"But she has disappeared," mused Kennedy. "Were there any others?"
"Haynes hasn't been proof against their wiles," answered the coroner. "I have found out that he was introduced by one of the 'war brokers' to a Madame Daphne Dupres."
"And she?"
Leslie shook his head. "I don't know anything about her, except that she lives at the Hotel St. Quentin—the same place, by the way, where Haynes makes his headquarters."
Our car pulled up at the private morgue of the burial company to which Delaney's body had been taken.
We entered, and Kennedy wasted no time in making a careful examination of the remains of the unfortunate victim.
"I couldn't make anything out of it, even after an autopsy," confessed Dr. Leslie. "It seemed as though it were something that had been conveyed by the blood all over the body, something that blocked the capillaries and caused innumerable hemorrhages into organs and tissues, and especially nerve centers."
The body seemed to be discolored and variegated in color, with here and there little marks of boils or vesicles.
"It looks like something that has depleted the red corpuscles of oxygen," continued Leslie, noticing that Kennedy had drawn off a little of the body fluids, evidently for future study. "As nearly as I could make out there had been a cyanosis in a marked degree. He had all the appearance of having been asphyxiated."
"Which seems to have been enough to suggest to some imaginative mind the 'purple death,'" remarked Kennedy dryly.