“And a couple of men dead in the front seat, though the doors are intact!” Doyle finished, his eyes blazing. “The cold-blooded, murdering weasels! They knocked off the three boys in the moving van just as practice for this job! To see if the poison gas would work!”
“Hell, who cares!” Wollson roared. “The mail truck’s empty! Sacks of registered mail! Thousands — millions gone, and some reporter is sure as hell to follow the ambulance!”
Doyle, however, had leaped to the station house door. The police car parked outside roared into life as he headed for Rose Street. The case was his, for the moment, though it was of such magnitude that the entire force and the Federal men would be called into it later. His was the first chance to arrest a cold-blooded killer before other defenseless men fell victims to a deadly gas, and this time the police had an eyewitness who was not dead — yet.
Chapter II
The Twisted Man
Rose Street was lined on both sides by bungalows, each surrounded by its garden. The rifled mail truck stood in the center of the block, directly beneath a street light, and despite the drenching rain a few curiosity seekers were gathered near by, kept away by the patrolman, Mike Slatterly.
Beyond a glance to satisfy himself that all the bags of registered mail had been carried away, Doyle wasted no time on the truck. He knew only too well what he would find — a pair of dead men and a faint odor of peaches in the interior of the cab.
“Shut off the engine, Mike!” he called and leaped up the bungalow steps to the front door. A broken window pane indicated where the shots had been fired. Already the rain would have blurred any footprints that might have existed, but Doyle could find out the point from which the shots had been fired by the position of the ejected cartridge.
As an afterthought he called to Mike to locate these before souvenir hunters gathered them up, then he turned to confront an open door and the most striking blonde he had encountered in all his twenty-five years.
“I’m Doyle — Terry Doyle, the detective on the case,” he stammered.
She had hair of pure gold, a vivid, buttercup yellow without a trace of red or brown, and eyes as dark as his own. A tall girl, slender, about twenty, with long fingers that gripped the door firmly. Pale, with a fleck of her father’s blood on her cheek, but with her emotions well in hand. A girl with a firm chin and a straight, level glance.
“I’m Myra Freeman,” she said. “Father is still unconscious, but the doctor says he will live. It all happened so unexpectedly that I can’t tell you much, I’m afraid. We were—”
Farther back in the hall Doyle had seen a man who was no stranger. He motioned Myra to be silent. How Billy Peck of the Herald had managed to get to the scene of the crime so promptly was too much for Doyle, but there the reporter was, listening avidly.
Peck was a regular guy. Doyle liked him, and the Herald was fair to the cops, giving praise or blame to the individuals who deserved them, and never holding the department in general responsible for the fact that criminals were becoming more daring and more successful, as other newspapers did from time to time.
The reporter was as welcome as any one of his profession could have been, though Doyle’s thought was that publicity is likely to aid the criminal rather than the police.
“Wipe off the grouchy stare,” Peck grinned. “I’ve got to get the news. That’s what I’m paid for, but anything that the Herald or I can do to help you will be done pronto. I’m here to play ball with you, Slats. I’ve got the story already, but there’s still plenty of time before the deadline and I’m hanging around to get your theory, provided you’re willing to have it printed.” The grin broadened. “I can always say that an immediate arrest is expected, of course...
“Mr. Freeman is an accountant and a widower, Slats. He bought this house four years ago, and since his wife died Miss Freeman has been keeping house for him. Mr. Freeman is a great reader. They were both sitting in the living room reading when they heard a car put on its brakes hard—”
“Say, will you let her tell it, Bill?” Doyle interrupted.
“Mr. Peck is repeating exactly the words I used,” Myra answered quietly. “We heard brakes, and though there was no crash or a collision, both father and I thought there had been an accident and went to the window. He had to raise the shade, of course. He looked out, stared, and then seized me by the waist and threw me aside. He seemed to fall straight back upon me. The window pane shattered and there was blood on his chest. A pistol was firing. I screamed — I’d heard that was the thing to do—”
“I’ll say it is!” Doyle grunted.
“And tried to stop the bleeding. The next thing I knew a car started, and I heard the policeman running down the street.”
“You saw nothing yourself?”
“Only a Ford touring car and a truck with a little man opening it,” Myra apologized. “I had only time for a glimpse. They fired at father instantly.” The dark eyes flashed, and the firm chin set. “They weren’t his enemies! They shot him in cold blood—”
“They?” Doyle inquired.
“Or he. I’ve no idea who or how many!” the girl exclaimed.
“They — or he — are like that, Miss Freeman,” said Doyle. “Your father is lucky to be living. Three men were bumped off practicing for this. The moving van case,” he added for the reporter’s benefit.
“Say — that’s news!” exclaimed the latter. “I’m glad I hung around. Got any idea who did it, Slats? It must be some hot shot—”
Doyle looked at the reporter hard. “Not an idea in the world,” he confessed. “The hot shots all had airtight alibis in the other case. How long after the shots before the car started again, Miss Freeman?”
“I’ve no idea. Maybe a minute. Maybe as much as five.”
“The truck carried ten mail sacks. I’ve checked that,” interposed Peck officiously. “They’ve no idea of the value at the post office until they check up the lists, but the sum must be way up in the hundreds of thousands. Even one man could snake ten sacks out of the truck in less than a minute.”
Doyle shrugged. The time element was not important, and the girl’s testimony as a whole worthless.
“I’d like to see your father,” he said.
“How about me?” pleaded Peck.
“Sure. Come along. You’re playing ball with me,” the detective conceded.
The living room of the bungalow extended entirely across the front of the house. From the center of the rear wall a straight, narrow hall led directly to the back door, with the kitchen and dining room on the left, and on the right two bedrooms with a bath between. Mr. Freeman was in the rear bedroom — a small room with two windows, one on each corner of the house. The back window was open about a foot at the top. Against the side window the rain beat heavily.
An ambulance surgeon had just finished bandaging the wounded man, and sat watching him closely. Freeman’s eyes were open — clouded with pain to be sure, but with no signs yet of fever or delirium. He was a tall, wide shouldered, dark-haired man of forty-five, his hair only slightly grizzled at the temples. His head turned as he caught sight of Doyle, and he tried to speak.
“Will you get out of here and stop disturbing my patient?” snapped the ambulance surgeon without looking around. “One of these bullets touched the lung. I don’t want him to talk for a day at least.”
“Meanwhile a murderer is getting away,” Doyle objected.