"Somehow, I got the idea that the Brace woman knew Russell hadn't killed her daughter. Funny, that is. How could she have known that? How can she know it now?
"She's got the pivotal fact in this case. I felt it. I'm willing to bet she persuaded her daughter to pursue Webster. And things have gone 'bust'—didn't come out as she thought they would. What was she after, money? That's exactly it! Exactly! Her daughter could hold up Webster, and Webster could hold up the Sloanes after his marriage."
He whistled softly.
"If she can prove that Webster should have married her daughter, that he's in need of anything like sixty-five thousand dollars—where does he get off? He gets off safely if the Brace woman ever sees fit to tell—what? I couldn't guess if my whittling hand depended on it." He grimaced his repugnance.
"What a woman! A mania for wickedness—evil from head to foot, thoroughly. She wouldn't stick at murder—if she thought it safe. She'd do anything, say anything. Every word she uttered this morning had been rehearsed in her mind—with gestures, even. When I beat her, I beat this puzzle; that's sure."
That he had to do with a puzzle, he had no manner of doubt. The very circumstances surrounding the discovery of the girl's body—Arthur Sloane flashing on the light in his room at a time when his being awake was so unusual that it frightened his daughter; Judge Wilton stumbling over the dead woman; young Webster doing the same thing in the same instant; the light reaching out to them at the moment when they bent down to touch the thing which their feet had encountered—all that shouted mystery to his experienced mind.
He thought of Webster's pronouncement: "The thug, acting on the spur of the moment, with a blow in the dark and a getaway through the night——" Here was reproduction of that in real life. Would people say that Webster had given himself away in advance? They might.
And the weapon, what about that? It could have been manufactured in ten minutes. Crown had said over the wire that Russell's nail file was missing. What if Webster's, too, were missing? He would see—although he expected to uncover no such thing.
He came, then, to Lucille's astounding idea, that her father must be "protected," because he was nervous and, being nervous, might incur the enmity of the authorities. He could not take that seriously. And yet the most fruitful imagination in the world could fabricate no motive for Arthur Sloane's killing a young woman he had never seen.