There was no need for him to remind himself that the Lathrup case was one of the explosively violent ones, with that strange residual violence remaining, making itself felt, every time his thoughts returned to it. Not only in the magazine office itself, with her loveliness only slightly marred by the small, dark hole in her temple--the wound had bled profusely, but the blood had not spread over her features--but later, when the body had been lifted into a sheet, and removed from the office, and the last flash-bulb had gone off and he'd been left alone with the medical examiner. He had been just the same as being completely alone, because Hunter had completed his preliminary examination, and his thoughts were back in a smoke-filled room where a poker game was in progress. To Hunter it had been no more than a routine interruption, breaking in on a winning hand and making him so morose and ill-tempered that Fenton, who had always found him a hard man to deal with, had shut up after asking him only two questions. The residual violence was there, all right, a something in the room that seemed to point an accusing finger, to demand that justice be not too long delayed, to threaten reprisals if the vanished killer were not relentlessly tracked down and made to answer for his crime. It was a feeling Fenton had--nothing more. The threat of reprisal was not directed at him, but at the nebulous entity known as society. But it was always there, always present, a demand for retribution from beyond the grave, a screaming and a pleading, an insistence that justice be done or all hell would yawn for someone. All right, it was only something he imagined, peculiar to him alone. But he knew from experience that it was unwise to take even imagined horrors lightly. They were part of a man's thinking, his inner life, his individuality. It was a mistake to take them _too_ seriously, but just as bad to brush them aside as of no importance. All right, the violence had been there, but in another way the office had seemed the opposite of crepe-somber. It had seemed still filled with her living presence, as if she were still striding back and forth from her desk to the window, or sitting at her desk impatiently talking into the intercom. That she had been a strong-willed, very determined woman despite her aspect of pulse-stirring femininity he'd strongly suspected the instant he'd entered the office with its costly but severely functional furnishings. The choice of furnishings had quite obviously not been influenced in any way by feminine whims and extravagances. No woman, surely, would have really liked such severity in the décor surrounding her. But a woman determined to keep her professional and private lives in separate compartments might well have made such a choice deliberately and taken pride in her ability to impose a severe discipline upon herself.