"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 016 - The Ghost Makers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

It was the last response of the strange mockery that had preceded this frightful scene! No one knew from
whence it came. In the midst of that eerie sound, the medium's bulging eyes swept everywhere. His
struggle stopped as he sought the source of those jeering tones.

He could see no one laughing. Only wild, white faces were in view. They were faces of the startled
sitters. As before, these people were obsessed by fear.

From face to face, the medium glared, forgetful of the dead man on the floor, seeking only that hawklike
visage that he feared.

But the search was in vain. The man with the firm, unyielding eyes was gone. All that remained to tell of
his strange presence was the memory of a weird, sardonic laugh. A laugh so horrible that no one could
believe had come from human lips.

It was like the laugh of a ghost. A mockery so grotesque that only a being from another world could utter
it. An unearthly tone that even the cringing, faking medium believed had come from spirit lips.

Like the laugh of a ghost it had come; like a ghost, it had returned. A man had vanished with it, as though
he, too, belonged in some unknown realm of the universe.

Yet that laugh, ghostly though it had seemed, had come from human lips.
It was the laugh of The Shadow!

CHAPTER II. SPOOK OR SHADOW
MURDERED by a ghost!

Of all the strange deaths that Detective Joe Cardona had investigated, the case of Herbert Harvey,
stabbed to the heart with a keen-bladed knife, was the most mysterious.

To the ace of New York detectives, summoned to the seance room within half an hour after the murder,
the situation presented baffling angles that afforded no tangible solution.

After a night of witness quizzing, after an exhaustive search for clews, Cardona was back to the point
from which he started.

In the morning, the detective was summoned to the office of Police Commissioner Ralph Weston. This, in
itself, was sufficient to arouse Cardona's apprehensions. The police commissioner, despite his fastidious
tastes, was a keen analyst of crime.

Weston relied on Cardona, but he had a habit of criticizing the detective's pet theories on those rare
occasions when he and Cardona went into consultation.

Joe Cardona was a man inured to criticism; with most persons he was quick with a keen retort. But
Weston played on the detective's weaknesses.

Now, as Cardona approached the office, he felt that he was due to encounter a barrage of well-founded
disapproval.

Commissioner Weston, well-groomed and leisurely, smiled in friendly fashion when Cardona was
ushered into the office. The detective knew that lulling smile. He was not deceived by it.