An article writer, and a good one, if the staff at Eaton-Lathrup were right about him and there was no reason to doubt their competence. A free-lance article writer who had quarreled violently with Helen Lathrup three weeks before her death. Fenton had found the letters in the slain woman's desk. Each was a hot-tempered letter and one was extremely violent, not quite threatening Lathrup with bodily harm but strongly hinting that such harm might be visited upon her if she did not correct what the writer claimed was a _very serious_ mistake. It seemed incredible to Fenton that anyone, no matter how enraged, would send a prominent editor such threats and sign the letters with his own name. The man had practically started himself on a walk to the chair. And that particularly irritated Fenton, because Willard would have to be captured before he could complete the walk, and a three-state alert had proved as ineffective in locating him as a fast-moving city dragnet and three Westchester roadblocks in the vicinity of his suburban home.... Fenton was still frowning down at the letters, the only strong lead he had, when someone said from the doorway: "He's given himself up." Fenton looked up quickly, annoyed, the statement not registering immediately, as First Grade Detective John Gallison had apparently assumed it would. Gallison was a big man, almost as big as Fenton, and he had much the same look about him--the look of a man aged in some ways beyond his years, but with a curiously unlined face, and the almost boyish aspect that seems to hover until late in life about big, ruggedly built men with beat-up features who never take the trouble to comb their hair. "What is it, Gallison?" Fenton asked, and then the words themselves penetrated, and he rose from his desk, a look of stunned disbelief in his eyes. "Is it Willard you're talking about?" "Who else?" Gallison said, coming into the office and sitting down opposite Fenton in a chair that was two sizes too small for him. "He came in and gave himself up. He said he knew we'd found the letters, and it would only be prolonging the agony for him to hide out in a furnished room somewhere and live in fear until we closed in on him. He thought of heading north into Canada, or south into Mexico, and even of hopping a freighter to South America. That's what he said, believe it or not. I'm practically quoting his exact words." "Well, what made him change his mind? We've had such a tough job tracing him he could have gotten all the way to Brazil by this time. If you're going to tell me he was afraid the Brazilian non-extradition policy doesn't cover murder ... skip it. I'm not in a very humorous mood right now."