Ted Wood: Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

There were lights on in the cabin but I backed away without knocking. If the kidnappers were less dumb than they looked at this moment, they would have parked in front of the wrong cabin, giving themselves time to escape when the big slow copper came banging on someone else's door. I would check first.

Fred Wales was pouring coffee for Val, excited at the presence of a good-looking woman on a night when only truck drivers would normally come in. He's a tall thin Englishman who's been here since the war but has never lost his accent. He thinks his slang makes him sound North American. Most of it comes from late movies.

"Hi," he said. "Long time no see."

"Official business, Fred." I sat down and sipped my coffee, but kept my hat on and my parka zipped so he would know this was not a social call. "What can you tell me about the party in number six?"

"Hang on, I'll check." He beamed at Val again and went out through the back door. Val grinned at me. I winked back.

"Here it is." He returned with a sheaf of cards in his hand. "A woman, Ms. Ann Gree."

I snorted. "Not trying very hard to fool us, are they?"

Val laughed. "Ann Gree, with a Ms. She's sure teed off with you male chauvs, that's certain."

I took the card from Wales. It was filled out in a clear, literate hand, a schoolteacher's script.

"Can I see the others, Fred? I'm looking for women on their own, pairs of girls, maybe even three together."

Wales handed over the cards and rubbed his chin. "No, everybody else was couples, except for one trucker and a guy, said he was on his own."

One of the cards read: George Nighswander. The address was the one I'd seen on Nighswander's license at the Tavern. "You sure he was alone? I think he's gay."

Wales shrugged. "I don't go out to check. The window was snowed up at the office. He said he was alone." He was losing interest in us. Most likely Casablanca was on TV from Parry Sound. He was hoping we would clear out and leave him alone to get on with being snowed in.

"When I saw him he had a couple of other guys with him, looked light."

"I didn't see anybody," Wales said patiently. "An' what the eye don't see, the heart don't grieve over."

"Thanks anyway. One last thing. When did you sell your book of tickets for the dance?"

"Tickets? Why?"

"Just checking. Can you remember?"

He rubbed his chin with one finger, making a rasping sound I could hear above the Muzak. "Last Saturday. A woman came in an' bought all ten. Just like that."

"Thanks." I wondered if we had ten people working against us tonight. "I'll just go call on Ms. Gree."

Wales was alarmed. "Hey, go easy, Chief. There's no law against her giving a phony name."

There is, but it's never enforced. I pulled down the flaps around my hat. It looks silly, but it saves your ears from frostbite and that's not silly. "Don't worry. I don't care about any Smiths you get in here, just her."

That bothered him. His accent lost thirty years and became bitingly British. "I run a respectable place."

"I know. They get their share of Smiths in the Royal York in Toronto. But this girl could be important."

Val was standing, buttoning her coat. "She could be involved in a kidnapping at the Legion," she offered, and Wales gasped.

He gave us the key with no more argument and we walked to cabin six. We stood there perhaps thirty seconds, listening hard, but could make out nothing over the rush of the wind and the white-sound hiss of the snow against our collars and faces.

Finally I turned to Val and shrugged, then knocked at the door. There was no answer and I waited another twenty seconds, taking a few steps to each side of the cabin, making sure no one was coming out of the sides or the back.

I opened the door and a gust of warm air enveloped me.

I took one sniff and told Val, "Wait by the door, something's wrong." She didn't understand me but did as I said anyway. I stuck my right hand deep in my parka pocket, holding my gun ready for trouble.

The bedroom was empty. The bed was rumpled as if someone had sat on it. It looked as if the cabin was empty but I knew better. The place smelled of death.

I pulled my gun and slammed the bathroom door open with a kick, trying to shock whoever was hiding there.

It was too late. The girl who was hanging from the shower rail had been dead for at least fifteen minutes.

The face was bloated and inhuman, but I could tell that the body was not Nancy Carmichael's. This was another girl, as close to thirty as she was ever going to get. She was naked and her sphincter had failed her. I knew she was dead but I'm not a doctor, not qualified to make judgments like that. I took out my clasp knife and cut her down. I spent a fruitless couple of minutes breathing into her lungs and pounding her chest but I was too late. Val came in on tiptoe, frightened, saw the corpse, and vomited into the bathtub. "Don't touch anything," I told her. She tore some tissues from the container, not touching the metal, and wiped her mouth.

"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."