“Her husband? Oh dear!” Judy exclaimed. “Irene is married. I ought to warn her—”
“No, please, don’t alarm her,” Peter interrupted. “It didn’t happen the way they planned. I’m sure of that. It was supposed to take place Saturday night—”
“It was Saturday night that Clarissa disappeared. But she isn’t an actress, and she isn’t married.”
“And she isn’t a phantom,” Peter added. “Whatever else we know about her, we can be perfectly sure she’s real. She may be in real danger, too. If I can’t find Lawson I want the confidence men who are working with him. This is no small outfit. It appears to be a nationwide organization. We want the top men, not just the tough kids they hire to do the shooting for them.”
“Do you really think they were hired?” Judy asked.
“We know they were following orders. Their minds, in some way, had been taken over by the minds of the criminals who gave those orders.”
“I see.” Judy was quiet a moment. Did these mind manipulators have, in their possession, some fiendish machine more dangerous than an atom bomb? It was a terrifying thought.
“Peter,” she asked, “what about Irene? Why didn’t she have a nightmare like Pauline and Flo and me? Irene told me this morning that she hadn’t dreamed an unpleasant thing.”
“Was she on the tour with you?”
“No, she’d gone to her rehearsal. We didn’t see her again until it was time for the show. There were a lot of people we didn’t know on the tour with us,” Judy remembered. “There was an ad man from Flo’s office, too. He was the one who quarreled with Mr. Lenz.”