It needed only a cursory examination of the body to determine how he had met his death. His face was drawn, as though he had seen the blow descending and was powerless to avoid it. On his skull was a deep gash, made by some heavy implement. The weapon, too, was lying there—Burke discovered it—a broken leaf of an automobile spring, used by some one to force tires over rims. There was no art, no science, no finesse about the murder. It was just plain, brutal force.
If a bomb had been dropped among us, however, we could not have been more stunned than by the murder of Mito.
Burke and Riley were plainly at a loss, but I did not mind that. It was the look on Kennedy’s face that worried me. He did not say much, but it was plain that he was thinking much.
“Just a brutal murder,” he remarked at length, after he had surveyed the garage and finally come back to Mito himself again. “There doesn’t seem to be a clue. If it were odd, like the murder of Marshall Maddox, then there’d be more to work on. But it isn’t. No, it’s the harder just because of its simplicity. And it puts us just that much further back, because one whom we thought might lead us to the person higher up has been removed in the most primitive and, after all, most startling fashion.”
“I’ll wager that fellow Sanchez could tell something about this if we could only get at him right,” put in Burke, to whom Kennedy had delegated the removal of Mito’s body.
Kennedy said nothing, but it surely had begun to look as though he might be acting for Paquita in some capacity. Was she, in turn, acting for a desperate band of crooks? I felt that if we could break down Sanchez we might reach her.
Burke barked his orders to Riley and the rest. “You fellows have been marking time too long. Get out and find that man Sanchez.”
His men knew better than to question or defend. Action was the only thing that satisfied Burke. They took the orders on the jump and hurriedly organized themselves into a searching party, though what it was that was tangible that they had on Sanchez, supposing that they got him, it was hard to see. As thoroughly as they could the men under Burke and Riley covered the hotel, the Casino, the grounds, and finally turned their attention to the town.
Kennedy and I took up the search together, beginning at the hotel. Hunting through the corridors and other rooms brought no trace of the man we sought. He was not registered at the Harbor House, and though the clerk and some of the attendants knew him, they professed to be able to tell nothing. Nor was there any trace of Paquita.
Meanwhile Burke and Riley had spread a general alarm through the town, although I am sure that many of those whom they enlisted as searchers had not the slightest idea who Sanchez was or even what he looked like. The search was rapidly resolving itself into an aimless wandering about in the hope of running across this elusive individual. There seemed to be no particular way of tracing the man. The farther they got away from the hotel, however, the more convinced did it seem to make Kennedy to stick about the Lodge and Casino, if for no other reason than to keep an eye on any possible moves of the Maddoxes and Walcotts.