“All right. Get up there before she starts down. Begin putting up handkerchiefs and appear to be watching the river. That will mix her up so she will not know what to do. She will not dare to leave the roof while you are there. When we’re through I’ll send the elevator man up for you with the message that we have found the short circuit.”
He turned to the other operative.
“Find anything, Williams?”
“Only this.”
Carter’s face brightened as his assistant held out to him two copies of an afternoon newspaper. In each of them a square was missing where something had been cut out.
“I found them in the waste-paper basket by the old man’s desk,” the man explained, “and there was some ashes there—ashes of paper—as if he had burned up something. Maybe it was what he cut out of those papers. I could not tell.”
“We’ve got to get copies of those papers at once and see what it was. Come on, I’m going to take them to the Chief. We can get the papers on the way down.”
Calling the other operative from the roof, before he even had had time to attract the attention of Lena Kraus by his activities, they hastened back to the office, where Fleck and Carter together scanned the two papers from which the clippings had been taken.
“Why,” said Carter disappointedly, “it is just a couple of advertisements he cut out—advertisements for a tooth paste. There’s nothing in that.”
“Don’t be too sure,” warned Fleck. “If a man cuts out one tooth-paste advertisement, the natural presumption would be that he wished to remind himself to buy some. When he cuts out two, he must have some special interest in that particular tooth paste. We’ll have to find out what his interest is.”