Murder on Ice by Ted Wood

Author:Ted Wood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective - General, Detective, Police Procedural, Bennett, Crime & mystery, Mystery & Detective, Mystery, Fiction - Mystery, Fiction, Reid (Fictitious character), Suspense, Police, Crime & Thriller, General
ISBN: 9781585868599
Publisher: E-reads/E-rights
Published: 1999-12-15T08:00:00+00:00

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10

I've seen a lot of men killed. Some of them the same way as Irv Whiteside, literally blown away. But they were all guys who knew the odds. They didn't like them but accepted the thought that a mortar shell could land close enough to leave nothing behind but their boots. It didn't make things easier, they lived with fear the way civilians might live with toothache, but they weren't innocent the way Irv had been, the way a two-year-old is when it totters out onto a highway. It made his death more sad, made me more angry.

I brought him inside where the foxes and raccoons wouldn't insult his broken body any further. There was a plastic snow shovel leaning against the woodpile and I used it to pick up everything I could find. It took longer than I wanted. So did the task of slipping the hinge pins off an inside door and wedging it into place in the damaged door frame of the back door.

I began to concentrate on the people who had booby-trapped the cabin. If they had access to grenades they were part of something far better organized than C.L.A.W. It was impossible to know what their mission was, but it had nothing to do with winning free ink for Nancy Carmichael. And then I remembered, some of her father's money came from a company in Toronto. The company made missile systems, including one for the American missile that had brought out the peace-lovers on the city streets. Maybe the kidnapping was all a scam. Carmichael was the target.

I put the spread from the bedroom over the mess that had been Irv Whiteside and then stood for a while, looking down at the body and wondering what to do next. A million thoughts needled me, distracted me. I realized that the murderer must have fastened the grenade to the door frame with a line from the pull pin to the outside door. He had opened the outside door once to check how much line he needed so that a man would open the door without thinking, without enough time or light to recognize the clack when the lever flew away and the last four seconds of his life started. The murderer had planned it so the pin would be out and the fuse working while the person was still opening the door, his body fully exposed to the blast without even the inadequate pine boards of the outer door to shield him. The cloud of steel fragments would hit him from two feet away at waist height. A one-hundred-percent kill.

Slowly I moved Irv out of my mind and started assessing priorities. These people were professional haters. They had killed twice, almost three times. They would not hesitate to use Nancy Carmichael as a bargaining tool. They would not hesitate to kill her if they decided there was a need to do so. I had to find her right away. Nothing else mattered.

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