Nick Carter remained at his desk, absent-mindedly drawing circles on his blotter.
The puzzle which had been given to him to solve was a decidedly unusual one, and it might mean almost anything—or next to nothing.
CHAPTER XIII.
WANTED: A MOTIVE.
The case against Grantley and his confederates had furnished one of the greatest newspaper sensations of recent years, and the attitude of the public toward the vivisectionists was bitter in the extreme.
Their trials were delayed for some months, during which time Nick and his assistants collected all the evidence they could obtain. The girl recovered, and, as there had been no law at the time to forbid such unnecessary operations, the detective was compelled to furnish another basis for prosecution.
It was that or nothing.
After a great deal of probing, Nick had brought to light an instance of actual death as a result of a previous experiment in vivisection, which had been carried out by Doctor Grantley and the same set of assistants.
It was that of a little boy, also from the East Side, and the son of poor parents. He had been lame, and Grantley had carried him to the private hospital in the Bronx, after promising a cure by means of an operation on his hip.
The operation that had actually been performed, however, had borne absolutely no relation to the child’s lameness, and he had died from the effects of it.
It seemed a clear case of manslaughter, and the prosecution put all its strength into it. But Grantley still had means, despite the fact that his practice had fallen off to an alarming extent in recent years. Moreover, he was exceptionally clever and had retained a number of powerful friends among the more radical and unscrupulous surgeons in the State.