Are You Afraid Of The Dark   ::   Sheldon Sidney

Secretary General Renaud said sourly, "So you and Detective Marais were unable to get any information about how a man was murdered in an areait would be impossible for him to be in, in the first place, and impossible for his assassins to get to or escape from? Is that what you're telling me?" "Marais and I talked to everyone who-" "Never mind. You may go." Yes, sir.

They watched the chastened detective walk out of the room.

Secretary General Renaud turned to the group. "During your investigations, have any one of you come across a man named Prima?" They were thoughtful a moment and then shook their heads. "No. Who is Prima?" "We don't know. His name was scribbled on a note found in the jacket pocket of a dead man in New York. We think there's a connection." He sighed. "Gentlemen, we have a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. In the fifteen years I have been in this office, we have investigated serial killers, international gangs, mayhem, patricide, and every other crime imaginable." He paused. "But in all those years, I have never come across anything like this. I am sending a NOTICE to the New York office…"

* * *



FRANK BIGLEY, CHIEF of Manhattan detectives, was reading the file Secretary General Renaud had sent when Earl Greenburg and Robert Praegitzer entered his office.

"You wanted to see us, Chief?"

"Yes. Sit down."

They each took a chair.

Chief Bigley held up the paper. "This is a NOTICE that Interpol sent this morning." He started reading. "Six years ago, a Japanese scientist named Akira Iso committed suicide, hanging himself in his hotel room in Tokyo. Mr. Iso was in perfect health, had just received a promotion, and was reported to be in high spirits." "Japan? What does that have to do with-?" "Let me go on. Three years ago, Madeleine Smith, a thirty-two-year-old Swiss scientist, turned on the gas in her Zurich apartment and committed suicide. She was pregnant and about to marry the father of her baby. Friends said they'd never seen her happier." He looked up at the two detectives. "In the past three days: a Berliner named Sonja Verbrugge drowned herself in her bathtub. The same night Mark Harris, an American, did a swan dive off the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower. A day later, a Canadian named Gary Reynolds crashed his Cessna into a mountain near Denver." Greenburg and Praegitzer were listening, more and more puzzled.

"And yesterday, you two found the body of Richard Stevens on the bank of the East River." Earl Greenburg was looking at him, perplexed. "What do all these cases have to do with us?" Chief Bigley said quietly, "They're all the same case." Greenburg was staring at him. "What? Let me see if I have this right.