The song Preston Whiteway had commissioned had marched across the country like an invading army. No matter where Harry Frost fled, it was impossible to escape the tune, banged out by saloon piano players, rattling from gramophones, hummed by men and women in the street, storming through his skull like a steam calliope.

Up, up . . . higher . . . The moon is on fire . . . Josephine . . . Goodbye!

Good-bye, it would be. Red-faced with rage, Harry Frost strode out of the terminal. Not only had Josephine betrayed their marriage, not only had Celere betrayed the trust that had suckered him into investing thousands in his inventions, now they had made him a fugitive.

He had consulted lawyers secretly. Every single one warned that if it ever went to trial, a conviction for a second murder charge would be a catastrophe. His wealth would not help a second time around. His political connections, the best money could buy, would disappear when the newspapers whipped his “day in court” into a Roman circus. When he cornered a New York Court of Appeals judge in his mistress’s Park Avenue apartment, the man had told Frost flat out that his only hope of escaping the hangman would be to rot the rest of his life in the insane asylum.

But capturing him would not be easy, they would discover. He had lived like a hermit since he was released from Matawan. Even before, his face had never been well known to the public. That “Newsstand King” stuff was confined to the business. Average citizens, like those leading the rush out of the terminal toward the Belmont grandstand, had never seen his picture.

Besides, he smiled, stroking the full beard and mustache he had grown, now he himself saw a stranger in the mirror. The beard had made him look twenty years older by growing in surprisingly gray compared to his heavy crown of black hair, which had barely begun to be salt-and-peppered. Eyeglasses with the lenses tinted in the European way made him look a little like a German professor. Although wearing his flat sportsman’s cap, he might even pass himself off as an Irish writer.

His only fear was that his bulk would give him away. The middle-aged professor in the beard and tinted glasses filled as much space as the Newsstand King. More, even, because his dark sack suit was a veritable tent of loosely cut wool, deliberately chosen to conceal his weapons and “bulletproof” vest. He had no intention of being stopped from killing Josephine, much less locked up for murdering a woman who deserved it. His firearms included a highly accurate Browning pistol for covering his escape, a pocket pistol and derringer for emergencies, and a powerful Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver. He had sawed four inches off the barrel to hide it in his pocket and loaded it with the “man-stopper” hollow-point expanding bullets.