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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.

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5

    T he 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."
    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