Murder on Ice (16 page)

That's where I stopped, slipped on my snowshoes, and tramped back, keeping off the center of the road although the light on the bridge was so obscured by flying snow that nobody could have seen me from the Tavern. The side door was locked, but this is a small town. Irv Whiteside once showed me where he kept the key, in a coffee can under one of the beams that supports the side of the Tavern on pilings over the water. I think he left it there in case any friends want liquor. They took what they wanted and paid him on Monday when he opened again. That way he wasn't bootlegging—they were breaking in.

I took the key and opened the side door, very softly. My snowshoes were propped outside in a drift. It's an old building and it creaks in the wind. I hoped the wind would cover the sound of my entrance. There is another door sealing off the inside so that my entrance wouldn't be announced by a blast of cold snowy air.

I went up the stairs. I knew Irv had a couple of rooms he rented, two he used for himself. I tried his room first. It was locked, of course, but the simple Yale slipped in a moment to my knife blade. I squatted low to the floor and shone my flashlight around. The room was neat. There was a TV set and some comfortable furniture, including a double bed, but nothing more. The adjacent room was filled with stores, mostly liquor. I went back out, locking the door again.

The next door was also locked and I went through the same procedure. A quick search showed it was the room occupied by Nancy's parents. It was empty except for their clothes and toiletries.

As I touched the third door I heard a low sound inside, muffled, half scream, half burble. It made the hair prickle on the back of my neck. It sounded as if someone had a woman held hostage, one hand over her mouth, the other very probably holding a gun that would be pointed at the door. I stood to one side of the door frame as I slipped the lock with my left hand, eased the door open with my right. When I had it open a millimeter past the catch point I drew my gun and hurled myself inside, rolling away from the door as I landed. I collided with the end of the bed, but not hard enough to bother me. I lay perfectly still for a half second. The sound persisted but there was no scuffling of feet, nothing to indicate a struggle, only the squeaking and rocking of the bedstead against my shoulder.

I crouched, moving a pace to the left and holding my flashlight over my head at what must have looked like chest height. Nobody fired at me. I flashed it over the bed. In the beam I saw the shifting pattern on the bed, white flesh and black shadows writhing like snakes. I scuttled around the bed and into the bathroom. There was nobody there. Only then did I come back into the bedroom, still wary, and switch on the light.

Nancy Carmichael was tied to the wooden bedstead. She was naked and spread-eagled, her ankles and wrists tied to the corners. She had a scarf around her head, the folded thickness of it jammed into her open mouth. Her eyes were rolled toward me like those of a frightened horse. I went to the bed and patted her ankle. "I'll be back, I have to search the place."

She moaned again. I could read the anguish but I had to be sure there was nobody downstairs, and I believed there was. There had been no tracks away from the building.

I turned off the light so I wouldn't be silhouetted, then advanced, gun drawn, to the head of the stairs. I was crouching automatically, as I've crouched a thousand times in enemy areas.

It saved my life again. As I reached the top of the stairs a bullet came out of the darkness, an inch high over my head instead of through my throat. I fired at once down the muzzle flash, then again, lower, not even stopping to think.

I heard the rushing collapse of a falling body and the clatter of a dropped gun. I fell to the floor and held my light above me, shining it down the stairs.

The first thing I saw were feet. Then the foreshortened length of a man's body lying head down on the staircase. I could see nothing moving beyond. It didn't mean he was alone. I stood up, still crouching carefully, and ran down the stairs. There was a handgun, some kind of automatic, lying beside the body. I booted it away but did not stop until I was through the doorway at the bottom and had rolled sideways against the bar.

I crouched, listening. The only sound was the creaking of the building under the northeast wind and the sand-storm rustle of the tiny brittle snowflakes against the windows. I switched on my flashlight and flicked it over the room. It seemed empty. Moving carefully, I went back to the doorway and found the light switch.

The lights fluttered for a moment, then settled down, and I could see that the place was empty. Gun in hand, I searched the rest of the lower level. It was deserted. There was a bottle on the counter and a half-filled glass. I looked at it in disbelief. My gunman had been relaxing over a glass of Bailey's Irish Cream. Jesus! They don't make hoodlums like they used to. He was trained enough or scared enough to keep the lights off so nobody could see him in the bar. Perhaps he had been expecting me. Well. Now we'd met.

I went back to him, first switching on the stairway light. He was lying as I had left him. One bullet had caught him through the chest. That must have been my first shot at the muzzle flash. The second had hit him in the left eye. He had no pulse in his throat. I had closed off any chance of getting information from him, even though he might have been as useless as Elliot back at the other cottage with the C.L.A.W. women.

I picked up his handgun. It was a Walther P.38. I slipped it into my pocket and went back to Nancy's room. As I entered and switched on the light she squirmed with fear, then relaxed as she recognized me. I took out my pocket knife and cut the scarf from her mouth. Words poured out of her instantly. "Did you shoot him? Did you?"

"He's dead, Nancy." I cut the two belts that held her wrists to the bedposts, then the stockings that tied her ankles. She sat up, sobbing. "It was awful. Gross."

"Did he molest you sexually?"

She put her hands over her pretty mouth, pressing her lips against her teeth, speaking through clenched fingers. "He raped me. He made me … do things. It was terrible." She ran out of words and sobbed helplessly.

"Come to the bathroom." I handed her a blanket and she stumbled to her feet and came with me, tugging the blanket around her shoulders. I took a handful of tissues from the dispenser. "Wipe your mouth out with these." She did it, not looking at me, not knowing what I was doing, then hunched over the sink and vomited dry bile. I handed her a bottle of Scope. "Use this." While she was busy I folded the tissues she had given me and put them in my tunic pocket. Her blanket had slipped but she did not care. I wasn't a man. I was an act of God, blind as the snowstorm that raged around the Tavern, keeping me from driving her fifty miles to the nearest hospital and the help she needed.

When she had gargled and spat a couple of times she straightened up and looked at me. I told her, "It's important that you wipe yourself inside and save the tissues. Can you do that for me?"

She looked at me blankly, not replying, but I handed her more tissues, then closed the door and waited. I had never felt so inadequate in all my life. She needed a doctor to check her, a woman to comfort her. I was neither. I was a rough-and-ready copper trying to compensate for the crime and the criminal ugliness of the weather.

I looked around the room for something to put the swabs into. Without going through her luggage there was nothing obvious. I called through the door, "Save the swab. I'm going downstairs," and I went down, stepping over the body without looking down at it.

I searched the place again from end to end to make sure there was nobody hiding in a beer cooler or behind empty crates. When I was sure, I went to the bar and took down the Black Velvet. It had never tasted better. The purity of the taste thrilled me and it went down like soft fire, spreading out through my whole body. Then I picked up some foil wrap from the kitchen and went back up.

She answered nervously when I knocked. "Who is it?"

"Chief Bennett."

She opened the door for me and stood back, not speaking.

She was wearing the bottom half of a brown pants suit and a white brassiere. I said, "I'll wait outside while you dress," but she shook her head silently so I picked up the swab she had left on the dresser and wrapped it in some of the foil. Then I took out the other and wrapped it. The move was probably unnecessary. The guy on the stairs was most likely the culprit. But if he weren't, we would need this evidence when I brought the guy in, and I intended to. Rape is the worst crime in the book, for my money. I asked her, "Do you have a lipstick I can borrow?"

She looked at me in surprise, wondering if she had heard right, and I tried a tiny laugh to let her know that the world was still rotating on its axis despite what had happened to her tonight.

"Not for me—I doubt you have my shade. I just want to mark these."

She said, "Oh," in a faint voice, and looked in her purse. The lipstick was very pale but it marked on the foil. I marked the appropriate one "Oral" and put both in my breast pocket.

She was fully dressed by now, in a fawn sweater and the jacket of her pants suit. I sat down on the bed and gestured for her to take the chair. She did, and I told her what had to happen.

"You can't stay here alone. What I'm proposing is that I take you back to the station. There's a policewoman there and you'll be safe until your parents get there. I guess they're still at the dance."

She began to weep silently, only the movement of her shoulders giving away what was happening. I stood up and squeezed her shoulder. "It's all over. You're going to be okay. Tomorrow morning, soon as the snow is cleared, your folks will take you to the hospital in Sunbridge. If they prefer they can ship you right down to Toronto on one of your dad's helicopters."

She snuffled quietly and I told her, "First off, you'll need your outdoor clothes. I've got a snowmobile just up the road. It's cold outside."

She stood up automatically and looked for her boots. They were lying beside the bed. So were her other clothes—blue jeans, the Irish sweater, and her underwear. The panties were torn. I picked them up and put them in my pocket with the swabs. More evidence. She watched me without speaking. I didn't like that. She was in shock and I didn't want her going catatonic on me. I was glad Val would be waiting at the station.

"Get your coat and we'll go." Her coat was on the back of the door on a hanger. It was raccoon, but made from lush pelts sewn in a chevron pattern. It was as expensive as most mink coats but without the pretension.

"That's good. You'll be snug in that. Put a scarf over your head and we'll go."

She came out of the room and I locked it. Anyone who chose could slip the lock in a moment as I had, but it was the closest I could come to sealing the crime scene for forensic investigation later. Nancy was taller in her boots, but frail-seeming and timid. I took her by the elbow and checked her for a moment.

"Nancy, the man I shot is lying on the stairs. He can't hurt you any more, so don't be afraid. I'll take your arm. When we get to him, tell me if he was the guy who assaulted you."

She looked at me wide-eyed, as if I were speaking a foreign language. I gave her a little nod. "Come on, now, be brave." I held her elbow and walked one step ahead of her down the stairs to the body. When we reached it I asked her, "Is he the one?"

She burst into tears, nodding her head over and over, wordlessly.

"Then he got what he deserved," I said. "Come on." We negotiated the rest of the stairs and she spoke angrily through her tears, like a child who has been wrongly scolded.

"I'd never done it with anybody before. I was a virgin."

I patted her arm. "You still are. Nobody in the world knows your secret. He's dead and the bad news died with him."

It wasn't true, but it was the best thing to say even though just telling her made me feel dirty and unshaven and uncouth. I felt the old familiar disgust growing within me. I wanted this to be over. The other member of the Guard group could go to hell for all I cared. I wanted to be in the station with Val until sanity came flooding back with the morning daylight and we could turn over Tom's description to other people and go away and rediscover the fact that gentleness still exists in the world.

Outside, the snow was still whirling and Nancy gasped as the chill hit her face. Fortified with Black Velvet and adrenalin, I didn't even notice it. I picked up my snowshoes but did not put them on. Shoulder to shoulder with Nancy, I struggled through the drifted snow to my machine. I had one bare hand on the gun in my pocket, ready to shoot if anybody fired on us, but nobody did.

I started the machine and sat on it, wearily, instead of kneeling. Nancy sat behind me, hanging on tight enough to break my heart.

I took us slowly up the road to the station. It was hard to tell, with the snow that had fallen nonstop for the last six hours, but it seemed to me that there was a skidoo trail there, that the surface had been broken in the last hour or so. I wondered if somebody had talked his way out of the Legion and headed home on his skidoo. I hoped that was it. Tom was still out somewhere, a potential for trouble, and I didn't want any more. Outnumbered and outgunned I had found Nancy, and now I wanted to wait till morning before I did any more police work. I wouldn't be able to go home to bed, but I could doze at the station.

The wind had shifted and reshaped the snowdrift beside the back door of the police station, laying it longer and lower so that I was able to pull up close to the door that led to the cells. I felt uneasy. There were definite tracks here, more recent-looking than my own. I felt my heart bump a couple of times rhythmically. Maybe I was just tired. I'd been shot at three times, had someone try to frag me, and found a rape victim. My adrenalin was running like maple sap in February.

In the silence that followed my stopping the machine I heard Sam barking inside the station. That relieved me. Whatever else happened, Val was safe. Sam could bring down any man with any weapon he could hold. I tapped Nancy on the shoulder and she followed me over the last six feet to the door. Then I whistled once, a short clear note, and Sam stopped barking. The door was locked and nobody came to open it, but that made sense. I had told Val to stay inside and she was taking no chances. I fumbled for the key and opened up, stepping in first. It's not gallant but it's sense. It put me in the firing line, if any—that's what I was paid for. Nancy wasn't.