As he stubbed out his cigarette a maroon Jaguar shot past his car, braked sharply up ahead, and plunged into the driveway just beyond Douglas’s building. Hook settled lower in his car seat, watching the corridor that led to the parking lot. And immediately she came into view, striding rapidly, almost running across the red bricks of the courtyard to the stairway, her long hair flowing out behind her like black fire in the sunlight. She was wearing a white turtleneck sweater and tan suede jacket and brown slacks, and could have passed for one of the girls who pushed the high-priced cars on television. All she lacked was a cougar on a leash. Then abruptly she was gone, already inside the door at the top of the stairs.

Hook lit another cigarette and settled back, waiting. He was smoking too much, he knew, but it did not worry him now. Suddenly none of the old problems mattered, had fallen away much as they did during the hours of an Illinois tornado watch. After five or six minutes she came out again, followed not by Mrs. Rubin but by a man in his mid- or late thirties wearing baggy gray slacks and a tweed sport coat that looked lived in, even slept in. He was shorter than Hook but well built and handsome in a casual, shaggy-haired sort of way. Yet there was nothing casual about him at the moment. He was trying to finish saying something to Miss Madera, but she obviously did not want to stop and hear him out. So he took her by the arm and held her there while he tried to speak his piece. She submitted for a few seconds, nodding impatiently, and then angrily pulled her arm free and went on down the stairs. He leaned over the railing and said something more, but she kept on moving and in a moment disappeared into the corridor leading to the parking lot. The man went back into the office then and slammed the door shut behind him. Hook started the engine of his car and waited.

He arrived at Rider’s third-floor office a few minutes after Miss Madera, and she reacted as he had expected she would, coolly, without the slightest hint of surprise or fear. Rider said a few vague words to the effect that he believed the two of them already knew each other, and then he got right down to business. A couple of new “things” had turned up in the case, he said, and Mr. Hook had flown here from Illinois to discuss them in person. And he, Rider, had thought it would be a good idea if she knew about them also.

“Why not Mrs. Rubin too?” she asked. “After all, she was the one who witnessed the act. Not me.”

“That’s true,” Rider admitted. “But this new information concerns your statement more than hers.”

“Oh? In what way?”

Not answering her for the moment, Rider began to search for something in the litter of papers on his desk. Hook, who was still standing just inside the door of the cramped cell-like office, sidled past both of them to reach a place where there was room enough to sit—on the corner of a table loaded down with bound reports. Miss Madera, in the chair next to Rider’s desk, did not look at him as he moved past her.