"Somebody groaning!" gasped Miss Cornelia. "It's horrible!"
The detective stepped up and took the receiver from her. He listened anxiously for a moment.
"I don't hear anything," he said.
"I heard it! I couldn't imagine such a dreadful sound! I tell you--somebody in this house is in terrible distress."
"Where does this phone connect?" queried Anderson practically.
Miss Cornelia made a hopeless little gesture. "Practically every room in this house!"
The detective put the receiver to his ear again.
"Just what did you hear?" he said stolidly.
Miss Cornelia's voice shook.
"Dreadful groans--and what seemed to be an inarticulate effort to speak!"
Lizzie drew her gaudy wrapper closer about her shuddering form.
"I'd go somewhere," she wailed in the voice of a lost soul, "if I only had somewhere to go!"
Miss Cornelia quelled her with a glare and turned back to the detective.
"Won't you send these men to investigate--or go yourself?" she said, indicating Brooks and Billy. The detective thought swiftly.
"My place is here," he said. "You two men," Brooks and Billy moved forward to take his orders, "take another look through the house--don't leave the building--I'll want you pretty soon."
Brooks--or Jack Bailey, as we may as well call him through the remainder of this narrative--started to obey. Then his eye fell on Miss Cornelia's revolver which Anderson had taken from beside Fleming's body and still held clasped in his hand.
"If you'll give me that revolver--" he began in an offhand tone, hoping Anderson would not see through his little ruse. Once wiped clean of fingerprints, the revolver would not be such telling evidence against Dale Ogden.
But Anderson was not to be caught napping. "That revolver will stay where it is," he said with a grim smile.
Jack Bailey knew better than to try and argue the point, he followed Billy reluctantly out of the door, giving Dale a surreptitious glance of encouragement and faith as he did so. The Japanese and he mounted to the second floor as stealthily as possible, prying into dark corners and searching unused rooms for any clue that might betray the source of the startling phone call from nowhere. But Bailey's heart was not in the search. His mind kept going back to the figure of Dale--nervous, shaken, undergoing the terrors of the third degree at Anderson's hands. She couldn't have shot Fleming of course, and yet, unless he and Billy found something to substantiate her story of how the killing had happened, it was her own, unsupported word against a damning mass of circumstantial evidence. He plunged with renewed vigor into his quest.
Back in the living-room, as he had feared, Anderson was subjecting Dale to a merciless interrogation.