A Cold White Sun: A Constable Molly Smith Mystery (Constable Molly Smith Series) (9 page)

Sure, Gord had put on a few pounds recently. But Cathy wasn’t exactly the hot chick he’d met all those years ago. He thought about what she’d looked like back then. The firm breasts, flat stomach, muscular legs and arms, taut skin.

He bent to pull on his shoes, grunting slightly with the effort.

Jocelyn ran into the mud room. She grabbed her coat off the hook.

“I’m going for a walk, honeybunch. You stay here.”

“I want to come.”

“I need some time alone.”

“Please, Daddy,” she whined. “Don’t leave me.”

“I won’t be long. I’ll be back by dinnertime.”

She stuffed her hands into her mittens. She pulled her hat down over her ears. He jerked it off and threw it across the room.

“I said no.”

She burst into tears.

“For god’s sake, you’re not a baby, stop acting like one,” he yelled.

“Please, Daddy, please.”

“Keep crying like that, and I might never come home.”

He wrenched open the door. Turned at a movement. Cathy’s mother stood there, Gord’s own mother peering over the shorter woman’s shoulder. Renee stepped into the mud room. Cold eyes fixed on Gord’s face, she gathered Jocelyn into her arms. “Grandpa’s downstairs fixing the broken shelf. He’ll take you for a walk.”

“No. I want to go with my daddy! Mommy, I want Mommy!”

Gord slammed the door behind him. He was in the garage. His SUV and Cathy’s van were parked in their places. He slapped the button by the wall to open the garage door. He ran down the driveway, followed by Jocelyn’s howls. Ralph, dependable as ever, had coated the path with a thick layer of salt. Gord’s heart pounded in his chest. He sucked in cold air and gasped for breath.

He fumbled for his cell phone, deep in his pant’s pocket. Shaking, gloved hands pulled it out. It fell onto the ground. He swore heartily, grabbed it, and flipped open the lid. Four unanswered calls and six text messages.

He punched a button and listened as the call went through.

Chapter Twelve

Every Monday, Lucky Smith began her day at the Trafalgar Women’s Support Center. As well as being a member of the non-profit’s board, she taught new mothers and expectant women the importance of nutrition in childhood and pregnancy.

Several members of her class would be away today, gone on vacation, but enough had said they wanted to come she decided to keep the class open.

Lucky demonstrated how to prepare nutritious homemade baby food, introducing infants to solids, and cooking healthy food young children would eat because they enjoyed it in the small kitchen at the back of the center. Any woman was welcome to join the program, but only the marginalized and the young usually did. Middle-class women with working husbands, jobs, supportive mothers of their own, money to spend on the latest parenting books, didn’t need Lucky’s advice.

Her students were mostly teenagers and a few sad women who’d slipped through the cracks in life. Some, she suspected, came mainly for the food that she handed out after the cooking classes and shopping trips.

The support center was housed in a crumbling 19th century house that had, a long time ago, been one of the most fashionable residences in town.

This morning, Lucky had to give the front door an extra hard shove to get it to open. The old wood was alternately shrinking and expanding according to the weather. They needed a new door. They needed a lot of things—the cosmetics would have to wait. The large main room was freshly painted in neutral beige, the walls covered with mass-produced art of the type that came ready framed. The table tops were dusted, and sunlight poured through sparkling windows, but it was impossible to disguise the grime-stained carpet, threadbare furniture, thin faded upholstery, ill-fitting doors, chipped crown molding, water marks in the decorative plaster of the ceiling, and the crack in the far wall, getting larger almost before her eyes.

Bev Price, the tiny dynamo who was the inspiration and driving force behind the center, sat at her desk in the corner of the formerly-gracious living room which served as her office. She pushed back her chair and gave Lucky a wave.

“Have a nice weekend?” Lucky asked.

“Nice enough. I’m worried about the roof. We lost more tiles last week in that sudden wind. Something’s going to have to be done, and I don’t know where we’ll find the money. Donations are down sharply with the recession, expenses are up. And then there’s the furnace, surviving on a wish and a prayer.”

As if summoned, the wheezing old furnace rattled to life.

“We’ll think of something,” Lucky said. “We always do.”

“Someday, I fear we won’t. Then what?”

Lucky rested her hand against her friend’s thin back. “Let’s worry about that when the day comes, okay?”

Bev gave her a weak smile. “Okay.”

They said no more. Both of them, Lucky knew, were thinking the same thing. The center did such important work, giving babies a good start in life. What could be more vital? Yet they had to beg for funding, scrounge every cent, debate whether to fix the furnace or eliminate one of their outreach programs. When military jets were fully paid for, and prisons being built at the same time the crime rate was falling, and fat business executives dined in expensive restaurants getting a tax deduction on hundred dollar bottles of wine and thick marbled steaks.

No point in getting angry about it, Lucky reminded herself. Such was the way of the world, and she’d find herself in an early grave if she allowed herself to let all the injustices gnaw at her insides.

In which case she would be of no help to anybody.

The door flew open and two young women burst in, stomping snow from boots, pulling off gloves and scarves. Round bellies strained against coats too small to fasten at the front.

“Sorry we’re late,” the taller one said. “The bus slid off the road on George Street, and we had to walk the rest of the way.”

“You’re not late,” Lucky said, “I haven’t started yet.”

She watched them head for the back, sheading snow and outdoor gear as they walked. High school girls, the both of them.

Lucky Smith wasn’t here to judge anyone. She’d do the best she could to give their babies a good start in life by trying to ensure they were well fed.

When she arrived in the kitchen, four young women were sitting around the table. The other two were mothers now, babies in arms or snoozing in strollers. Heather’s baby was feeding at the breast with gusto. Heather was one of the few married women who came to Lucky’s classes. She was only seventeen, and Lucky figured Heather would be better off without the husband, a sneering nineteen year old with baggy pants and a whole lot of attitude. Lucky suspected child abuse lurked in Heather’s background. The girl was smart and well-read. Lucky was trying to encourage her to finish high school, get into college. Lucky suspected the arrogant husband didn’t want a wife better educated than he.

Poor girl, trading an abusive parent for a husband not much better.

Again, not her place to judge.

“She was my English teacher last year,” Marilee, one of the expectant mothers, was saying to Heather as Lucky came in.

“Really, what was she like?”

Marilee shrugged. “All right, I guess. Just a teacher.”

“Are you talking about Cathy Lindsay?” Lucky asked.

“Yeah. You heard what happened to her?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Weird. Isn’t your daughter a cop? Who do they think did it?”

“Moonlight and I don’t discuss police business.” Not that Lucky didn’t constantly try to squeeze information out of her daughter.

“Probably the husband.” Heather shifted her infant to the other breast. “It’s always the husband.” She kept her head down, her face covered by a waterfall of dark hair, and Lucky was unable to see her expression.

“Maybe he found out she was screwing Mr. Hamilton,” Marilee said.

“She wasn’t!”

“Where have you been, Brenda? Everyone knows she just about drools when he walks by.”

“Well, pardon me, I didn’t know.”

“Who’s Mr. Hamilton?” Lucky asked, unable to restrain her curiosity.

“The new math teacher. Mark Hamilton. He started at our school in September. He’s dreamy, for an older guy. Super athlete type. Mrs. Lindsay’s been all over him. Fluttering her eyelashes and simpering. At her age. It’s embarrassing. Ronnie Desmond caught them once.”

“Caught them screwing!”

“Well, not quite,” Merilee admitted reluctantly. “Ronnie says Mrs. Lindsay was leaning in real close, like for a kiss. Her hand was on his chest, like she was undoing buttons. They jumped out of their skin when they realized Ronnie had come in.”

Lucky wondered if she should tell the girls to go to the police with this information. So far it sounded like nothing more than gossip and innuendo. Teenagers loved gossip, especially anything to do with sex.

Heck, everyone loved gossip to do with sex.

“The husband did it because she dissed him by falling for another guy. Guaranteed,” Heather said, her voice flat and unemotional. Lucky wondered what on earth had happened to this girl to make her so cynical.

“Liam should be ready to begin trying solid foods soon, Heather,” Lucky said, reaching more comfortable ground. “What do you think?”

***

John Winters learned nothing at the autopsy. He’d expected to learn nothing, but these things had to be done.

Cathy Lindsay was a healthy female who had given birth more than once. Her heart and lungs were in good shape for her age, she was not overweight, the pathologist could see no signs of developing tumors or impending illness.

She’d died from a shotgun slug striking her in the back, penetrating her heart before exiting her body.

“She was dead,” Doctor Shirley Lee said, “before she hit the ground.”

Winters rubbed his eyes. He’d been to a lot of autopsies over the years. Far more than he ever wanted to. In some ways, the physical ways, it got easier. He didn’t want to throw up any more, could study mangled flesh and shattered limbs or disembodied organs without feeling faint. Unless the smell was particularly bad it didn’t much bother him. But he never stopped thinking of the dead body in front of him, laid out on the steel table under the harsh white lights, as a
person
. A person with a life they’d led, for good or bad—often both. With stories that would never be told and laughs that would never be shared.

Wasn’t he turning into a sentimental old fool? He tried to concentrate on the doctor’s voice as she methodically recorded her findings.

Doctor Lee walked him to the morgue doors while her assistant tidied up. They’d release the body tomorrow. No need to hold onto it.

Shirley Lee was an excellent pathologist. She seemed, to John Winters, to have no other personality. She always dressed in an expensive gray or navy blue suit with stern lines and a skirt cut sharply at midknee. The high heels she favored seemed more like weapons as they clattered down the industrial hallway warning everyone to be on their guard, rather than an attempt to appear attractive and feminine. She wore her long black hair in a tight bun scraped back off her face. She didn’t crack jokes or engage in friendly small talk. Winters got the feeling that the morgue assistant, Russ, lived in terror of the diminutive doctor with the penetrating black eyes and thin-lipped mouth.

It was unusual, in fact unprecedented, for her to walk with Winters after she’d torn off her surgical gloves and said she’d have her report ready shortly.

“They say,” she said, drawing the words out, “she was walking her dog.”

“Yup. On the old railroad track above town.”

They passed a janitor rubbing her mop across dirty boot prints and snowmelt.

“Someone shot her.”

“So it would seem.”

“Why?”

They reached the doors to the parking lot. Outside, sun shone on mounds of freshly plowed snow.

“If I knew why, I’d be a lot closer to finding the one who did it.” Winters studied Shirley Lee. She never asked
why.
The why of violent death wasn’t her job. He’d seen her carve up bodies of small children while showing as much emotion as if she were repairing a toaster. Today, something moved behind her eyes. She swallowed.

“Has it come to that? Here?”

“To what? It’s an isolated incident, Doc. We’ll get to the bottom of it. I’m guessing mistaken identity until I know more. Doctor Lee? Shirley?”

She shook her head, like a dog coming out of the water. She blinked several times, rapidly. When she looked at him again her eyes were their normal black chips.

“An isolated incident. Quite right. I’ll send you my report as soon as it’s ready, Sergeant Winters.” She half turned, her white lab coat swirling around her legs. “Oh, have a nice day.” She walked away, head up, heels tapping a furious rhythm. The janitor almost fell over her cleaning bucket in her haste to get out of the pathologist’s way.