Read Murder on Ice for Free Online Page A

cabin six and a cup of coffee. I sat and sipped, not talking, trying to work out what to do next. The obvious thing would be to go over the murder scene minutely. That's what any regular department would do because any regular department has men to spare for jobs like that. I don't. If there's a choice between thinking work and hot pursuit, I have to take the pursuit.
    I was wondering if the dead girl had been intended as a sacrifice, a gambit to put me off the chase. Maybe she had also been a prospect for dropping out of C.L.A.W. and filling me in with some details. Now she would tell me nothing. But, I resolved, she wouldn't hold me back, either. I would keep on chasing Nancy Carmichael any way I could, tugging at all the leads until they had unraveled or led me to her. This was a bad night for police work, but it was also a bad night for people planning a getaway. If someone had taken the girl away by car, they might be stuck in a ditch right now waiting for a policeman to come by. There was nothing moving but fools, criminals, and coppers.
    I left Val finishing her rum and went from door to door along the row of cabins. In four of them, including the truck driver's, I found couples, two of them obvious mismatches, worried that a jealous husband had sent me to check on them. None of them had seen anything. None of them was suspicious. I opened the cabin Nighswander had rented and in it found my only clue. Beside the bed, looking as if it had been dropped in a hurry, lay the top of a swimsuit similar to the one the Carmichael girl had worn at the pageant. It was fragrant with the same perfume.
    I phoned the police in Toronto and asked them to stake out Nighswander's home. I also called the doctor in Murphy's Harbour but he wasn't home. Probably he was at the dance. He must have been wearing one of the skinny girl's masks, and after the disappearance, when people took off their masks, I hadn't noticed him. I would have to wait until morning for his assistance at the murder scene.
    It still felt wrong. It was all too obvious. If Nighswander had been intending to kill the girl he wouldn't have gotten into that fight earlier, where everyone could see him. And was it him, anyway? I could sense a connection but there was nothing to match him up with the dead girl, only with the one who had disappeared. I sat on the edge of his bed and thought about it for a minute or two but could see nothing brilliant to do. The only thing I knew was that the puzzle was in pieces and the pieces were scattering themselves wider all the time.
    I took Val from the coffee shop and drove back to the Legion Hall as fast as I dared on the snowed-in road. It was beginning to get frightening. The road was hidden under eight or ten inches of new snow, up to four feet in the drifts, and my eyes were dazzled with the flakes spiraling down my headlights to crackle against the windshield. Val said nothing. I glanced at her once or twice but she was staring ahead, her lips moving. She might have been praying.
    At the Legion, things were getting boisterous. Everyone was committed to staying all night and they were all drinking more than they would have done normally. It was hot and noisy and lively, and the missing girl was a joke. I was glad I'd stayed cool about it. They all thought they were in on a prank. It was easier that way.
    People caught at me and tried to talk as I went through to the office where Puckrin was still sitting with his bottle. Val was right behind me.
    Walter Puckrin was feeling good. The rye and ginger were working on him and he was enjoying the limelight. "Talkative little devil," he told me jovially. "'Part from telling me to go screw myself, she hasn't said boo."
    "Thanks, Walter. It's time to tuck her in for the night." I touched the seated woman on the shoulder. "On your feet, please, I'm taking you to the station."
    She looked up at me, not moving, debating what her civil-disobedience friends would have recommended. She decided to