all because of a girl who had just finished confessing to two particularly unpleasant murders.

Naia North raised her head and their eyes met—met and held. Her lips parted slightly as she caught the unmistakable message in those gray-blue depths....

The moment passed, the spell was broken and she leaned back in the chair and laughed a little shakily. "I read about those statements of his in the papers, Lieutenant. I think perhaps I can at least partially explain them. As I remember it, there were several Bunsen burners lighted on the laboratory bench near that window. They give off a blue flame, you know, and I must have been standing near them when Paul Cordell came charging in. In his confused frame of mind, he may have pictured me as being in a ball of flame."

"Sounds possible," the man admitted, frowning. "What about those flashes of light?"

"You've got me there. Unless they were reflections of sunlight through the window—from the windshield of a passing car, perhaps."

"And the things he heard you and Gilmore saying?"

She shook her head regretfully.

"There I'm simply in the dark, I don't see how he could have twisted what little we said into the utterly fantastic nonsense he claims to have heard."

Kirk rubbed a hand slowly along the side of his neck, still frowning. "He could have confused that length of metal in your hand as a gun.... Well—" his shoulders lifted in the ghost of a shrug—"it all seems to add up. Except one thing: Cordell had been tried and convicted, leaving you in the clear. Why come down here voluntarily and stick your lovely head in a noose?"

The girl smiled faintly. "'Lovely head', Lieutenant?"

Kirk flushed to the eyebrows. "That slipped out.... Why the confession?"

She said soberly: "I was so sure they'd let him off. When you know someone's innocent you can't realize that others won't know it too, I suppose. But when I learned he'd been found guilty and actually condemned to die ... well, I know it sounds noble and all that but I couldn't let him go to his death for something I'd done. Surely such a thing has happened before in your experience, Lieutenant."

He watched as she drew smoke from the cigarette deeply into her lungs and let it flow out in twin streamers from her nostrils. Only 

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