TICK, TICK...MURDER!

Strings and puppet

Beautiful, astonishing women who revolved with their uncertainties like satellites about the world of normal beings, trailing their baleful, striking brilliance like an impalpable poisonous gas across the surface of every person whom they plucked and tortured within the intricate enigma of their hearts.

The law never could touch her, nor could a person either. She would escape. She would always escape with the subtlety of mercury slipping between impotent fingers.

For she had escaped. There wasn't any doubt in his mind about that.

She had been the focal point five years ago in that Endicott case, no matter what the law or men might say. Her forgery of that postscript had had a deeper, a more deliberate intention than the mere breaking up of any affair between her husband and Marge Miles.

It was to have been a breaking up of all of his affairs — of him.

She was the true murderer of her husband and not Marge Miles. She had simply spread the powder train to a suitably lethal explosive and had then applied the match. The movements of the others had been nothing more than gyrations performed by stringed puppets, and she had held the strings.

Some of her puppets had died, committed suicide, and been killed, and it didn't matter in the least.

The world was ageless. She herself was ageless, and plenty of puppets grew perennially every spring.

Inspector Valkor wondered as he descended to the curb and prepared to enter the lift to her apartment — where Thomas had become a puppet, too.

The final chime has struck, and the mystery of Murder by the Clock is laid to rest.

Lieutenant Valkor's sharp mind and keen instincts have once again exposed the hidden truths lurking in the shadows.

But in the world of crime and deception, justice is never guaranteed — and time never truly stops.