Free Ransom Game by Howard Engel Page B

the ratchet along the floor. I could see the mark where Muriel had had the seat, nearer the wheel, and then, a little further back, the mark of Johnny’s favourite position.
    I was just about to close the door when my eye caught a dark stain on the back of the driver’s seat. In my work, I haven’t come across much dried blood, but when I saw this, I got out my penknife and chipped a few crumbs of it into an envelope. I shone a pocket flashlight around the floor of the car, front and back, looking for other clues such as used theatre stubs, hotel bills, or a bank draft for five hundred thousand dollars, but all I saw was the cellophane wrapper from a pack of cigarettes. I thought I’d better leave the cops something to look at, so I left it where it was.
    Back in my car, I lit up a smoke of my own, and headed over the canal bridge to see if I could find the place where the car had been left. It wasn’t difficult. A black patch in the snow stood out too well. I stopped the motor but left the parking lights on, and crawled out. These narrow two-lane roads are hazardous in the dark. If I’d been hoping to find footprints, I was disappointed. There were a couple of good ones from Walter’s boots, but all other prints had been swept away by the stiff breeze blowing in off the lake.
    I wandered into the main office of the Regional Police when I got back to town, and asked for both of my old pals, Sergeants Savas or Staziak. Both were off. But I left Savas the envelope and told him to check it for blood type. I didn’t need to mention Johnny Rosa. Savas was a good cop.
    When I left the Regional Police I bought an evening paper, and found myself feeling hungry again. I solved that problem at the Diana Sweets with the Beacon propped up in front of me. The front page carried the news that a Canada-wide warrant for Johnny Rosa’s arrest had been issued. The kidnapping was chewed again like an old cud, but there wasn’t anything I didn’t already know. I ordered a bowl of vegetable soup and a well-done omelette. I hate runny eggs, and as usual, I had to send them back to the kitchen to be fried for another five minutes.

TEN
    My headlights easily picked out the name “Sanderson” stencilled on the rusting mailbox, which leaned intemperately toward the road. The lane leading into the property was dark with naked poplars on either side. The black mass of a barn stood at the end of it, with the moon going down behind. To the left was the house, a typical Ontario farmhouse, its three storeys squeezed into a narrow silhouette, as though it had been forced to move upward because expansion in other directions was impossible. In fact it sat quite alone on a fat ten-acre lot with nothing threatening it but a chicken coop and that was fifty yards away. It was going to ruin slowly. The wooden shutters bracketed the windows precariously where they hadn’t fallen off. White paint was peeling from the clapboard. The wooden porch subsided under my weight as I looked for the door. I rang the old-fashioned hand bell and waited. Light from inside lit up the porch from tall narrow windows on either side of the door. It was quiet on the porch, and I could hear the poplars. Even without leaves they made a poplar-like noise.
    Something stirred inside the house and I could hear footsteps coming closer to the door. It was opened by a girl of about nineteen, wearing old blue jeans and a purple T-shirt. Her straight brown hair hung to her shoulders. “Are you Mr. Cooperman?” she asked, opening her dark eyes wider and arching her right eyebrow. I nodded and she led me through a messy hallway and kitchen to a messy back room. It had been a summer kitchen when the house was built, but now it had a woodstove and plastic over the inside of the windows. It didn’t pass any House and Garden standards, but it looked comfortable. Rolf Knudsen was sitting in a wooden rocking chair with a guitar leaning