"He wrote a letter purporting to be a threat from the Invisible Master, a demand for a hundred thousand dollars, and mailed it at a time calculated to bring it to their office before noon on the next day. They were settling their accounts, the letter was opened and brought by their excited secretary, and Allen led them in laughing it down. When the hour of eleven came, though, the hour specified in the threat, Allen rose and walked behind his three partners, who were bent over the accounts. Three shots sent quick bullets crashing into their skulls, from behind, and another shot a bullet into the opposite wall. Allen leaped back to that wall, pocketing the gun, and when the others who had heard rushed into the room they found him standing by the bullet-pierced wall, apparently overcome with horror. There was the threatening letter lying on the table, and none doubted for a moment but that the Invisible Master had carried out his threat and had slain three of the partners but had been forced to flee before he could kill the fourth or snatch any of the securities on the table. The Three Crimes "Thus three crimes had been committed that every soul in the city believed implicitly had been committed by the Invisible Master! For the obsession of his presence had been spread so that all believed him roaming its ways, and no suspicion fell on Harkness or Taylor or Allen because in the ordinary course of things they would never have committed crimes which would be blamed so swiftly and inevitably upon them. What all forgot was that the ordinary course of things had been changed, and that the three had in each case counted, and counted correctly, upon the Invisible Master obsession turning away all suspicion from themselves toward the unseen criminal. As it happened, I ordered the usual routine investigation of Harkness in the first crime, though not for a moment believing him guilty, so strong was my own belief in the Invisible Master. But it was that bit of routine that shattered the whole great scheme in the end. "As it was, though, Grantham had achieved his third great step, and all New York was in panic from the crimes which it believed the Invisible Master had committed. And Grantham himself had not needed to be concerned with a single one of those crimes! He had needed only to sit back, knowing that as surely as human nature was human nature, crime after crime would be committed by those who would blame it on the Invisible Master, and that those crimes would as surely raise up a greater and greater terror for the Invisible Master's name! If it had not been Harkness and Taylor and Allen, it would have been others!