“I’ll wait with you. Listen to me. When you talk to Karen, tell her that I need the gray canvas bag on the shelf of the bedroom closet. She’s to put it in a shopping bag and carry it in her lap on the flight down. I’ll take it as soon as she gets off the plane.”

“What is it?”

“My gun. It was our Dr. Roberts who broke into MacIver’s office.”

Leland took Mike out to MacIver’s car.

“MacIver’s death was reported in the newspapers, it’s true. Anyone could have gone for the office, but there were other break-ins done by the same person at the same time. Little things were taken. The real guys don’t take little things; they have to make it worth their while. So it was a psycho, teen-agers, or someone trying to do something. A psycho is out simply because the odds are against him. Kids make a mess, but the man I spoke to didn’t say that. He didn’t take the thing in stride. We do have knowledge that there was something of value in the office that morning. Norma told me that she went down there because she hadn’t been able to sleep. Of course she didn’t tell anyone—anyone. No one knew that the office would be empty. Okay?”

“I suppose.”

“We don’t know for certain, but it would seem from the evidence that none of the people in Rainbow would have known of MacIver’s coded books. But suppose someone became afraid of what would happen to the things MacIver had a right to have—the letters, the documents. So that someone broke in, found the office empty, broke into other offices to cover what he had done. If you were afraid of those papers, would you have stopped there? You would have found out what had happened to them. Suppose for a moment that Wendell Roberts is in this up to his eyeballs. Our anxious party learns from Roberts where the papers are. No one I talked to was contacted, by the way, and the management of the building would have reported that kind of contact to the police. We would know about it. A man anxious enough to break into a number of offices doesn’t take the word of a man in Roberts’ position—look at the deceit of it—that the papers are safe in the crawl space of a garage. He goes after them. That didn’t happen. So at the end of it you have a man who suddenly became immensely confident. He didn’t have the papers. He had to have something. There is only one thing left—a working knowledge of the woman who did have the papers.