Constable Molly Smith 01 - In the Shadow of the Glacier

Winters.
Deep calming breaths
, she said to herself, applying the balm.
Take deep calming breaths.
This couldn’t be any worse than the guy who flew off his motorcycle and hit the side of the mountain head first going a hundred kilometers an hour. After having a lot to drink and telling his buddies that only pussies wore helmets.
    They followed Lee through the swinging doors.
    The room was filled with white light, like someone’s idea of heaven’s waiting room. However, unlike what Smith might hope to find in the heavenly vestibule, a slab of meat that had once been a human being lay on the table in the center of the room. He was naked, and in the indignity of death and the lights of the morgue his skin was the pale blue of skim milk. His mouth gaped open. His belly was flabby, the muscles of his arms and legs shrunken to pinpricks, genitals withered to insignificance. The table he lay on wasn’t like any table Smith had ever seen. A gutter ran all around it. She tried not to think of what might be the purpose of the gutter.
    A young man stood against the wall, beside an array of instruments that would have done a medieval torture chamber proud. He was almost as pale as Montgomery, and a scattering of whiskers on his chin struggled to make a goatee. He nodded greetings.
    “Russ,” Winters said. Smith dared not say anything.
    Dr. Lee walked to Montgomery’s head. She pulled an elastic band out of the pocket of her lab coat and, with one twist, bound her hair. Then she held out her hand, and Russ handed her a saw. “I’ve made a visual examination of the exterior of the body, and am now going to penetrate the skull.” The doctor held the instrument over Montgomery’s head. “If you think you are going to be sick, Constable Smith,” she said, “leave immediately.” The saw roared to life. “It messes up the chain of evidence if I have to pick an observer’s vomit out of the cadaver’s brains.”
    Smith put both hands to her mouth and fled.
    ***
    “That wasn’t nice, Doctor,” Winters said, once Lee had finished her task and they’d left Russ to clean up.
    “Constable Smith?” the doctor said. “Next time, she’ll be better prepared. She’ll last a good five minutes before running out the door. And before you know it, she’ll be as cool as a cucumber, just like you.”
    “There’s something to be said, Shirley, for people who vomit at the sight of violent death.”
    “Not in our professions, John.”
    “Probably not. Tell me what you think, before I fetch our embarrassed constable.”
    “Killed by a series of blows to the back of the head. No doubt by the proverbial blunt instrument. I don’t see any traces of the instrument itself in the wound, which almost certainly rules out wood. Something metal, probably, and clean. Death was instantaneous or as good as. There are no wounds, other than to the head, that I can see. No defensive wounds, no sign of restraint—bruising around the wrists or ankles, for example. His last meal had been steak and potatoes and Caesar salad. Why men of your age persist in believing that a few leaves of lettuce, if they’re coated with high-fat dressing, sprinkled with chunks of bacon and deep-fried bread cubes, is at all healthy, I hesitate to guess. He’d eaten less than an hour before death.” Lee shrugged thin shoulders. “My report will be ready before the end of the day.”
    “Thanks, doc.” What the hell did she mean by
men of your age
? First Tyler suggested that Winters should try the delights of Viagra and now Shirley Lee was lumping him in with the overweight Reginald Montgomery.
    “Time of death?” he asked.
    “Less than an hour before I got there. He was very fresh.”
    Lee walked away without another word. Back to her strange world of the dead.
    Winters went in search of his constable.
    She was sitting on a bench by the front doors of the hospital. The smokers, some of them in wheelchairs, or taking in liquids through IVs, watched her from the corner of their eyes.
    “Ready to go?”
    Her eyes were dry, but tinged with red. She held her hat in her hands. Strands of pale hair had escaped from the braid and caressed her face. Despite the blue uniform, the badge and gun belt, she looked like a high school cheerleader who’d just found out that her boyfriend, the captain of the football team, had been making merry behind the stands with another girl.
    An ambulance sped past, under full lights and sirens.
    “We have work to do back in