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A woh-pitched and panicked, filled the silence that followed A hidden catch inside the suitcase that Bell hadn’t shot through clicked open and a woht black bodysuit of elastic chiffon clihtly that the mind rejected the very idea that soence had aAs Bell had h Had she not been an aed the contortions needed to stoay inside the bag

Latang made for the door while the police officers were distracted, but then he realized Bell wasn’t paying her the slightest attention He had anticipated this and so was ever vigilant The gun’s aiician’s eyes

The young woman was barely five feet tall and rail thin, with pretty blond hair and a pleasant face, though once she’d gathered her wits, anger flushed her cheeks She suddenly leapt across the roo speed and slapped Isaac Bell across the face

“You could have killed me,” she said in a thick Cockney accent “You should be arrested for attempted murder”

She tried to slap hiain, but Bell deflected the shot adroitly And once the contortionist was off balance, her craht and she fell to the floor She started sobbing

“How in the devil?”

Bell holstered his 45 McCallister hadwhile his partner readied a pair of handcuffs

Bell said, “I figured early on that the thefts were done by soet a look at any of the luggage that had been removed, I was forced to rely on clerks’ enerally unreliable Still, it seemed there were few man-sized steamer trunks recalled, so I deduced it was an insidewoman on the floor—“or lady, as it turns out, as either a child or a contortionist That is what prompted me to check if any circuses had been in the area of the crimes and, lo and behold, I discover the Fraunhofer & Fraunhofer Circus had been near them all”

The detective turned his attention to the seething“When I watched your performance, I was particularly interested in any tricks you did involving boxes, placing someone in them atop a table You had an illusion where you saw a lady in half, but your variation was to cut off a leg first Your regular assistant was the woman who initially stepped into the coffin-sized box in front of the entire audience All could plainly see she had the proper number of limbs When you first raised that curtain for a moment, she slipped out the bottom and her twin”—he pointed to the wo foot prosthesis through one hole in the bottoh the other

“Then you used your saw to hack off one leg and allow the box surrounding it to fall to the floor I noted that the fake foot was kept pointed away fro to heighten the effect While you were distracting the audience by flailing the saws around and shielding the bottoed the hole with a second, fake leg, and curled her body into the top portion of the box with her head still exposed You cut the box in half even higher up than the leg cut, and the audience believes you’ve just saoman into three pieces

“Then it’s a si the sisters switching places under the table, and, presto, you are Rudolfo the Magnificent”

“And you figured this all out by watching his act once?” Northrop was duly impressed

“I kno the standard illusion is played out This variation was an intriguing one, but there was only one possible explanation for how it could be executed Since Latang didn’t reically reattach it, it must not have been there in the first place And since I saw the assistant step into the box on her oo shapely legs, there had to be a second person with only one leg Confirether to help dismantle the circus venue One walked perfectly normal, the other with a severe limp

“After that, I followed Latang I was actually in line at another postal branch when he shipped these trunks here I ed to chalk an X on the one he hadn’t double-checked that he had the key for That’s how I knew to

shoot the other one”