
Then he lighted a cigarette, puffed on it a moment, and, as if by accident, let it drop from his fingers. But, as he stooped to recover it, his eyes rested for an instant on Scanlon’s exposed cuff, where faint markings showed, unobserved as yet by the police. The slain D.C.I. man had written them there with a pencil, jotted down an address. And the stranger, in the flash of a second memorized that address, storing it away in his mind. Then, as quietly and mysteriously as he had come, he moved off into the darkness.
Inspector Burks, occupied with the murder investigation, didn’t notice the stranger’s absence for a few seconds. When he did, he shot an abrupt, uneasy question.
“Where did that bird go?”
The detective-sergeant at his side looked around in puzzlement.
“I don’t know, chief. I thought he was still here.”
Burks stood scowling, hands thrust deep in pockets, eyebrows drawn together.
“I wonder—” he said slowly. Then he whirled on the men around him and gave a harsh, quick order. “Don’t let him get away. I want to talk to him.”
Two cops broke swiftly from the group, spreading out in different directions, searching the street, their flash lights in their hands. They covered the whole block, then came back shrugging apologetically.
“He beat it, chief. We looked. We couldn’t find him any place.”
There was no one in sight along the dark street; but a sound suddenly rose above the clicking of the ice-coated branches. It was a whistle — faint, melodious, eerie. It had a strangely ventriloquistic quality that seemed to fill the whole air at once.
As Burks stood listening tensely, trying to locate it, it died away. Then, somewhere down the street, an auto engine roared startlingly into life. Gears muttered, whined, grew silent as a fast car swept away into the night.
Chapter II
THE man who had displayed the press card didn’t go to any newspaper office. He drove swiftly through the winter darkness, staring straight ahead. His eyes were like living coals. His knuckles on the black wheel of the car were white and tense.
Before his gaze, the dead, distorted face of Bill Scanlon seemed to hover. Scanlon whom he had known and worked with in days gone by! Scanlon who had guided him, aided him along the rough road of a perilous profession! Scanlon, loyal to the point of death, who had once even saved his life.
What would Scanlon’s wife and young son say when they heard he had been slain? They knew his work was dangerous. They were never sure when he would return. But that wouldn’t make their sorrow at his passing any less.
The man at the car’s wheel muttered huskily, softly to himself. The words came almost like a chant.
“There’s a kid and a woman waiting!” he said.
The glowing light in his eyes seemed to deepen as his lips moved. It grew more steely, more bright, like flame reflected from the polished, gleaming point of a sword. If wise old Bill Scanlon had failed in his mission, fallen a victim to the unseen strangler, then the police must be right. Then this was no ordinary murder menace. The killer back of it all must have the cunning brain of a fiend.
The man of mystery made sure no one was following him. He turned the battleship nose of his roadster into a cross-town street, sped westward toward the river, entering upon a long, smooth drive that followed the curving line of the shore.
Millionaires’ homes and huge apartment houses rose on one side of the drive. On the other were paths and a parkway leading down to the water, curtained now in darkness. The man threaded his way through evening traffic, parking at last on a side street.
He leaped out of the car and walked forward, the burning look of intense emotion still in his eyes. He turned a corner, moved faster still, then stopped suddenly to press a hand to his side. A twinge of pain had come for an instant. Under his fingers was the scar of an old wound received on a battlefield in France.
A fleeting, bitter smile played over the tall man’s lips. Years ago doctors had predicted that the wound would kill him — that he had only a few months to live. But he had gone on living just the same. There was in his body energy that seemed inexhaustible — energy that even death could not seem to conquer. There was an iron will like a living dynamo that drove him on night and day. He had work to do, strange, secret tasks to perform. He wasn’t ready yet to answer the call of the Grim Reaper.
He turned into an avenue running parallel with the drive, walking blocks beyond the spot where he had parked his car before heading back toward the river again. He was on a dark street now — a street deserted, with a high wall on one side of it.
Over the wall, against the night sky, the chimneys and peaked roof of a house were faintly visible. It was a huge pile of masonry, bleak and austere — the old Montgomery mansion left empty by the litigation of heirs who could reach no agreement in the settlement of an estate. It had stood empty for years while the legatees battled like wolves.
The man moved along the wall, creeping deeper into the shadows. Suddenly he stopped. His burning eyes scanned the block in both directions. No one was in sight.
Deftly he inserted a key in a door so nearly the color of the wall itself that it seemed hidden.
The door opened, the man moved inside as silently as a shadow. He was in a place of desolation and ruin now. In the old garden behind the Montgomery mansion.