Constable Molly Smith 01 - In the Shadow of the Glacier

Ashcroft believed in God, he would have fallen to his knees in the parking lot behind
Trafalgar Daily Gazette
and raised his hands in thanks.
    ***
    “Kootenay Boundary Regional Hospital in Trail. The autopsy’s scheduled for noon. We should just make it, which will put us in Dr. Lee’s good books. She hates being left waiting.” Winters leaned against the headrest and closed his eyes. “Wake me when we get there.”
    Communities in this part of the province were small, with long stretches of undeveloped land between them. Trail was about an hour from Trafalgar but less than half-an-hour from the border with Washington State. Smith had driven down this road many times. Lucky, Samwise, and Moonlight visited family in the States. They never visited Andy’s side of the family, and he didn’t often come with them. When Smith was fourteen, her parental grandfather, whom she had never met, died. After that her grandmother traveled to Trafalgar every second Christmas, and sometimes Andy’s sisters and their families came with her. No one ever spoke about the old man, and his years of bitterness at the son who’d abandoned not only his country but the legacy of generations of a proud military family.
    The sky was blue, and the temperature indicator in the van already read twenty-nine degrees Celsius. She switched on the car’s air conditioning. American tourists sometimes ran into difficulties with the change in the temperature scale as they crossed the border, thinking that twenty-nine degrees meant scarves and mittens, rather than the shorts and sunscreen required by the equivalent of eighty-five Fahrenheit.
    Houses and property sporadically broke through the heavy pine forest stretching back from the road. She passed everything from tumble-down shacks to luxury mansions, sometimes less than a hundred yards apart. At the lights for the turnoff to Castlegar, a young woman, hair wrapped in a red scarf, heavy pack at her feet, stood on the other side of the intersection, her thumb out. She raised her eyebrows as the light turned green and the unmarked police van, the only car on the road, accelerated. There weren’t many places you saw hitchhikers these days, and certainly not women. Other than the Kootenays, that is.
    It was five minutes to noon when they arrived at the hospital. Smith found a parking spot close to the entrance and switched off the engine. When she turned to wake up Winters, he was looking at her. There was no trace of sleep in his dark eyes or the muscles of his face.
    “Here we are. Trail.”
    “So I see. Thank you, Molly.”
    Smith cursed herself for an idiot. Did she always have to point out the obvious? Of course they were in Trail. Winters must have been here hundreds of times.
    They walked across the parking lot, heat rising from the asphalt. One of the advantages of being a woman is summer clothes—cropped pants, light cotton T-shirts, naked arms, barely there sandals, acceptable even at work. But now that she was a cop, Smith’s feet sweated in boots and thick socks, her pants clung to her legs, and her gunbelt dragged her down. She’d made the mistake of wearing a new bra, and beneath the Kevlar vest the underwire dug into tender skin. Winters, by contrast, was dressed comfortably in brown pants and a perfectly ironed cream shirt, open at the neck. The shirt wasn’t tucked in, and Smith knew that it concealed his gun and handcuffs.
    The hospital was quiet on a pleasant Friday morning. Her boots were loud on the freshly polished floors.
    “Have you attended an autopsy before, Molly?” Sergeant Winters asked, pushing through the door marked
No Entry
.
    “No.” A flock of small birds searched for a place to nest in her stomach.
    Dr. Lee was waiting for them. Her unbound hair fell in a sleek black waterfall. The too-large white lab coat covered her dress, and she held a Styrofoam coffee cup in her right hand.
    “We’re ready to begin.” Lee turned, and her stiletto heels tapped like a marching band down the bright white corridor. She tossed her cup into a wastepaper basket without giving it a glance.
    Smith swallowed.
    “There’s no disgrace in being sick or feeling faint. Leave if you have to,” Winters said. He pulled a small tube out of his pocket and rubbed it above his upper lip. He held it out. “Menthol. Kills some of the smell. This body isn’t old, so it shouldn’t be too bad, but it’s never pleasant. Take it.”
    Smith took it. She smiled at Sergeant