For an instant the tip of her tongue darted along the quivering, scarlet gash of her mouth, but the rest of her face remained expressionless. Her eyes had gone completely blank. It was as if tiny, weighted curtains, iris-colored, had dropped across her pupils, obliterating their gleam, making both eyes look opaque. For five full seconds she remained in an upright position behind the desk, her back held rigid. A barely perceptible quivering of her shoulders and a spasmodic twitching of her right hand gave her the look, if only for an instant, of a strong-willed woman shaken by a fit of ungovernable rage and still capable of commanding the intruder to depart. Then her shoulders sagged and she shuddered convulsively and fell forward across the desk, her head striking the desktop with such force that it sent an ashtray crashing to the floor. An explosive sound came out of her mouth, and her body jerked and quivered again, but less violently, and after that she did not move. The door opened and closed, with a barely audible click. Chapter II The clicking of typewriters in two of the offices almost drowned out the sound of the shot. It was just a faint _zing_, with a released-pressure kind of vibrancy about it. A ping-pong ball striking a metal screen might have produced such a sound. It was strange and unusual enough to make Lynn Prentiss look up from the manuscript she was reading and wrinkle her brow. If a fly had alighted on her cheek she might have paused in much the same way, startled, incredulous--asking herself if it really could be a fly. A fly in an air-conditioned office, with all of the windows shut? The _zing_ puzzled and disturbed her more than a fly would have done, because the mystery could not be instantly solved with a quick flick of her thumb. The angry impatience, the annoyance with trifles which she had been experiencing all morning--an impatience which hours of manuscript reading had done nothing to alleviate--turned even so trivial an unsolved mystery into an infringement on her right to work undisturbed. She blew a thin strand of red-gold hair back from her forehead, and sat for an instant drumming her fingers on the desktop. Then her woman's curiosity got the better of her. She arose quickly, piled the unread manuscripts on top of the blue-penciled ones and strode out of the office. The clicking of the battered typewriter in the office adjacent to her own stopped abruptly and Jim Macklin, his collar loosened and his tie awry, called out to her. "When you get through taking out commas, Monroe, there's something here you can help me with. Or maybe you should be more of the Bardot type. With that sweater you're wearing, it's hard to tell."