CHAPTER V.
THE TRAIL VANISHES.
Grantley’s trail vanished into thin air—or seemed to—very quickly.
Nick Carter and his assistants had comparatively little trouble in finding the hotel which the fugitive had patronized the night before, but their success amounted to little.
Grantley had arrived there at almost one o’clock in the morning and signed an assumed name on the register. He brought a couple of heavy suit cases with him.
He had not been in prison long enough to acquire the characteristic prison pallor to an unmistakable degree, and a wig had evidently concealed his closely cropped hair.
He was assigned to an expensive room, but left his newly acquired key at the desk a few minutes later, and sallied forth on foot.
The night clerk thought nothing of his departure at the time, owing to the fact that the Times Square hotel section is quite accustomed to the keeping of untimely hours.
That was the last any of the hotel staff had seen of him, however. His baggage was still in his room, but, upon investigation, it was found to contain an array of useless and valueless odds and ends, obviously thrown in merely to give weight and bulk. In other words, the suit cases had been packed in anticipation of their abandonment.
It seemed likely that the doctor had had at least one accomplice in his flight, for the purpose of aiding him in his arrangements. But not necessarily so.
If he had received such assistance, it was quite possible that one of the six young physicians, who had formerly been associated with him in his unlawful experiments, had lent the helping hand.
Nick had kept track of them for some time, and now he determined to look them up again.
It was significant, however, that Grantley had, apparently, made no provision for the escape of Doctor Siebold, his assistant, who had been in Sing Sing with him.
In the flight which had followed their ghastly crime against the blind financier, Siebold had shown the white feather, and it was easy to believe that the stern, implacable Grantley had no further use for his erstwhile associate.
There was no reason to doubt that the escaped convict had gone directly to the theater after leaving the hotel. But why had he gone to the latter at all, and, what had become of him after he had broken up Helga Lund’s play?
There was no reasonable doubt that Grantley had disguised himself pretty effectually for his flight from Ossining to New York, and yet the night clerk’s description was that of Grantley himself.
It followed, therefore, that the fugitive had already shed his disguise somewhere in the big city. But why not have gone directly from that stopping, place, wherever it was, to the theater?
Nick gave it up as unimportant. The hotel episode did not seem to have served any desirable purpose, from Grantley’s standpoint, unless on the theory that it was simply meant to confuse the detectives.
However that might be, it would be much more worth while to know what the surgeon’s movements had been after his dastardly attack on the actress.
Had he gone to another hotel, in disguise or otherwise? Had he returned to his former house in the Bronx, which had been closed up since his removal to Sing Sing? Had he left town, or—well, done any one of a number of things?
There was room only for shrewd guesswork, for the most part.
An exhaustive search of the hotels failed to reveal his presence at any of them that night or later. The closed house in the Bronx was inspected, with a similar result.
That was about as far as the detective got along that line. Nick had a feeling that the fellow was still in New York. He had once tried to slip away in an unusually clever fashion, and had come to grief. It was fair to assume, therefore, that he would not make a second attempt, especially in view of the fact that the metropolis offers countless hiding places and countless multitudes to shield a fugitive.
If he was still in the city, though, he was almost unquestionably in disguise; and he could be counted on to see that that disguise was an exceptionally good one.
Certainly, the prospect was not an encouraging one. The proverbial needle in a haystack would have been easy to find in comparison.
And, meanwhile, Helga Lund would not know what real peace of mind was until she was informed that her vindictive persecutor had been captured.
Three days was spent in this fruitless tracking, and then, in the absence of tangible clews, the great detective turned to something which had often met with surprising success in the past.
He banished everything else from his mind and tried to put himself, in imagination, in Doctor Grantley’s place.
What would this brilliant, erratic, but misguided genius, with all of his unbridled enmities and his criminal propensities, have done that night, after having escaped from prison and brought Helga Lund’s performance to such an untimely and harrowing close?
It was clear that much depended on the depth of his hatred for the actress who had repulsed him five years before. Undoubtedly his enmity for the beautiful Swede was great, else he would not have timed his escape as he had done, or put the first hours of his liberty to such a use.
But would he have been content with what he had done that first night? If he had considered his end accomplished, he might have shaken the dust of New York from his feet at once. On the other hand, if his thirst for revenge had not yet been slaked, it was probable that he was still lurking near, ready to follow up his first blow with others.
The more Nick thought about it the more certain he became that the latter supposition was nearer the truth than the former. Grantley had caused Helga Lund to break down completely before one of the most important and critical audiences that had ever been assembled in New York, to be sure, but, with a man of his type, was that likely to be anything more than the first step?
He had threatened to ruin her career, and he was nothing if not thorough in whatever he attempted. Therefore—so Nick reasoned—further trouble might be looked for in that quarter.
The thought was an unwelcome one. The detective had taken every practicable precaution to shield Helga from further molestation, but he knew only too well that Grantley’s attacks were of a sort which usually defied ordinary safeguards.
The possibility of new danger to the actress spurred Nick on to added concentration.
Assuming that Grantley was still in New York, in disguise, and bent upon inflicting additional injury on the woman he had once loved, where would he be likely to hide himself, and what would be the probable nature of his next move?
The detective answered his last question first, after much weighing of possibilities.
Grantley was one of the most dangerous of criminals, simply because his methods were about as far removed as possible from the ordinary methods of criminals. He had confined himself, thus far, to crimes in which he had made use of his immense scientific knowledge, surgical and hypnotic.
Accordingly, the chances were that he would work along one of those two lines in the future, or else along some other, in which his special knowledge would be the determining factor.
Moreover, since his escape, he had repeatedly called his mastery of hypnotism to his aid. That being so, Nick was inclined to believe that he would continue to use it, especially since Helga had shown herself so susceptible to hypnotic influence.
Could the detective guard against that?
He vowed to do his best, notwithstanding the many difficulties involved.
But it was not until he had carefully balanced the probabilities in regard to Grantley’s whereabouts that Nick became seriously alarmed.
As a consequence of his study of the problem, an overwhelming conviction came to him that it would be just like the rascally surgeon to have gone to Helga’s own hotel, under another name.
The luxurious Wentworth-Belding would be as safe for the fugitive as any other place, providing his disguise was adequate—safer, in fact, for it was the very last place which would ordinarily fall under suspicion.
In addition to that great advantage, it offered the best opportunity to keep in touch with developments in connection with the actress’ condition, and residence there promised comparatively easy access to Helga when the time should come for the next act in the drama of revenge.
This astounding suspicion had sprung up, full-fledged, in Nick’s brain in the space of a second. The detective knew that his preliminary reasoning had been sound, however, and based upon a thorough knowledge of Grantley’s characteristic methods.
It was staggering, but his keen intuition told him that it was true. He was now certain that Grantley would be found housed under the same huge roof as his latest victim, and that meant that Helga’s danger was greater than ever.
The next blow might fall at any minute.
It was very surprising, in fact, that Grantley had remained inactive so long.
The detective hastily but effectively disguised himself, left word for his assistants, and hurried to the hotel—only to find that his flash of inspiration had come a little too late.
Helga Lund had mysteriously disappeared.