McCarty hesitated and then said slowly:
“Denny, you’ll mind the other night after we had examined it I put it in a cracker box while we went for a bite to eat and when we came home you saw me hunting around for something?”
“You were trying to whistle, too!” Dennis nodded. “That always means you think you’re putting something over! What was it?”
“I was hunting for that cracker box. I knew the minute we came back into the room somebody’d been there, for there was the stale smell of a heavy cigar on the air, not as if he’d been smoking right then, but the scent of it was strong on him as he passed through the place; when I found the box missing I knew what he’d come for.”
“Think of that now! Do you know what it means, Mac? The murderer knew you and not the medical examiner’s assistant had taken it from the conservatory! I wonder if he followed us from then on? The sight of us parading through the streets with all them balloons would have told him we were on, if he wasn’t blind!” Dennis grinned. “Leave the medical examiner find out what kind of gas was it; we know how ’twas give to her, though not what busted the balloon right in her face nor how the gas got in it! The notion come to me that ’twas not meant to kill Lucette, anyway.”
“Not kill her!” exclaimed McCarty. “The first whiff of it must have knocked her cold!”
“But what if it was intended for the baby and not for her?” Dennis lowered his voice. “What if the murderer has a craze for killing children? I’ve heard tell of such things and so have you! Suppose Hughes was poisoned by mistake in the first place for Ching Lee, so that little Fu Moy wouldn’t be protected. Then Horace was taken away and maybe killed and the Bellamy baby was next on the list—!”
“Denny, you’re running wild!” McCarty interrupted in his turn. “The murderer’s brain has got a twist to it, but he’s not as crazy as all that. Baby-killers are just stupid, low brutes without the shrewdness or knowledge to plan such crimes as we’re up against now. We’re fighting a mind, not a fist with a knife or a club in it!”
“So you’ve been saying!” Dennis retorted disgustedly. “That comes of those books you’ve been reading! Whilst you’ve been figuring out his ancestors and the blood that’s in him to decide is he in the ‘Born’ or ‘Habit’ class, like that Diagnostic book of yours has it, he’s been having an Old Home Week in the Mall, kidnapping and killing right and left! ’Twill be a week to-night—!”
McCarty beat a hasty retreat and took his solitary way to the restaurant, where he ate a hearty dinner to make up for the deferred lunch. Then he returned to the Mall, to prowl about like an unquiet if somewhat too material ghost. The rain had stopped at last and although the sky was still partially overcast the glimmer of a few stars gave promise of a clear dawn. Lights were brilliant in the Sloane, Parsons and Orbit residences, but low in Goddard’s and Mrs. Bellamy’s, where the lady had been in a hysterical state since the murder of her baby’s nurse.