Ted Wood: Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

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."

Now she looked up, keeping her hands busy, pitty-patting the folded handkerchief. "Is that what you'd do, really?"

"Straight up." In the mood of this interrogation I sketched a cross over my heart with my right hand. It worked. Over the next five minutes she gave me all the information she had.

She had been the victim of an attempted rape. She had accepted a ride home from some guy she met at a party. He had been acquitted because the judge thought she should have shown better judgment than to go off with a stranger. As she was leaving the court, humiliated, while the accused was shaking hands with his friends, she had been approached by a woman in her fifties. They had gone for coffee together. My prisoner had been ashamed and depressed and the woman had been sympathetic. The other woman had told her that there was a new group being formed to heighten the awareness of men to the humiliation of women.

I asked her to repeat that part and she gave it back to me word for word. Obviously I had some pop psychology coming at me from this mysterious, murderous grandmother.

The woman had not given a full name. "You call me Margaret," was all she gave away. She had invited the girl to a meeting, which was held a week later in a motel room on the edge of Toronto. The girl had gone and met three other women of about her own age, all of them angry over some feminist cause. One had been a battered wife. One had been harassed by an employer with more hands than sense. The other one had no specific beef but it seemed to my prisoner that she was angry at all men.

"She struck you as lesbian?"

"I'm not saying that. She seemed angry, as I said-more than the rest of us, and we all had some good cause for anger." Between them they had hatched up the plot to abduct Nancy and gain publicity for their cause. She insisted that Nancy had been a party to the idea. They would not have forced her, they were all too anxious to protect one another's rights as women, she told me.

It rang true. If the kidnapping had been carried out by force, it would have taken at least two people to drag Nancy to the waiting car. As it was she had gone cleanly-her footprints had told me that. This girl confirmed it.

When it came to her own part in the affair, she was more reticent. I found out at last that she had been told to strip while the crowd was watching the beauty parade and to jump out as soon as the lights came on again after Nancy's disappearance. But she had been too timid and had spent ten minutes psyching herself up for the exposure.

I nodded and made tut-tut noises, and then threw her the hard question. "One girl is dead and Nancy is gone. Do you still think it's a joke?"

It scared her, but she had no information. She had carried out her orders and was waiting for her group leader to pat her on the head and tell her she had done well. Only there was a corpse in the picture now and it wasn't a prank any more. All she could do was to weep and insist that she had no idea where Nancy had gone. The plan had been for her to stay at the motel until morning, when she would emerge and make her speech about male chauvinism while the whole of the beauty contest judging panel hung its head in shame.

It was all very bloody smug. And it was also a crock. There was more to this operation than the phony kidnapping. It looked to me as if somebody wanted to get their hands on the girl, perhaps for ransom, and had set up this spurious group to do the dirty work and act as a smoke screen. I was growing certain that professionals had removed the girl from the removers while the removers all struck their little poses.

Val found coffee and made a full pot. We all had a cup while I talked the girl through her story again. She came up with the dots for a couple of "i"s and the crosses for the "t"s, but nothing new. I decided to ring the motel where the meeting had taken place, on the outside chance that Fred might remember this Margaret and that she had used her real name to register for the room. After that, I was stumped. Nancy Carmichael could be fifty miles south of here by now, still not realizing that she was in danger. I had no way of letting her know.