The Daily Alaska empire., 1934-06-19

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 aroused HnrDer's suspicion.
 Chaptei B
 HARPER's THEORY
 FTERwARo. Dufresne's alibi A was so confoundedly air-tight that 1t annoyed me" Harper contin ued. But how to get around 1t? 1 had that idea in mind when l left here right after the discovery of the bodies and dashed back to the Aus. terlitz-but there he was. dead drunk. and our own men on guard" He shook his head. That's a tough nut to crack. 1 guess ve'll have to look elsewhere for the mur derer. There are two vital questions we'll have to answer before we can pin it on anybody The first one is. Who is the dead man? Certainly the man lived somewhere. ate his meals somewhere. bought things. and met people to some degree. You can't live in any city without some per sonal contacts.
 "The second question is. How did the murderer escape from this house without leaving tracks in the snow? Each is vital question and we've got to supply the answers" "The newspapers will help us es- tablish his identity" Laffert preph- esied. With all the publicity we're getting. something Is bound to come out. But the question of the escape through the snow we'll have to solve ourselves. Do you suppose we could possibly be wrong about that? Maybe the murderer hid and didn't leave until later"
 Harper smoked in silence. "lt's got me guessing, but I'm convinced it was done. That's where the mur- derer showed his devilish ingenuity, picking his time and arranging the circumstances so that 1t was nearly impossible that his presence at the scene of the crime should even be suspected. We've been over every inch of the house half a dozen times. No hiding-place for anything larger than cat has escaped attention. Add to this the presence of the Du- fresnes, the Croydens, the servants, and you see how impossible 1t would be for an outsider to escape notice. "l can't conceive of one outsider coming into this house to meet and kill another outsider. That wouldn't be reasonable. If you take that line you've got to explain why any one in this household should be moved to cover up the evidence, as this hiding of the gun proves. A
 "No. every indication points to the murderer as being among those present. There's some trick to that escape and we've got to fathom 1t. We know from the evidence in hand that there were previous meetings in this room between some one from this house and our man of mystery. The killing was carefully planned, with every detail worked out in ad- vance,"
 You think the snowstorm was ar ranged for by the killer?" Lafferty davnapdol fo
 "T THINK the presence of snow was l essential to the whole scheme" Harper replied, seriously. Assume there was some guilty relationship between the person who met here. say. blackmailer and his victim. The killer has determined on mur- der as the only way out. But that murder must be made to look like suicide.
 'Fol' the past three days the Weather Bureau has been reporting a blizzard sweeping the Middle West and warning that we were sure to catch the tail of it. The killer saw the big chance. A completely de- tached and unoccupied house, with snow all around it. and no prints in the snow. That person had forty eight hours to figure out way to turn that unmarked snow into an unassailable alibi."
 H-
 Harper tapped down the ashes in his pipe. By the way. you haven [ said word about your check-up in the nearby houses. suppose it was a wash-out?"
 Lafferty nodded disgustingly. 'I couldn't gather two cents worth of evidence" he growled.
 Did you cover all the houses?"
 "Every one in this block. both sides of the street. and the three nearest the back of this house."
 Harper stirred restlessly. Every thing hinges on that getaway. Until we can discover that our story will not be fully credited. What hap pened here last night is almost as plain to me as though had been hiding behind the door. The trouble is that the murderer's face is just a blank and almost any one of our