d let him off. When you _know_
someone's innocent you can't realize that others won't know it too, I
suppose. But when I learned he'd been found guilty and actually
condemned to die ... well, I know it sounds noble and all that but I
couldn't let him go to his death for something I'd done. Surely such a
thing has happened before in your experience, Lieutenant."

He watched as she drew smoke from the cigarette deeply into her lungs
and let it flow out in twin streamers from her nostrils. Only rich men,
he thought, could afford a woman like this, and somehow it made him
resentful. What right did she have to walk in here and flaunt a body
like that in his face? She went with mink stoles and cabin cruisers and
cocktails at the Sherry-Netherland, and her shoe bill would exceed his
yearly salary. She would be competent and more than a little cynical and
not too concerned with morals or the lack of them. That kind of woman
could kill--and would kill, on the spur of the moment and if the
provocation was strong enough.

"Well, Lieutenant?" She said it lightly, almost with disinterest.

Then Kirk was all right again, and he was looking at a woman who had
just confessed to murder.

"You heard the phone call I made a moment ago, Miss North. Two men from
the Crime Lab are already on their way to the University. If they find
your fingerprints inside that closet, if they can turn up _anything_ to
prove you've been in Gregory Gilmore's laboratory, then you and that
evidence and your confession get turned over to the D. A. and Paul
Cordell will be on his way to freedom."

"And if those men don't find anything?"

"Then," he told her rudely, "you're just another crackpot and I'm
tossing you _and_ your phony confession out of here."

* * * * *

They found the fingerprints: several perfect ones on the inner door of
the laboratory coat closet. But even more conclusive was their discovery
of a short length of polished metal pipe among the dismantled parts of a
Clayton centrifuge. At one end of the pipe were the imprints of four
fingertips--at the other a microscopic trace of human blood.

"We had no business missing it the first time, Lieutenant," the Crime
Laboratory technician told Kirk ruefully. "I'd a sworn we pulled that
place apart last month. But this time we got the murder weapon and we
got the prints--and those prints match the ones we took off that blonde.
Hey, how about that, Lieutenant? I t