Ted Wood - Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

They were fine. Val had taken the plastic seal off the thermostat and cranked up the heat a notch so the station was gloriously warm to come into. And there was fresh coffee. She hadn't slept but had been talking to the prisoner, woman to woman now the limelight was off and the prisoner was feeling a bit foolish.

I asked Val to stay out back with the first girl while I drank coffee with the second one. In the full light she turned out to be a dish. She was five-six, one-fifteen, blonde hair, even the makeshift outfit I'd scored for her didn't hide a real sexual confidence. I guessed she was the C.L.A.W. member who had worked as a model. I also guessed that it wouldn't take long to turn her off her man-hating, she seemed too warm a woman for lifelong separation from us all.

She had the same story as the first girl. This mysterious Margaret woman had contacted her after a hearing at the Ontario Civil Rights Board. She had been protesting harassment by her employer, a fashion-house proprietor who reckoned his models should do their bit for corporate earnings by putting out for his out-of-town buyers. She had kneed him and taken her complaint to the government. He had turned up for the hearing in a wheelchair hired for the occasion, with his wife as character witness, and the case had been dismissed. Whispering through his pain, her employer had told her there and then to look for another job. She was in a boiling fury at him and all other men and had been inducted into C.L.A.W. It might not have stuck in her case except that the fashion industry is a small circle and she found herself unable to get more modeling anywhere. On top of that, her former boss was out of his wheelchair the next morning, taking off for Miami with, for once, his lawful wedded wife.

"So what was your job this evening? I already know the Carmichael girl was in on it and didn't need dragging away. What did you do?"

"I drove the getaway truck." She cocked her head to one side and her sweetly blonde hair fell sideways down to her shoulder. She beamed at me like a little girl who had remembered the right text in Sunday School.

"You understand the vehicle was stolen."

She pulled her head erect at once and tried to look less amused. "I was told we had the use of it for the evening."

"You did. But the owner never knew it. So when you reached the highway, what happened?"

She looked at me for a long moment. You could almost see the chess pieces moving behind her eyes. I had saved her pretty bacon out there on the ice, but I was still a Male Chauvinist and doubly a Pig, the enemy. She wondered what she owed me. I reminded her. "You could have been the second victim of the evening if I hadn't stopped. Somebody already strangled your buddy at the Muskellunge Motel."

Her eyes filled with tears. It was more impressive than screams or sobs. They were the honest tears of somebody for a friend you won't see again. "Poor Katie," she whispered. "Who would do that to her?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out. Who did she come up here with?"

"She said she was coming up with her boyfriend. She was driving, he wanted her to, but he was paying everything."

"That's no big deal-a few gallons of gas, a motel room."

"It was to her. Her husband never put out a nickel for her. She thought this guy was marvelous."

"Did you ever meet him?" I wanted facts, not True Romance. This was a murder.

She shook her head. "We were going to meet him tonight. He was going to be at the rendezvous with Nancy and Margaret."

"And where was that?"

She shook her head again, sadly. I think she would have told me had she known. Now she was warm and safe she realized how close she had been to death. "I'm sorry. I just don't know, we were never told."

"So all right, tell me where you went after the kidnapping." I already knew the first moves and it was a cold trail anyway, but I hoped it might have some kind of pattern to it, like a child's dot-to-dot puzzle. Maybe with some more information I could infer where the others fit in.

"Katie was waiting for us at the highway in the big wagon. Rachael and Nancy and I got in and went back to Katie's cabin."

"That was number six? And Katie was driving a big Ford wagon?"

She nodded impatiently. "Cabin six. But only Katie went inside. Rachael and I and Nancy went to another one that had been rented for us by Rachael's boyfriend."

"Was his name Nighswander?"

"I don't know." She almost shrieked it. Her eyes blazed. "Believe me, if I knew, I would say."

"Did you go into this other cabin?"

"Yes, we all did, and Nancy took off her silly swimsuit and put on some street clothes."

"What kind of clothes-a skirt, a suit, what?"

I might have guessed. Like all good man-haters, Nancy Carmichael had put on blue jeans. "With an Aran sweater, oyster-colored." On top of which she had put on her skidoo boots and her three-thousand-dollar designer coonskin coat.

"Then what happened?"

"That was our part of the exercise completed. Rachael and I left the cabin and walked out front. We were picked up there by another car. A man was driving."

"What did he look like?"

She shrugged. "It was hard to see, there was almost no light. I would have said he was under thirty and not very big or very heavy. But he had a wool hat on and I couldn't see much of his face or hair color or anything."

He might have been one of the three men at the Tavern. I stopped and counted bodies. If Nighswander was part of this, then I had three men against me-two now, with him handcuffed to the log box, as well as the two surviving C.L.A.W. people, Margaret and Rachael. That meant a minimum of four. Three of them had gone with Nancy Carmichael across the ice. That left one wild card somewhere. I wondered where. I needed help, that much was certain.

"Where did he drive you?"

She frowned. It was her first artificial gesture. It looked the kind of move she made when men asked her to do things she wasn't crazy about. "We went back down the highway, the way we'd been, and past Murphy's Harbour."

"You're sure of that?"

"Positive. Rachael pointed out the Toyota. It was where I'd left it, and we all laughed."

"And you stopped where?"

It was as I had begun to guess. There's a provincial campground just south of the turn-off. They had driven there and pulled into the parking lot.

"The car got stuck but the driver called it some bad names and managed to get through the snow and into the center."

"What happened then."

"There were two snowmobiles there. Somebody had taken them off a trailer."

"How do you know?" If she were right, the trailer might still be there, perhaps with a license plate on it that would lead me into the middle of this tangle instead of bouncing around the edges.

"Just observation. It had gone, but I could see where it had been driven away. Like, you know, there were two sets of tire tracks-the car, and then the trailer tracks smaller and over the top."

"You're very observant, noticing something like that." I kept my voice neutral. The comment could have been either a compliment or a sneer. She took it as a compliment. I was beginning to like her better than the other C.L.A.W. member.

"Wasn't I, though? The thing was, nobody was there for a couple of minutes. We wondered whether to stay in the car or look around. I was looking for footprints to see if anybody had been there recently."

"And had they?"

"Yes. Margaret was there. She was sheltering in the privy but she came out when she saw we'd come."

"You're sure it was Margaret?"

"Oh yes. She was all dressed up in a skidoo suit and red ski mask but I could tell it was her. There's a big street light in the middle of the lot. You know."

I plodded on through the story, taking her back over parts she didn't remember the first time. It took ten or fifteen minutes, and by the end I knew that the three women had been joined by Nancy and a man on another snow machine. The car took off then, back north toward the Murphy's Harbour cutoff. The man who had brought Nancy back took the driver aside first and talked to him and then came back to the women. My new prisoner, whose name was Freda, "Freddie" to the cell members of C.L.A.W., had taken one machine with Nancy on the back. They had followed the other two across country, over the frozen marsh and through the woods to the shelter I had found earlier. The other three people had left them there for half an hour and then returned and led them on across the lake to the ice huts. At that point they had stopped and undressed Freddie and left her. She did not know why, but I was becoming certain that it had been solely to prevent my catching up with them. They had seen my lights behind them. None of it was much help. I thanked her anyway and said, "I'm going to have to lock you up, along with your friend from the dance. It's no fun, but it's safer than that ice hut."