“You did,” said Culligore dryly, “and I’m still wondering how you knew about them. Did you just walk in on a hunch and discover a dead woman, and a cop chained to an opium-eating runt, or did someone put you wise beforehand?”
The Phantom felt he was on dangerous ground. “It was only a hunch. We newspaper men have them, you know, and once in a while they pan out. But what do you make of it, Culligore? How do you explain the cop being handcuffed to Dan the Dope?”
“I don’t explain it. I suppose Pinto will tell us how it happened when he comes to.”
“Think there’s any connection between the handcuffed pair and the murder of the housekeeper?”
“How could there be? The medical examiner said the housekeeper must have been dead from twenty to thirty hours when the body was found. Besides, where do you find any connection between a murder on the one hand and a cop chained to a dope fiend on the other? To my way of thinking, the two cases are separate. The one of Pinto and Dan the Dope is all a riddle, and the only clear thing about it is that the Phantom had a hand in it.”
“The Phantom?”
“Yep. The Phantom was in on it. Surprised, eh? Well, there are some things we don’t tell the newspapers, and this was one of them. Just how the Phantom figured in the thing I can’t tell, but he was in the Gage house last night or early in the morning. Beats the dickens how that fellow can walk past our noses without getting caught.”
The Phantom stared. He did not think he had left any traces of his connection with the affair at the Gage house, and Culligore’s statement startled him for a moment.
“How do you know?” he asked, getting a grip on himself.
“Finger prints,” said the lieutenant. “This is on the q. t. I examined the handcuffs, and there were three sets of prints on them, showing that three different persons had handled them. There were only two or three marks of each set, but enough to identify them. One set was Dan the Dope’s, the other must have been Pinto’s, and the third was the Gray Phantom’s.”