“What!” Verbeck cried.
He grasped the papers and opened the first that came to his hand. Great headlines told of the day’s progress in the Black Star case. The attack on the hotel clerk was exploited at length, the removal of Verbeck and Muggs and Riley to the old Verbeck place mentioned. The paper told how the place was surrounded at all hours by policemen, and grilled the police department because the dragnet had caught nothing but small fish.
The eight crooks arrested with the Black Star, and who really aided his escape, had been bailed out. Bail of five thousand had been fixed in each case, and two famous criminal lawyers had appeared and put up forty thousand dollars cash, refusing to say for whom they acted, merely declaring the crooks were their clients.
“So they’re loose!” Roger thought. “They’ll be at work again—or else they’ll all jump bail and so keep from betraying the Black Star’s secrets. I imagine it’d be worth forty thousand to him to have his plans safeguarded.”
He read on. At two o’clock that morning, just as the paper was going to press, a messenger boy had appeared with a letter from the Black Star. The press had been stopped to get in this latest bit of news. The messenger declared he had been called to a prominent hotel and handed the letter by a distinguished-looking gentleman whose description did not tally with that of the Back Star.
That letter read:
Within three days!
Within three days I commit the greatest theft I have perpetrated since coming to the city!
Within three days I make a huge joke of Roger Verbeck, who dares match wits with me!
I know all that goes on—I know everything! The police dragnet is most amusing. They never would dream of looking for me where I am hiding!
I know, for instance, that yesterday afternoon, and again last evening, sitting in the living room of his ancestral home, Roger Verbeck planned with Detective Riley and Muggs, Verbeck’s man of all work, to set a trap for me. Very clever—had I not learned of it.
Let Roger Verbeck understand that he may advertise to his heart’s content that he is having his famous diamond necklace reset at a prominent jeweler’s—and hope that I’ll take the bait and try to steal the jewels while a crowd of police are waiting to make a capture—but his hopes will be in vain. I am planning something bigger than the theft of the Verbeck necklace. The shock will come soon——
Within three days!
*****
Verbeck did not go back into the house just then. He thanked the sergeant for the papers again, and turned toward one end of the veranda, to stand there and look off down the street, thinking.
It was almost uncanny what this Black Star knew. It was beyond belief that either the Black Star or one of his confederates had been in the house and overheard those conversations. Had they not searched the house from bottom to top the evening before?