The Three Crimes
"Thus three crimes had been committed that every soul in the city believed implicitly had been committed by the Invisible Master! For the obsession of his presence had been spread so that all believed him roaming its ways, and no suspicion fell on Harkness or Taylor or Allen because in the ordinary course of things they would never have committed crimes which would be blamed so swiftly and inevitably upon them. What all forgot was that the ordinary course of things had been changed, and that the three had in each case counted, and counted correctly, upon the Invisible Master obsession turning away all suspicion from themselves toward the unseen criminal. As it happened, I ordered the usual routine investigation of Harkness in the first crime, though not for a moment believing him guilty, so strong was my own belief in the Invisible Master. But it was that bit of routine that shattered the whole great scheme in the end.
"As it was, though, Grantham had achieved his third great step, and all New York was in panic from the crimes which it believed the Invisible Master had committed. And Grantham himself had not needed to be concerned with a single one of those crimes! He had needed only to sit back, knowing that as surely as human nature was human nature, crime after crime would be committed by those who would blame it on the Invisible Master, and that those crimes would as surely raise up a greater and greater terror for the Invisible Master's name! If it had not been Harkness and Taylor and Allen, it would have been others!
"Thus the fear of the Invisible Master, as Grantham had foreseen, was now convulsing all the great city, and that was what he had waited for. He sent in instantly that letter demanding the payment of five million dollars as the price of the Invisible Master's departure from the city. It was sheer, colossal bluff, and it succeeded! For with the peoples of New York mad with fear of the Invisible Master, with its ordinary life falling into chaos under that fear, the money was swiftly raised by the city's leaders who were losing far more than that in this storm of panic. Kingston was appointed to place the money at the requested spot, and since the letter had mockingly given the police liberty to attempt the capture of the Invisible Master, Grantham was able to suggest a scheme by which he might be captured, using his warning bell.
"That scheme, of course, was devised only to the end that Grantham might accompany Kingston in to place the money. For Grantham, before he had written the letter specifying the spot where the money was to be placed, had been to that spot and had arranged a clever hiding-place near the boulder, a niche in the earth covered by an earth-masked trap-door. He and Kingston went in, they placed the steel box on the boulder, after stretching their wire around, and then waited with drawn guns, no doubt, while we all waited around them in a great circle.
"Then when Grantham judged the wait long enough, he himself rang the bell beside him by making contact with its batteries, and as Kingston naturally cried out in astonishment he cried out with him, then gave an exclamation in a feigned deeper voice and at the same moment shot Kingston dead, and sent another bullet through his own left shoulder, the last touch of verisimilitude needed to remove any trace of suspicion from him. It was but the work of an instant to grasp the box and stow it in the niche beside him, all prepared, and slam down the masked door of it and then crouch beside Kingston. None of us doubted for a moment his story that the Invisible Master had shot Kingston and himself and escaped with the money. We came back to town believing that the whole thing was over.
Over the Trail
"But when I got back to headquarters I found awaiting me the report of the man I had given the routine job of looking up young Harkness. The report stated that Harkness was a young man without any known income but his salary, but stated also that he had in the last few weeks lost nearly fifty thousand dollars through a certain broker on stocks. I was amazed. Where had he gotten the money? I recalled that it had been almost exactly that amount the Invisible Master had been blamed with taking from the bank, and for the first time I was suspicious of Harkness.
"I had them bring him to headquarters at once, and we hadn't sweated him fifteen minutes before he confessed that he'd seen the chance to cover his embezzlement by blaming a theft on the Invisible Master. I didn't know what to think. Could it be that the other crimes were the same in nature? I had them round up Taylor and Allen at once. Taylor was found on the point of sailing for Europe, having resigned his position on the ostensible account of shattered nerves. He proved a harder case than Harkness, but an hour of grilling brought from him the admission that he too had blamed his theft of the money and killing of Barsoff on the Invisible Master, and had only planned the crime because he saw a chance to do it thus free of all suspicion. I don't think he'd ever have come clean if we hadn't found most of the money involved there in his grips.