There was a grimly humorous side to it when he stopped to think, nor could he attach any blame to the hotel clerk or to the police, because they had assumed that the mysterious caller on Colonel Grafton was the person who had committed the deed.
But in that very supposition on their parts he had the advantage of them, in that he personally knew the untruth of it—in that until the hour of two in the morning, or a few minutes before or after it, he was certain that one of the women now dead and the other now wounded at the hospital were perfectly well, and certainly anticipated no thought of imminent danger.
It will be remembered that he had escaped from the apartment where the double crime was committed, with the small safe in his arms; that he had made his way to the roof of the building, and that he had spent a considerable time there in opening the safe.
He had not seen any person in the corridors—anywhere, in fact, within that building, after he came away from that apartment—until he had passed through the office on his way to the street, shortly after three o’clock; he had not noted the exact time.
But some person had been there—and it was almost a logical deduction that the person who had committed that double murder was in the building at the time Nick Carter entered it and did not leave it until after the business of the ensuing day had begun—or that the murderer was an actual resident of one of the apartments there.
This latter theory naturally disposed of the idea that had partly formed in the mind of the detective that the man who called himself Carleton Lynne might be the guilty one, because Chick had already been indefatigably on Lynne’s track for ten days, and was supposed to know—believed himself that he did know—every move that the man from the West had made during that interval.
The conversation that the detective had overheard while he was in hiding in the little room and intent upon making his escape from it must not be forgotten.
It had made a marked impression on him, implying, as it had done, a deep-seated hatred and fear—which is a stronger incentive to the commission of a crime than hate ever was—on Lynne’s part, for Madge Babbington.
Nick Carter’s theory of the original condition of things, which had brought about the appearance of Carleton Lynne upon the scene bore out this idea, too.
It was quite natural that the man, having attained the possession of the Lynne millions, should wish to keep them for himself and should have a reluctance to sharing them with a woman whom he both feared and hated—save only when he was in her presence, and she fascinated him with her tigerish eyes and her beauty.