Page:Arthur B Reeve - The Dream Doctor.djvu/200

 police, whose pictures are, many of them, in the Rogues' Gallery, whose careers and haunts are known to every probation officer. They are getting away with loot that means for them a sumptuous living."

"Of course we are not up against the same sort of swindlers that you are," put in Bentley, "but let me tell you that when the big jewelers do get up against anything of the sort they are up against it hard."

"Have you any idea who it could be?" asked Kennedy, who had been following the discussion keenly.

"Well, some idea," spoke up Donnelly. "From what Bentley says I wouldn't be surprised to find that it was the same person in both cases. Of course you know how rushed all the stores are just now. It is much easier for these light-fingered individuals to operate during the rush than at any other time. In the summer, for instance, there is almost no shoplifting at all. I thought that perhaps we could discover this particular shoplifter by ordinary means, that perhaps some of the clerks in the jewellery department might be able to identify her. We found one who said that he thought he might recognise one of the women if he saw her again. Perhaps you did not know that we have our own little rogues' gallery in most of the big department-stores. But there didn't happen to be anything there that he recognised. So I took him down to Police Headquarters. Through plate after plate of pictures among the shoplifters in the regular Rogues' Gallery the clerk went. At last he came to one picture that caused him to stop. 'That is one of the women I saw in the store that day,' he said. 'I'm sure of it.