A Cold White Sun: A Constable Molly Smith Mystery (Constable Molly Smith Series) (30 page)

Chapter Thirty-eight

John Winters did not think Mark Hamilton had killed Cathy Lindsay. Unless he was a heck of an exceptional actor.

Winters had felt about as bad as he could while doing his job. Hamilton was a basket case, no doubt about it. He’d twitched and sweated all through the interview but managed to remain lucid. Cathy Lindsay had bothered him, yes. She clearly liked him and wanted him to pay attention to her. He didn’t have any feelings for her and never encouraged her.

He had never arranged to meet her outside of school hours. He had never been to her house, didn’t even know where she lived, and she had never been to his.

“Do you own a long gun?” Winters had asked.

“No, sir, I do not.”

“Not even for hunting? There would have been opportunities for hunting at the cabin you went to last week.”

Hamilton shuddered. “I don’t hunt. I don’t eat meat. I can’t stand the sight of blood. Not after the things I’ve seen. The very idea makes my skin crawl.”

“What sort of things.”

“In Afghanistan.”

Mr. Hamilton, have you sought treatment for PTSD?”

“I can handle it.” Hamilton lifted his head and fixed his eyes on Winters. “When I’m left alone.”

“Cathy Lindsay didn’t leave you alone.”

“Cathy Lindsay was a minor annoyance. If she’d come to my house uninvited, invaded my privacy, I might have struck out at her. But she didn’t. And so I didn’t hurt her.”

“There’s no disgrace, you know, in needing help to deal with trauma. The police get counseling these days. After a shooting or a killing or any highly stressful incident we’re sent to a psychologist. Have to keep going until the doctor says we’re back to normal. Whatever normal means. It’s the same in the army, isn’t it?”

“No disgrace, no, not usually. For me, though, no forgiveness.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a filthy coward. Because I hid under a truck afraid to move while a man lay in the dust and died.” Hamilton began to cry, soundlessly. Tears dripped down his face. His voice was so low, Winters had to lean forward to hear. “An IED, a street on the outskirts of Kabul. Our truck hit it. Flames, smoke, people screaming, guns firing. Corporal Fred Worthing got the worst of it. He was under my command, and I failed him. I groveled in the dust, covering my head, crying like a baby. Fred had been thrown into the street, out in the open. Blood everywhere, most of his legs nothing but red mist. He screamed and screamed. Calling my name, screaming for help, but I couldn’t move. I heard a shot and the screaming stopped. Then more of our guys arrived and the crowd scattered. I stood up, pretended I’d been under fire myself. Fred lay in the road, not moving. A single shot in the forehead. Killed where he lay by some cowardly piece of shit, unable to defend himself.”

“You can’t keep blaming yourself,” Winters said, knowing how feeble his words must sound. “If you’d gone to your buddy’s aid, they would have shot you too.”

Hamilton’s eyes were streaks of red. “I only wish they had.”

The guy was a mess. Winters knew he was largely to blame, at this moment at least.

Still, a murder investigation was a murder investigation. He had a job to do, never mind how many innocents got hurt in the process.

Hamilton had been pretty much his only suspect. Back to square one. Almost two weeks had passed since the shooting. The trail was getting cold fast. Time to head home, and hope something new came to light tomorrow. He told Hamilton he was free to go.

John Winters watched Molly Smith lead Mark Hamilton to her car, his head down, his steps fumbling. He slipped on a patch of ice and her arm shot out to catch him. He recoiled as if she’d struck him.

Winters had begun to turn when out of the corner of his eye he saw another man hurrying toward the station, head down, collar pulled up against the icy rain.

Perhaps John Winters wouldn’t be going home quite yet.

He opened the door. “Mr. Lindsay, what brings you here?”

“Elizabeth. Elizabeth Moorehouse. You know her, right?”

Winters nodded. “We’ve met.”

“She killed my wife. She murdered Cathy.”

“That’s a serious accusation, Mr. Lindsay. Are you sure?”

“As sure as I can be. Elizabeth’s gone back to Victoria. That is, she told me she was going home. You’ll send someone around to arrest her, won’t you?”

“Why don’t we talk this over first?”

Winters escorted the man to an interview room. The nice one with a painting on the wall, comfortable furniture, good lighting, plastic flowers in a plastic vase. Rather than to the suspects’ interview room, stark and bare, intended to be intimidating, which was the room where he’d brought Hamilton. Probably another mistake. “If you’ll wait here a moment, I want to ask my colleague to join us.”

Winters went to his office. He still had the services of one IHIT guy, still working the phones. Ray Lopez had been taken off the Lindsay case. Crime didn’t stop just because they had a murder to investigate.

“Ray, Gord Lindsay’s here. He’s accusing his girlfriend, Elizabeth Moorehouse, of the murder of his wife.”

Lopez swiveled in his chair. “Wonder what brought that on?”

“You think he’s got a point?” IHIT said.

“Check with VicPD on Moorehouse’s whereabouts, will you. Tell them I might need them to pick her up. Ray, I want you in on this.”

“You got it.”

Gord Lindsay was perched on the edge of his chair when Winters and Lopez came in. His eyes darted between the men. Winters introduced them.

“Can I get you something, Gord? A coffee? Water?”

“No. Thanks. I want to get this over with.”

The police took seats and waited for Lindsay to begin.

“This isn’t easy for me. I spent most of last night tossing and turning, thinking about it. Didn’t get a darned bit of work done today. I don’t know what else I can do. Elizabeth came to my home on Monday, after the funeral.”

“I saw her in church.”

“She’s played me for a right jackass all along. I guess that’s why it’s taken me this long to come and talk to you. I feel like a stupid teenage boy. I thought she, well I thought she cared for me. Turns out all she wanted was my money.”

Winters kept his face impassive. How many times had he heard that before?

“We had a nice thing going. I had…company when I was in Victoria, she had a man around the house some of the time. When Cathy died, I was afraid Elizabeth would want to move in with me. Get married.” He laughed, the sound bitter, self-mocking. “Hardly. What she wants is money, and never to see me again.”

“How much money?” Lopez asked.

“Twenty thou.”

Not, Winters thought, a heck of a lot. “Be that as it may, I don’t see how that leads to murder.”

“She’s a crack shot, raised in the wilderness in northern B.C. Her dad hunted for food and taught Elizabeth to hunt alongside him.”

“Does she own a firearm?” Winters asked.

“Not that I’ve seen. Doesn’t mean she couldn’t go out and get one, does it?”

“Have you ever been shooting with her? To a range, hunting?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know she’s a crack shot?”

“She told me so.”

“Let’s go back a few steps. About this money. Did you tell her you’d pay?”

Gord Lindsay told them about the blackmail threat. He talked about his in-laws, always disapproving of him, about his mother, who pretty much put him on a pedestal. His shame, his regrets.

He talked about Cathy, about what a great woman she was and how much he loved her. Winters let the man talk. He’d never entirely written Lindsay off as the killer of his wife. His alibi was only his young daughter, easy enough to put ideas in her mind of where her dad had been and when. He was sad now, remembering all the good times they’d had, the love they’d shared.

Regret?

Had Gord Lindsay set Elizabeth Moorehouse—the crack shot—up to kill Cathy?

Was her blackmail attempt over more than illicit sex? Was Gord threatening to back out of their deal?

No. Not if Gord was here, at the police station, telling them about it, pointing the police in the direction of his lover. The man wasn’t that devious, or that clever. Or that stupid.

A soft knock and the door opened a crack. Ingrid’s head popped in. “Sergeant Winters, can I speak to you for a moment?”

“Excuse me.” He got to his feet, followed Ingrid into the hallway, and closed the door. He could hear sirens as vehicles pulled out of the parking lot behind the station. A uniformed officer ran past, pulling on his jacket.

“What’s going on?”

“We have a report of an active shooter. A woman shot on the street. No sign of the perp.”

A small-town cop’s worst nightmare. For a brief moment Winters thought of Elizabeth Moorehouse. Had the woman stayed in town, not gone home as she’d told Gord Lindsay?

He dismissed that idea as quickly as it had come. He’d pursue Lindsay’s accusation of Moorehouse for Cathy’s murder, but for the life of him Winters couldn’t think of any reason she’d start shooting up the streets.

Mark Hamilton. Winters groaned. He’d let the man, broken, depressed, highly trained, go.

“Get rid of Mr. Lindsay, will you, Ingrid.” Winters threw the door open. “Ray, you’re with me. Now.”

Recriminations would have to wait.

Chapter Thirty-nine

Molly Smith reached the scene in minutes. People had gathered in nervous clusters in the middle of the road. They turned to wave at her, and a woman shouted, in a voice high with panic, “Over here, over here.” Smith could see more people kneeling around an object on the sidewalk. Others were coming out of houses, standing on porches, or hurrying toward the excitement. Rain, mixed with snow and ice, continued to fall, but the onlookers paid no attention to their physical comfort.

She pulled her car to a stop in the middle of the road, heart beating rapidly. She hesitated for a fraction of a moment. Ingrid had said an active shooter. Somewhere, out there, in the night, was a person with a gun. It was not unheard of for a cop hater to create a scene, to deliberately draw the police out into the open.

Then—bang.

A child ran past her vehicle, heading for the group on the sidewalk. A boy, running flat out, his unbuttoned jacket billowing behind him. Smith slapped a control on her console, killing the piercing noise of the siren, and then she leapt out of the car. “You. Go home, get out of here, now.”

The boy whirled around, eyes wide. He did as she’d ordered.

Sirens, lots of them, heading her way. Her radio squawked with commands, and she shouted into it to tell them she was at the scene.

The streetlights cast puddles of yellow light into the rain and through naked branches. Some house lights were on, some shrouded in darkness. More houses loomed over them as the hill rose sharply up. The shooter could be absolutely anywhere.

“Did anyone see what happened?” she yelled, pushing her way into the crowd. “Did anyone see who did this?”

“I heard a noise,” a woman said. “A bang. Very loud. She was only a few yards in front of me. I saw her fall. I thought she’d tripped. Then I saw the blood.” She began to wail, “Oh my god. Oh, my god.”

“Anyone else see anything?”

Heads shook. Arms reached out to comfort the sobbing woman.

“I heard the shot. I didn’t know what it was, but then the screaming started, so I came over,” a man said. “I was going to do what I could to help, but the doctor arrived.”

“Get off the street,” Smith told them. “Go home. An officer will be around to talk to you shortly.”

A woman lay on her back on the pavement, face white, coat soaked with blood. Two people squatted beside her. A woman with her hands pressed against the wound, blood up to her wrists. A man next to her, coat off, bare chested, ripping up what looked to be his own shirt. “I’m a doctor,” the woman said. “Got to stop the bleeding.”

“Ambulance is coming.”

Smith turned back to the onlookers. “All of you people, get away from here. Go home.” She considered telling them the shooter might still be out there. Not worth the panic, she decided. People began to break away from the pack. Some left, some stepped back a few feet.

To her infinite relief, she saw Staff Sergeant Peterson pull up. Not her responsibility any more.

More vehicles were arriving, screeching to a stop in the street. City police, Mounties, an ambulance. Headlights broke the night, and sirens and men’s voices broke the quiet of the neighborhood.

“Smith, you’re with Evans,” Peterson shouted. “Check out these houses. Backyards, alleyways, sheds. You,” he directed a Mountie, stuffing uniform shirt into jeans as he approached, “get these people off the street.”

Smith glanced behind her as she moved to do as she’d been ordered. The eyes of the woman on the ground were closed, her face drained of color. Blood continued to pump through the fingers of the Good Samaritan, and that meant she was still alive. A man stood over the group, holding an umbrella up in a feeble attempt to provide some protection to the wounded woman and her helpers against the freezing rain.

Evans gave Smith a nod and they slipped away from the throng, drawing their weapons. Evans held a flashlight. Guns clutched in hands trying not to shake, watching their footing on the thin crust of ice coating the snow, the two officers made their way into the backyard of the closest house. A motion detector light switched on. Ignoring the rain dripping down collars, soaking through pant legs, they crouched in the cover of the building, leapfrogging each other, one moving forward, staying low, the other maintaining guard, using hand signals to communicate.

She pushed all conscious thought to the back of her mind. If the shooter were here, hiding, watching, she’d deal with him. That was all she needed to know. Back in Police College when they did use-of-force training, the immediate rapid deployment instructor had been a woman by the name of Sergeant Angelina Sullivan. Tough as they came, Sullivan ripped the head off anyone who dared call her Angie. Smith had been surprised to come across Sergeant Sullivan at the mall one evening. Leading a tussle-headed toddler by the hand, pushing a stroller, laughing up at a tall handsome man carrying shopping bags, she looked like a real human being. Smith thought of Sullivan now. Tried to remember everything she’d learned from the woman.

It was all a blur.

She remembered making a mistake, bursting into a room that supposedly contained the shooter, seeing movement to one side, turning toward it, yelling at it, “Get down, get down, get down.” It was a dummy, set up to represent a hostage, while the trainer playing the shooter came up behind her and said, “bang.”

The class laughed as Smith’s face burned with embarrassment.

Get it wrong now, and she’d be a lot more than embarrassed.

Smith whipped around the building, gun up, moving from side to side.
Dig your corner, dig your corner,
Sullivan bellowed at her. All was still. Thank heavens for snow. Unless the shooter could fly, he wasn’t here. The lawn was an unmarked, pristine carpet.

They cleared the yard, moved on to the next house. A garden shed stood in a dark corner against the back fence. The snow here was heavily trampled. Kids probably, out playing. Tracks in and out of the shed. Evans jerked his head toward it.

Smith went first. She stacked right; Evans positioned himself on the left. He gave her a sharp nod. She swallowed and tightened her grip on her Glock. She reached for the door knob. She twisted it, threw the door open and crashed in, gun up in a two-handed grip. Evans followed, swinging the flashlight from side to side, checking out the corners.

Nothing here but rusty garden implements and a jumble of sleds and snow shovels.

They moved from house to house, garden to garden, tension twisting their guts. Dogs barked and the curious peered out kitchen windows. Her radio told her Mounties were sweeping the other side of the street. Every officer who lived within a hundred kilometers was being called in.

Peterson ordered Evans and Smith to return to the scene. Start a door to door, ensure the shooter wasn’t holding some innocent family hostage.

Crime scene tape had been strung up, strong lights arranged to illuminate the area. The cold rain seemed to be lessening. The injured woman had been taken away. A patch of black blood soaked into the ice where she’d lain. Ron Gavin knelt on the sidewalk. The street was full of marked and unmarked police vehicles, red-and-blue lights flashing. Smith recognized Adam’s truck. He’d have Norman out, trying to get a scent. Unlikely they’d find anything, so many people had been milling about.

A couple of men from the
Trafalgar Daily Gazette
, cameras and notebooks ready, stood behind the tape. Other reporters held microphones in front of witnesses. No TV cameras yet, but they’d be here soon.

Smith and Evans took the house closest to where the woman had fallen. A man and boy stood in the window watching them approach.

“Hey,” Smith stopped so abruptly Evans almost crashed into her. “Give me a sec.”

She ran back to the road.

Winters huddled in a circle with Paul Keller and Ray Lopez.

Keller said, “Worst possible situation. A random shooter.”

“Have you ID’d the victim?” Smith said.

“We found a purse beside her,” Winters said. “Alison’s going through it.”

“Alison,” Smith called, “is the name Franklin?”

“Got it in one.”

“I thought I recognized her. I stopped her yesterday. Last night.”

“What? Where? Why?”

“She was driving through town. Up and down the streets, going slow, checking out cars, driveways. I thought she was looking for unlocked vehicles so I pulled her over. Ran her license and plates. An older woman, nicely dressed, nervous, car neat and tidy. Hardly the type to go in for a bout of smash and grab.”

“Did she tell you what she was doing?”

“Said she was looking for a friend whose phone number she’d lost. She got her pronouns muddled, said the friend was a she and then said he, back to a she. I figured she’d been having an affair with some guy, he dumped her, and she was trying to find him. I told her to go home or I’d bring her in. It was so weird her name stuck in my mind. As I remember, her address is near here.”

“A witness said she lives in that house on the corner. He didn’t know her name, though. I knocked, but no one answered. Place’s quiet. What happened after that?”

“Nothing. I told her to go home and then I left. Didn’t see her again.”

“I can’t believe that’s a coincidence,” Ray Lopez said.

“No.”

Townshend held up the wallet, open to the driver’s license. “Margo Franklin. Sixty-one years old.”

“What the hell?” Winters said.

“You know her?” Keller asked.

“I might.” Winters pulled out his phone. “Molly, wait right there. Hi, yeah, no time to talk. Margo who works for you. What’s her last name? Thanks. It’ll be a late one.” He put his phone away.

“You’re onto something,” Smith said, reading the gleam in his eye.

“Margo Franklin works for my wife at the gallery. Perfectly pleasant lady, the times I met her. Recently retired, new to town. She’s been stalking a man.”

“What?” Keller sounded as surprised as Smith was. One never thought of middle-class, elderly ladies as potential stalkers. Molly remembered her own mom yelling at the police from behind the barricades, and decided that middle-class women were capable of just about anything.

“She claims he’s her long lost son,” Winters continued. “Eliza told me Margo’s obsessed with this man. I saw her at Cathy Lindsay’s funeral, paying more attention to this guy than to the service. He bolted out of the church soon as it was over. I wonder if Margo approached him. Eliza had a talk with Margo’s husband, and he told her that she, Margo, has been somewhat unstable since the death of her son a few years ago.”

“So,” Smith said, “she’s unstable. That doesn’t help us. She didn’t shoot herself.”

“No. She didn’t. But she was making a nuisance of herself.” He chewed his lip. Ron Gavin shouted, “Move that light closer.” Alison Townshend went to give him a hand.

“Someone else said something of interest to me earlier today.
If she’d invaded my privacy, I might have struck out at her
.”

“What’s this guy’s name?” Lopez asked.

“William Westfield. Sound familiar?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Seems a stretch,” Keller said.

“Maybe not.
He knew
Cathy from night school class. When we interviewed the people in that class, one of the students said she’d told them she went for a walk every morning in the woods behind her house. Easy enough to find out where she lived, hang around a couple of days to see what time she walked. And then wait for her.”

“You think this is the same shooter?”

“Ron’s got the slug. Went in her side and out again. Same type of weapon, far as he can tell.

“I’m going to pay a call on William Westfield. This is only a hunch, so I don’t want to drag a lot of people away. We need to check these houses in case the shooter’s still here, start asking questions, interviewing witnesses. Ray, our friends from the press are here, and we can be sure the big city boys will be descending ASAP. Toss them a bone, will you, and then see if you can locate Margo’s husband. Eliza might have a number for him.”

He looked at the officers. Everyone watched him. His eyes settled on Molly Smith. She saw a flash of indecision, and then he said, “Smith, you’re with me.”