A match popped. In the tiny wash of light it spread over the room I saw a man, his back turned negligently toward me, hands raised to the propane light on the wall. He lit the mantle and the room filled with light, soft and white and kind, seeming to help the warmth of the room soak into my face. The man lowered his hands and turned. It was Nighswander. He looked indolent, unafraid. I wondered if he was alone here or whether one of his friends was asleep in another room waiting to come to his assistance. Not that he would need much, not if he tackled me now. I was too stiff to react to an attack. He could break me like a china cup.
I decided to try a little bluff. It might buy me enough time to make my arms and legs supple again in the glorious warmth of the stove.
"Hey. Mr. Nighswander, right? Sorry about breaking in. I didn't know anybody was home." He looked about to speak but I pressed on, almost babbling. "You remember me from the Tavern, eh? I'm the p'lice chief. I don't generally go breaking windows but I gotta problem." I poured on all the northern Ontario roughness of accent. I wanted him to think I was a useless hayseed. Overconfidence on his part was the only break I could hope for if he swung at me. "Yeah, I gotta civilian out on the ice with a problem, came off his machine and broke his leg, it looks like."
He was still holding the match, letting it burn down almost to his fingers. Now he blew it out with a deliberate little puff. He turned and dropped the dead match on top of the stove, a square airtight Fisher. I edged closer, not into his striking circle but closer to the stove with its miraculous, softening heat.
"What happened to your parka?" He asked it in an amused tone, as if rehearsing the way he would tell the story to his friends later over white wine and squid and New Wave music.
"Shock. First aid, you know. I wrapped the guy up in it and came over to the nearest place to see if there's anything I can wrap him in, anything in the way of first aid stuff."
As I jabbered I was weighing up the room as a potential battleground. It gave me no advantages. There were couches along two of the walls and one armchair set close to the stove. Except for a bare coffee table and bookshelves, that was it. There was nothing to shove in his way, nothing heavy to throw, not even a rug under his feet that I could pull away. I looked him over, still grinning my big foolish grin. He was dressed as he had been in the Tavern, and I knew how he could move. His build was slim but square and hard. He worked out regularly, probably in a karate class. And besides, his muscles and joints were loose and limber. He would be hard to beat without the use of my gun, a quarter of a mile away in the ice hut.
I was about to go on but he held up his hand imperiously. "That's enough. I don't want to hear any more of this nonsense. I know why you're here. You're looking for the Carmichael woman."
"Howdya mean?" Being dumb was buying time and warmth. A high isolated corner of my mind considered his describing a seventeen-year-old as a woman and I decided I had been right. He had nothing to do with women.
"She's not here," he said. "But on the other hand, you are. You weren't supposed to get this far, Mr. Bennett. I'm going to have to stop you."
Slowly he took up his karate stance, moving as deliberately as if he were under water. I wondered if he was psyching himself to kill me.
I dropped the hayseed impression. "Stop me the way you stopped Katie?"
His pose slackened in surprise. "How did you find your way to her?"
"Easy. I just checked your room at the motel."
He sneered at me, as if I were slow. "I booked no room at the motel. I'm staying here."
"Well, somebody called Nighswander booked a room at the Muskellunge Motel, took a girl there, and killed her with a chop in the throat."
I was watching him but he gave no reaction. Instead he drew himself slowly up into the karate stance and nodded curtly to me.
"Don't try that judo crap," I warned him. "I'll shoot you."
He took a tiny step toward me. "Before you can draw your clumsy gun you will be unconscious." He said it through clenched teeth and I knew it was time to move.
I tried one last ploy, raising my left hand in a placating gesture while I sneaked my right to my back pocket and took hold of the knob at the top of my stick. "Hey, what's happening? I'm the police, you guys can't use that stuff to break the law."
It helped. He made his crouch a little more menacing, hissing between his teeth as he covered the next crucial yard between us. And in that first hiss I read the news that I could win. He was operating out of ego, not need. Break his ego and he would lie in a heap. I kept talking. I figured I had a chance against a studio player. He had never done this for his life. Pain would throw him.
I made a show of backing off a foot, keeping him advancing as I drew my stick and flicked it underhanded in one movement.
He threw up his hands instinctively, as I had known he would. A master would have ignored the stick and the pain unblinkingly, but this was an amateur. He was still good enough to kick automatically as he ducked. It almost connected, except that I had watched his weight shift and moved a half step to the left. As his foot flicked past my hip I followed through on my throw, forcing my arm forward and down into the center of his chest. He didn't even have time to groan. The dynamics of the action threw him away, twisting him back to his right from the doubled momentum of his kick and my counter. I knew the muscles in his groin and stomach would be torn. I had him beaten. But the fall took him into overkill, hammering his head onto the stove with a solid crunch that put him out cold.
I swore first but immediately thought better of it and allowed myself a grin. I was still stiff with cold. He should have minced me. But I had stopped him. I was proud of that much, at least.
I retrieved my stick and gave it a superstitious little pat with my left hand. I always respect things that help me. I wanted that stick to know I was in its debt again. Then I took out my handcuffs and cuffed Nighswander's right wrist to the wrought-iron log cradle. It was a solid piece of work, two four-foot circles of one-inch iron rod, one behind the other, welded together by a series of foot-long rods and loaded with heavy maple wood. He wouldn't get away from there until I came for him or his friends brought a hacksaw and took half an hour to saw him free.
Next I took my flashlight and searched the cottage. There was nobody there and no indication that anybody else had been there that evening. There was a snowmobile outside the back door but it was snowed in, and I judged Nighswander must have ridden here immediately after leaving the Tavern, which complicated the question of who had killed the girl at the motel. I didn't stop to ponder.
There was a good down parka, probably his, on a hook in the hall. I took it and a pair of snowmobile pants and a couple of blankets from the bedroom for the girl to wrap her feet in. Finally I brought water from the kitchen and bathed Nighswander's temples until he came around, groaning.
I knelt on his uncuffed hand while I questioned him, but he said nothing except to swear. After a few moments I gave up and went on with my biggest priority, rescuing the girl from the fishing hut. Afterward I would return here and find out more, but her life was in my hands, she had to be handled first.
I put on the parka, which was a little tight, rolled the blankets and pants together, and went back to the skidoo. I tucked my bundle under my right foot and knelt up to drive back along my tracks to the snow hut. It was easier to find than the cottage had been. The wind was as strong as ever and just as dense with snow, but as I headed into it I could smell wood smoke from the stove in the fishing hut. I followed it to its source in less than a minute and drove the machine up until its headlight was shining through the rear window. I came around to the door and crouched and called, "It's the police chief, open up." There was a long pause and I waited and did nothing. I didn't want to be shot with my own gun. At last the door eased open and the girl said, "Come in, Chief, I'm okay."
It was warm inside. She had been stoking the wood into the stove as fast as it could take it, acting out of fear and cold. I wondered how much longer her supplies would have held out. I pushed the bundle of clothes into her hands. "There's skidoo pants in there-put them on and give me my parka back." I turned away and wriggled out of the parka I'd brought from the cabin. I felt uneasy in the ice hut. It was too simple a spot for an ambush. If anyone wanted me stopped permanently, they could do it now from thirty yards away in this snow and I would never know they were out there until the bullets ripped through the walls. As an ex-Marine, I know you never occupy known positions, you move on before you consolidate. That way the mortar shells come pounding in behind you, not on top.
The girl changed smoothly and modestly, slipping into the ski pants first, then turning away to shuck my parka and put on the new one. She turned to me then, crouched on her bench, her head almost scraping the center of the roof. "How's that?" she asked perkily.
"Very fashionable. Now wrap up your head in the blanket, then your feet, and I'll bring the machine to the front door." I turned away, glad to be wearing my own parka with the familiar weight of the gun in the right-hand pocket. If I needed more help tonight, the Colt would be there.
I chugged the machine around to the door, turning it back to face the mainland. The girl came out, almost on hands and knees, shuffling like a Chinese bride in her constricting blanket. I sat her side-saddle on the machine in front of me, then wrapped the last folds of blanket around her feet. She nodded and slid one hand free of her parka sleeve to give me a little thumbs-up signal, and I knelt up and drove slowly back to the nearest point of the shore line, almost due west. Now that I was no longer pursuing other machines, I was more careful. Skidooing over ice can be dangerous, particularly on our lake, which is part of an ever-flowing chain connected by locks. The ice is weak in places where the current is fast. And even the flat areas can heave in pressure cracks that sometimes drift open a few feet, wide enough to swallow a snow machine whole.
As I drove I watched for ridging that would warn me of a weak spot. When I found one I stopped the machine, leaving the girl hunched behind the windshield. "Stay there, I have to test," I said. Then I slipped my stick out of my pocket, keeping the strap around my wrist, and lay flat out on the ice to check the gap at arm's length. I tapped until I was sure there was a gap of only about six inches between the two surfaces and that the slick of new ice, perhaps an inch thick, was continuous between them.
I got back on and told the girl "Hold tight!" then drove the machine around in a big circle, picking up speed and coming to the gap at full throttle. There was a jolt as we passed over and I slowed back to normal pace and went on watching. I was anxious to be back at the station, thinking about the case rather than my own survival.
Nobody had been to the station since I left and my skidoo tracks were well drifted in. I wondered how much more snow was going to fall. We already had ten new inches and more was layering down every second. It was a worry. If I went out again I might get the snow machine bogged. Those things aren't magic carpets. They need firm footing or they're liable to sink right into drifts and start cavitating. It was something else to worry about but first I wondered how Val Summers and my prisoner were.
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."
She was sitting across the desk from me and she stood up slowly. I thought she was going to protest but instead she stretched out her hand to me. I took it and she pressed it.
"If you weren't the heat, I'd kiss you," she said matter-of-factly. She was looking at me calmly and I realized that she meant every word.
"Save it. You'll hate my guts by the time you come to court on Monday," I told her. She laughed and shook her head.
"I don't think I will, but right now I'm saying thank you."
"Part of the service," I said. I had more on my mind than flirtation. I had seen Nighswander with two other men. Neither of them fit the description of the guy who had wrecked Carl's house and abandoned this girl on the ice. I was guessing he was also the man who had murdered the girl in the cabin. He was a killer, not a big-city limp-wrist, and I had to get back out into the snow and go look for him.