with the front door lock. Since he had pressed the moulding back into place, there would be nothing to indicate his presence.

Within ten minutes Kirk had ransacked every inch of the living room in search of something, anything, that would point to Alma Dakin as being more than a nine-to-five secretary. And while he found nothing, no one, not even the girl who lived here, could tell that an intruder had been at work.

The bedroom seemed even less promising at first. Dresser drawers gave up only the pleasantly personal articles of the average young woman. Miss Dakin, it turned out, was almost indecently fond of frothy undergarments and black transparent nightgowns—interesting but not at all important to the over-all problem.

Kirk, his search completed, sat down on the edge of the bed's footboard and totaled up what he had learned. It didn't take long, for he knew absolutely no more about Alma Dakin than he had before entering her apartment. No personal papers, no letters from a yearning boy friend in the old home town, no savings or checking-account passbook. Not even a scrawled line of birthday or Christmas greetings on the fly leaves of the apartment's seven books.

To Kirk's trained mind, the very lack of such things, the fact that Alma Dakin lived in a vacuum, was highly significant. It smacked of her having something to hide—and his already strong suspicion of her was solidified into certainty of her guilt. But certainty was a long way from rock-ribbed evidence—and that was something he must have to proceed further.

He was ready to leave when it dawned on him that he had not yet looked under the bed. Kneeling, he pushed up the hanging edge of the green batik spread and peered into the narrow space. Nothing, not even a decent accumulation of dust. The light from the window was too faint, however, to reach a section of the floor near the footboard. Kirk climbed to his feet and attempted to shove that end to one side.

The bed failed to move. He blinked in mild surprise and tried again. It was only by exerting almost his entire strength that he was able to shift the thing at all, and then no more than a few inches.

He felt his pulse stir with the thrill of incipient discovery. Once he made sure nothing was anchoring the bed to the floor, he began to tap lightly against the wood in an effort to detect a possible false panel.

Within two minutes he located an almost 

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