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Coroner Stapleton was rising to his feet. “Gentlemen of the Jury,” the Coroner was saying, “you have heard the proceedings of this inqu—”
    Ellery leaped to his feet. Stapleton stopped to look around, annoyed at the interruption. “Yes, Mr. Queen? You’re interfering with the business of the—”
    “One moment, Mr. Stapleton,” said Ellery quickly, “before you address the Coroner’s jury. There is in my possession a fact which it seems to me is pertinent to your inquiry.”
    “What’s that?” cried District Attorney Crumit, starting from his seat. “A new fact?”
    “Not a new fact, Mr. District Attorney,” replied Ellery, smiling. “A very old one. More ancient than the Christian religion.”
    “Here,” said Coroner Stapleton—the audience was craning and whispering, and the jury had risen from their seats to stare at this unexpected witness—“what are you getting at, Mr. Queen? What’s the Christian religion got to do with it?”
    “Nothing—I hope.” Ellery leveled his pince-nez at the Coroner. “The most significant feature of this horrible crime,” he said severely, “if I may, be permitted to say so, has not been touched upon at all in this inquest. I refer to the fact that the murderer, whoever he was, deliberately went out of his way to plaster the letter or symbol T around the scene of his crime. The T shape of the crossroads. The T shape of the signpost. The T shape of the corpse. The T scrawled in blood on the victim’s front door. All these things have been commented upon in the press—and rightly so.”
    “Yes, yes,” interrupted District Attorney Crumit with a sneer, “we know all that. Where’s your fact, though?”
    “Here.” Ellery stared at him hard, and Crumit flushed and sat down. “I fail to see the connection—I confess to complete bewilderment—but do you know that the symbol T may quite possibly not refer to the alphabet at all?”
    “What do you mean, Mr. Queen?” asked Coroner Stapleton anxiously.
    “I mean that the symbol T has a religious significance.”
    “Religious significance?” repeated Stapleton.
    A portly old gentleman wearing a clerical collar rose from the thick of the audience. “If I may make so bold,” he said sharply, “to interrupt the learned speaker—I am a minister of the gospel, and I have never heard of a religious significance embodied in the symbol T!”
    Some one cried: “That’s tellin’ him, Parson!” and the minister blushed and sat down.
    Ellery smiled. “If I may contradict the learned dominie, its significance is this: There is one cross among the many religious symbols which takes the shape of a T. It is called the tau cross, or crux commissa.”
    The minister started from his seat. “Yes,” he cried, “That’s true. But it isn’t originally a Christian cross, sir. It was a pagan sign!”
    Ellery chuckled. “Exactly, sir. And wasn’t the Greek cross in use by pre-Christian peoples for centuries before the Christian era? The tau antedates the familiar Greek cross by many hundreds of years. It’s thought by some to have been a phallic symbol in origin. … But the point is this.”
    They waited in bated silence as he paused and drew a breath. Then he leveled his pince-nez at the Coroner again and said crisply: “The tau, or T, cross is not its only name. It is sometimes called”—he paused, and concluded quietly—“the Egyptian cross!”

PART TWO
Crucifixion of a Millionaire
    “When a crime is committed by a nonhabitual criminal, that is the time for the policeman to watch out. None of the rules he has learned will apply, and the information he has amassed through years of studying the underworld becomes so much dead wood.”
    —Danilo Rieka

3. Professor Yardley
    A ND THAT WAS ALL. Extraordinary, incredible—but it died there. The cryptic connection which Ellery Queen pointed out to the Weirton populace deepened rather than lightened the mystery. As for himself, he could see no solution. He