“How did he get out?” demanded Hart.
“That we have yet to learn. But he did get out, not through the door to the hall. Remains the possibility of a secret passage and the windows.”
“I’m sure there is no secret passage,” Everett said, with an unusual burst of unasked information. “I’ve been here three years and if there was such a thing I’m sure I’d know of it.”
“You might and you might not,” said Moore, looking at him. “If Mr. Tracy wanted a private entrance to his suite for any reason, he would have had it built and kept the matter quiet.”
“Not Sampson Tracy,” exclaimed Everett. “He was not a secretive man. I think I may say I knew all about his affairs, both business matters and private dealings, and he trusted me absolutely.”
“Even so,” Moore told him. “But in the lives of most men there is some secret, something that they don’t talk over with anybody.”
“Not Mr. Tracy,” Everett reiterated. “Even his engagement to Mrs. Dallas was freely talked over with me, both before it occurred and since. I know all about his habits and his fads and whims. And in no case was there ever an occasion for a secret passage to or from his rooms.”
“Yet it may be there,” Kee insisted. “But if none can be found, then the murderer either escaped by the windows or——”
“Or what?” asked Hart.
“Or he had a steel wire contraption to turn the key from the outside. But this I don’t think likely, for the door has a rather complicated lock, and is far from being an easy thing to manipulate.”