Constable Molly Smith 01 - In the Shadow of the Glacier

the walls.”
    “Bummer.” Christa was an only child; her mother had died when she was in primary school, her father devastated by the death. She’d been unofficially raised by the Smith family.
    Smith put the loaf onto the table, along with margarine and a pie-shaped wedge of brie. The kettle whistled, and she poured hot water into the brown tea pot with the broken handle. “It’s two AM and I’m not here to talk about my mom and dad. Spill, kid.”
    Christa explained about taking the phone off the hook, the knocking on the door, the neighbor screaming at her.
    Smith munched on bread and cheese. “If you just wanna talk, go ahead. But if you want my advice, you already have it.”
    Christa stirred milk into her mug. “I have to get some work done or I’ll fail this course.”
    Smith watched a fly trying to find its way out the window over the sink.
    “Okay, I’ll make a complaint.”
    Smith knew how hard this decision was for her: no matter how harshly life treated her, Christa always believed the best of people. “Charlie Bassing might look like a tough guy, but he’s a weasly no-account nerd beneath all that steroid-enhanced muscle. No point in calling right now, you’ll get night dispatch. Go down to the station tomorrow, that’ll be best. You want me to come with you?”
    Christa nodded.
    “I’m on this special assignment, so I’m busy in the morning. Perhaps we can meet up at the station.” Smith was dying to tell her friend about the investigation and her part in it. But Christa was looking out the window at the lights twinkling on the mountainside. For weeks she’d resisted Smith’s advice to take a restraining order out on Charlie, convinced that she only had to be firm and he’d go away. Tonight, she’d listen if Molly talked, but her attention wouldn’t be on what the murder of Reg Montgomery could mean to her friend’s career.
    “I gotta go.” Smith drained her tea. “If he comes back tonight, call the station straight away. And then me. Got that?”
    Christa nodded.
    “I’ll give you a buzz soon as I’m free. I hope they give me the job of serving the restraining order. I might accidentally bring my truncheon down across the back of his head and knee him in the nuts.”
    “I don’t want that to happen,” Christa said. “Maybe I shouldn’t make an official complaint. He likes me, that’s all. But it’s getting to be such a bother.”
    “I was kidding, Chris. But get one thing straight. He doesn’t like you. He wants to own you. There’s a difference.”

Chapter Seven
    Shirley Lee called while Winters was flipping bacon. It was seven AM Eliza had to catch a flight out of Castlegar, going to Toronto to shoot a magazine ad for a hybrid car. Something designed to appeal to the “middle-aged, upper-middle-class, environmentally aware woman.”
    “Aging bags with piles of dough and a guilty conscience,” Winters had said when she told him of the assignment.
    “Watch who you’re calling an aging bag, old man,” she’d replied. “And better a hybrid than jail bait and a Camaro.”
    “Yo, doc,” Winters said into the phone, reaching across the counter to press the lever down on the toaster. The twenty-fifth anniversary hadn’t been a total washout, and he was in a good mood.
    “Good morning, John,” Dr. Lee said. “I’m doing the autopsy on Montgomery at noon. It was a quiet night, so I can give him my full attention.”
    “Glad to hear it.”
    She hung up without bothering to say goodbye.
    “Who was that?” Eliza came into the kitchen, fitting a gold hoop into her ear. “Business?” The weather report was calling for another day of record-breaking heat, and she’d dressed casually for the trip in black capris, white T-shirt, and sandals that emphasized what the Victorians would have called her well-turned ankles.
    “Natch. Bacon?”
    She shuddered, and reached into the fridge for yoghurt and a jar of blackcurrant jam. She snatched at a slice of toast as it flew out of the toaster and tossed it onto a plate.
    “I’ve got time to take you to the airport, and get back to pick up my apprentice,” Winters said, cracking eggs into the hot fat.
    “You’re driving?”
    “Can you believe it, she doesn’t own a car. And she calls herself a cop? What is the world coming to?”
    “Don’t start your relationship with this constable with such cynicism, John. Give her some trust. Paul wouldn’t have hired her if she was no good.”
    “She’s too green.