Constable Molly Smith 01 - In the Shadow of the Glacier

scene-of-the-crime van was edging its way down the alley. Evans waved them to a halt a few feet short of the mass that had once been Reg Montgomery.
    “I want to talk to them first, then I’ll have a look at that apartment.”
    “They shouldn’t have to bother coming up here.” Smith’s voice cracked. She coughed and tried again. “That spiderweb. It proves that no one was up here tonight. At least no one taller than about five feet five. And Montgomery is…was…taller than that.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “They would have broken the web, wouldn’t they?”
    “Perhaps our criminal knows the legend of Robert Bruce. Perhaps he, or she, carried Montgomery and isn’t taller than five foot five. Lots of people, men as well as women, aren’t. You reach your conclusions much too quickly, Constable Smith. Please don’t try to be so clever from now on. I’ll ask your opinion when I want it. Which won’t be often.”
    Smith’s face burned and she was thankful for the darkness. Sanctimonious prick. She’d bet a year’s salary that Montgomery and his assailant hadn’t been on this roof. And who the hell was Robert Bruce? Some famous detective who’d solved a crime by studying the mating habits of a spider? She’d look him up. In case there was a test tomorrow.
    She stood in the doorway to the bakery as Winters greeted the RCMP officers, who were setting up strong lights. Something small and brown, with a long tail, ran out from the garbage bags behind the convenience store and crossed the lane, heading for the safety of darkness on the other side of the fence. Levalle busied himself in the back of his shop, almost falling over trying to see what was going on outside.
    The coroner, Shirley Lee, had arrived while Winters and Smith were on the roof. She pulled on thin blue gloves and crouched beside the body. Winters squatted beside her.
    “See anything other than the obvious, doc?”
    “Define obvious, Sergeant,” she said, not looking up. She was tiny, not much over five feet, and thin. Every strand of her black hair was gathered into a stiff bun at the back of her delicate neck. Smith had met her once before, at a traffic fatality, and she’d felt like a lead-footed Sasquatch in the presence of the diminutive, feminine doctor.
    “Dead from a blow to the back of the head,” Winters said.
    “At a guess, I’d agree,” Dr. Lee said. “Send him to Trail, and I’ll confirm tomorrow. I see no obvious signs of trauma other than the head injury.”
    “Could he have fallen?”
    “There should be injury other than just to the head in that case. I have to see him with his clothes off to be sure. I suppose he could have fallen directly onto his head. Unlikely, though.”
    She lifted the right hand and leaned over to have a good look.
    “Something interesting, Doc?”
    “What do you see here, Sergeant?” She ordered a technician to turn a light on their hands, and pointed to Montgomery’s fist, clenched tight. Her hand, holding his, looked like that of a child clinging to her grandfather.
    From where she stood, Smith couldn’t see anything significant.
    “Hair,” Winters said.
    “A few strands. Be sure you bag them.”
    Lee stood up in one liquid motion, as graceful as a ballet dancer, and pulled her gloves off, one slim finger at a time. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Sergeant. Call me in the morning and we’ll arrange a time.”
    “Sure.”
    “Don’t know why they pay her the big bucks,” Winters said, more to himself than to Smith, as the doctor walked away. “I’ve never heard her say anything I hadn’t already concluded for myself.”
    The coroner’s van backed down the alley.
    He pulled a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket, and pulled them over his fingers. He knelt beside the body and patted Montgomery’s pockets. “That’s interesting. Nothing here.”
    “Wallet?” Smith asked.
    Winters used the end of his pen to lift the side of Montgomery’s suit jacket away. “Nope. No cell phone either. He could have been out for an evening stroll. Left the house without phone or wallet, but at a guess I’d say not. Not dressed in a nice suit like this.” He felt both the dead man’s wrists. “And no watch.” He got to his feet with a stifled groan and pulled off the gloves. A technician held out an evidence bag and he dropped them in.
    “You think this might have been a theft?”
    “Or made to look like one.”
    They watched in silence as Montgomery was loaded onto a