Murder on Ice (5 page)

"Go back to the office and wait. Watch to make sure nobody leaves. If they do, check their car number and come and tell me right away. Can you do that? Please?"

She nodded and left. I stood up, leaving the girl lying face up on the floor, my eyes checking everything in the room. Nothing was disturbed. The pile of towels was untouched, the paper flag was across the toilet seat, there were no signs of any struggle. It could have meant that she had rented the room and simply walked in and committed suicide. But I didn't think so.

I bent and examined the mark on the throat. It was as I had guessed. There were two marks. One had been made by something broader than the thin cord of pantyhose used as a ligament for the hanging. To my eye it seemed as if the neck had been crushed by a blow, possibly a classic karate chop. Then, before the body was completely past the point of no return, it had been hung from the shower rail. I was dealing with a murder.

There was nothing else constructive to do in the bathroom. Later, when I had come to the end of the immediate things—the single-handed chasing I would have to do until I found the Carmichael kid—I would come back and spend the necessary hours here. For now I stepped back, checking visually that there were no obvious footprints on the tile.

The bedroom yielded more. Nothing tangible, but I have a jungle-fighter's nose. It had saved my life in Nam. I'd picked up the ammonia smell of sweat on a trail before I turned what would have been my last corner into the ambush. I had hosed down the jungle and killed the man who was waiting to kill me.

Now I was picking up a different scent. It was amplified by the overheated air of the cabin, reaching me even over the human smells from the dead girl in the bathroom and acidity of Val's vomit. It was perfume, the same scent I had noticed in the Toyota. I put my gloves on and opened the dead girl's purse. There was a different perfume inside—"Charlie," a light, almost neuter fragrance, not like the heaviness of the Carmichael girl's performing scent.

There was nothing in the purse to identify the body. No credit cards, no license. I checked the suitcase, there was nothing, not even a monogram on the blouses to indicate who the dead girl was. I took a final look under the bed, finding nothing, then went out, locking the cabin behind me.

In passing I checked the license plates on the station wagon, noting the number. Then I ran to the coffee shop.

Val was sitting with a glass of something dark, rum by the look of it. Fred Wales was standing over her, hands raised as if caught in a strobe light doing some frantic dance. He turned to me when I came in. "Christ, Chief, what's happening?"

"Looks like a homicide, Fred. Give me all the other keys to that cabin and let me use your phone."

I dialed the Ontario Provincial Police detachment to report the murder. The operator told me that the station wagon had also been stolen that morning, from a ski resort close to Orillia. I gave him a description of Nighswander and his address—wanted for questioning—and hung up. Wales brought me all the keys for cabin six and a cup of coffee. I sat and sipped, not talking, trying to work out what to do next. The obvious thing would be to go over the murder scene minutely. That's what any regular department would do because any regular department has men to spare for jobs like that. I don't. If there's a choice between thinking work and hot pursuit, I have to take the pursuit.

I was wondering if the dead girl had been intended as a sacrifice, a gambit to put me off the chase. Maybe she had also been a prospect for dropping out of C.L.A.W. and filling me in with some details. Now she would tell me nothing. But, I resolved, she wouldn't hold me back, either. I would keep on chasing Nancy Carmichael any way I could, tugging at all the leads until they had unraveled or led me to her. This was a bad night for police work, but it was also a bad night for people planning a getaway. If someone had taken the girl away by car, they might be stuck in a ditch right now waiting for a policeman to come by. There was nothing moving but fools, criminals, and coppers.

I left Val finishing her rum and went from door to door along the row of cabins. In four of them, including the truck driver's, I found couples, two of them obvious mismatches, worried that a jealous husband had sent me to check on them. None of them had seen anything. None of them was suspicious. I opened the cabin Nighswander had rented and in it found my only clue. Beside the bed, looking as if it had been dropped in a hurry, lay the top of a swimsuit similar to the one the Carmichael girl had worn at the pageant. It was fragrant with the same perfume.

I phoned the police in Toronto and asked them to stake out Nighswander's home. I also called the doctor in Murphy's Harbour but he wasn't home. Probably he was at the dance. He must have been wearing one of the skinny girl's masks, and after the disappearance, when people took off their masks, I hadn't noticed him. I would have to wait until morning for his assistance at the murder scene.

It still felt wrong. It was all too obvious. If Nighswander had been intending to kill the girl he wouldn't have gotten into that fight earlier, where everyone could see him. And was it him, anyway? I could sense a connection but there was nothing to match him up with the dead girl, only with the one who had disappeared. I sat on the edge of his bed and thought about it for a minute or two but could see nothing brilliant to do. The only thing I knew was that the puzzle was in pieces and the pieces were scattering themselves wider all the time.

I took Val from the coffee shop and drove back to the Legion Hall as fast as I dared on the snowed-in road. It was beginning to get frightening. The road was hidden under eight or ten inches of new snow, up to four feet in the drifts, and my eyes were dazzled with the flakes spiraling down my headlights to crackle against the windshield. Val said nothing. I glanced at her once or twice but she was staring ahead, her lips moving. She might have been praying.

At the Legion, things were getting boisterous. Everyone was committed to staying all night and they were all drinking more than they would have done normally. It was hot and noisy and lively, and the missing girl was a joke. I was glad I'd stayed cool about it. They all thought they were in on a prank. It was easier that way.

People caught at me and tried to talk as I went through to the office where Puckrin was still sitting with his bottle. Val was right behind me.

Walter Puckrin was feeling good. The rye and ginger were working on him and he was enjoying the limelight. "Talkative little devil," he told me jovially. "'Part from telling me to go screw myself, she hasn't said boo."

"Thanks, Walter. It's time to tuck her in for the night." I touched the seated woman on the shoulder. "On your feet, please, I'm taking you to the station."

She looked up at me, not moving, debating what her civil-disobedience friends would have recommended. She decided to ignore me, so I turned away and stooped to pat Sam and give him a quiet little hiss, one of his signals to give tongue. He bounced to his feet and barked at her, his big head almost at face level. She shrieked and stood up. I told Sam "Easy," and he fell silent. The woman came with us then, walking quietly between Val and me to the cloakroom for her coat and to the door. I told the Legionnaire: "Anybody wants to leave, tell them I said not to. It's a killer out there."

He was working on another Export. It must have been his eighth, and he waved a tipsy hand. "No sweat, Chief, I'll keep the bastards here."

I put the girl in the back seat of the Blazer. Val sat next to her and I walked around, swooping off the snow that had collected on the vehicle while I was inside. When I got behind the wheel with Sam in the passenger seat, I started up and turned to the prisoner. "Your friend at the highway was murdered." She said nothing, although I could see her mouth working. Then I gave her the rest of it. It was brutal but I had to crack her pose some way. I needed information and quickly. "Somebody hit her in the throat, then hung her from the shower rail."

She screamed, low and anguished, then covered her face and sobbed. Val put one hand on her shoulder but said nothing. I was glad she was there.

The station was in darkness. I don't bother lighting it at night, especially in winter. I don't live there. I have a house on the north edge of town. The station stays closed up except when I'm inside. The best way to reach the department is to phone. The operator will call on the radio in the scout car if we have an emergency. Only tonight the scout car was sitting on flat tires in front of the Legion.

Snow had drifted seven feet deep against the side door where I normally admit prisoners, so I parked in front and went in the way citizens come in under their own steam. I put the lights on and they buzzed and flickered a moment or two. The room was cool—I keep the thermostat down low. I lifted the flap in the counter and led the women through to the back.

There isn't much to see in the station. The front office has a couple of desks and an old manual typewriter, a stationery cupboard and file cabinets, a gun rack with rifle and shotgun, and the teletype machine. That's it. A few months previously, on a slow fall day, I had painted the walls. I thought yellow would be a change from the standard dull green. Under the blue-green of the lights it just looked bilious.

The woman was still crying. I let her sob. Maybe it would lubricate her tongue, and she would give me something more than her number, rank, and name. If she didn't, I was all out of things to do to trace Nancy Carmichael.

The back of the station is a narrow hallway. On one side is a white wall—I had, thank God, run out of yellow by then—with a table and chair. On the other side are our cells, both of them empty.

I sat the girl in the chair and picked up the clipboard that lay on the table. The girl went on sobbing helplessly and I said to Val, "Would you get the young lady some water and a Kleenex, please?"

The girl took the enamel mug as if it were a chalice, holding it in both hands, sipping between sobs. I crouched down until I was at her eye level. "I'm sorry about your friend. She looked as if she was an attractive and intelligent young woman."

"She was," the girl said, and sobbed quickly one last time. She repeated, "She was."

"Now you know she's dead, you must understand that whoever got you into this affair is not playing games. They're wicked people."

Wicked was the right word. It made everything sound like a fairy story. It might even make me a knight on a white horse. The girl looked at me, then glanced away. "I didn't think anything bad would happen."

"It happened," Val said. "She's dead." Her voice was harsh, and I realized it was the first time she had spoken since leaving the motel. She was badly shaken.

"What's her name?" I asked the girl.

She looked at me honestly. "I don't know. There were four of us. What did she look like?"

I described the girl to her but she shook her head.

"You were part of the same organization. You must know her."

"I do. But not her name. Not her real name, anyway."

"Were you working under some kind of security?"

She nodded almost eagerly. She wanted me to know. "It was very tight. All we used were first names, and I don't think they were all real."

It didn't look as if she was going to be much help, but she was all I had. I pushed a little harder. "What names did you use in your group?"

The girl sniffed and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She looked as frail and vulnerable as a ten-year-old. "She called herself Katie. Then there were two others, Rachael and Freddie. And me, of course."

"Freddie, was that a man?" Men joined feminist groups, supported them, anyway. I'd seen them in the parades when I was a young policeman just back from Viet Nam and angry at all the protesters.

"No." The girl was sure of that. "She called herself Freddie because she wanted to be like a man. But she wasn't—she was a girl, my age, about."

"Did this Katie come up here with the rest of you, or did she come with someone else?"

The girl looked at me levelly, telling the truth without reservation. "She came with a guy. She called him her boyfriend, but I don't think there was anything between them."

"Did you hear his name? Did you ever meet him?"

She shook her head. A strand of her mousy hair had come undone, and it wagged in front of her forehead like an antenna. "I never met him. She wouldn't introduce him."

"Did she give you any idea of what he looked like? Did she tell you he was dark, fair, tall, short?"

She pursed her lips and shook her head. I thought for a moment she would not speak, but she was thinking. Finally she said, "She called him a rough diamond once. Said we shouldn't judge by appearances when we met him."

Rough diamond! Scratch Nighswander. You could put him in dungarees and hand him a shovel and he would still come out a smoothie. If he hadn't killed this Katie, who had? And why?

I backed away from that line of questioning and tried for more background. It might loosen up something in her memory or lead me to the rest of the gang. "How did you meet up with the others?"

This was more personal than she liked. She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and began folding it into tiny tucks. "I was approached."

"Who by?"

"I don't know her name. She came up to me in court, afterward, and asked me if I'd be interested in joining a group that would make men sorry for the way they abused us."

That raised a lot of questions that I stored in my head. What was she doing in court, for one thing. And how did the woman who approached her know that this particular skinny girl was anti-men? But that could all wait for the brandy and cigars after we'd consumed the worthwhile evidence, if she had any to give me.

"Could you tell me about the woman who came up to you—her name, what she looked like, what she said to you, anything you can remember?" I asked it softly and she did not answer at once, just kept on folding the handkerchief until I reminded her, "A member of your group has been killed. If I can find the person at the center of the group, I can let her know. She can warn the others to be on their guard."