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

by Delany, Vicki

  He tossed the end of his cigarette to the sidewalk. Ground it out beneath his shoe, and then picked it up. He checked carefully that it was extinguished and, with a smile at Solway, he slid across the bench and dropped the butt into the sand-filled top section of the trash can.

  He lumbered to his feet. “That be all, Sarge? I got places to go, people to see.”

  “Thanks Gar,” Winters said. “Have a good day.”

  “Same to you, my man. And my lady.” He walked away, with his awkward listing gate.

  Winters peered into the trash. Cigarette butts stuck up out of the sand like trees in a forest after a fire had passed through.

  “You think Gar had something to do with the Lindsay killing?” Solway said, her disbelief matching Winters’.

  “No. I think someone’s playing me for a fool.” He hadn’t dared hope a killer as organized as this one would accidently drop a cigarette brimming with DNA at the scene, but even the best of them made mistakes. Otherwise the cops wouldn’t catch most of them.

  The person who’d killed Cathy Lindsay had come into town, picked up a cigarette butt, perhaps from this very bin, tucked it into his pocket and carried it up the mountain to drop where he’d stood, aiming his sights at a woman out walking her dog. He’d left the ‘evidence’ as a gigantic screw-you gesture to the police.

  ***

  Eliza’s hand hovered over the phone, as her head spun with indecision.

  Privacy, Eliza firmly believed, was a virtue. Everyone was entitled to privacy, unless they were committing an offence against another’s person or possessions. Unless, in other words they were intruding on someone’s privacy.

  Otherwise, butt out.

  She ran her fingers across the buttons of her phone as she glanced at the computer screen. Margo’s home number was in her employee file as well as Margo’s husband Steve’s cell phone number in case of an emergency.

  This was hardly an emergency. Margo had entrusted Eliza with her private information, trusted it would be used only if necessary.

  Eliza made the call.

  “Mr. Franklin,” she said, desperate now that she’d made up her mind to get the words spoken as fast as possible. “I’m Eliza Winters, from the art gallery where Margo works.”

  “Hi. Nice to meet you at last, Eliza. On the phone at any rate. Can I help you with something? Are you trying to get hold of Margo? Isn’t she off today?”

  “Yes. I mean, yes, she’s not working today. Which is why I’m calling, Mr. Franklin.”

  “Steve, please.”

  “Steve. This is difficult for me to say, but I feel that I must. I need to talk to you about Margo.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Perhaps we could meet. Are you free this afternoon?”

  “As it happens, I’m in town right now. I’m in the parking lot at the hardware store, about to go home. I could stop by the gallery.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  He came through the door a few minutes later, a man in his sixties with a round belly, bulbous red nose, and a thick shock of pure-white hair.

  He crossed the floor with quick, confident strides and stuck out his hand. She accepted it in her own. A bandage was wrapped around his forefinger, his palm was covered in scratches, and a healing cut bisected the pad of his thumb. He saw her notice and said with a self-depreciating grin, “Since I retired, I’m trying to do all the odd jobs around the house myself. It’s a tough learning curve. Now, what’s this about Margo?”

  “She spoke to me in confidence,” Eliza said, the words thick in her throat, “I won’t reveal the contents of that conversation, although I understand you know.”

  “Go on.”

  “Something happened, here, in the store that worries me, and that is my business. We had a customer the other day, a gentleman aged around forty, forty-five. Margo seemed…unduly interested in him. She told me she believes him to be her son.”

  Steve grimaced. “Yeah, I figured it was something like that.”

  “The man wasn’t happy at her attention. He left the gallery, and later sent someone ahead to ensure Margo wasn’t here before he came in to buy what he wanted. I’m sorry, Steve, but as well as being concerned about Margo herself, I can’t have her chasing customers away. I also understand she followed him into another store.” Her voice trailed off. “I thought you should know, that’s all.”

  “I appreciate it, Eliza. I do. I guessed this was happening. Again.”

  “Again?”

  “Margo had a baby boy when she was very young, and he was taken away from her. That’s never been a secret between us. I was okay with her trying to locate him through the usual channels. Nothing came of it. She was highly disappointed, but she seemed to accept that she wouldn’t be able to find him. We had two kids of our own. A boy and a girl. Our eldest, our son Gerald, was killed in a car accident three years ago.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “As well as Gerald, the accident killed his wife and their unborn child. As you can imagine that took an enormous emotional toll on Margo.”

  “It would on any mother. Or father.”

  “Once Gerald died, Margo began seeking her son, Jackson, again. This time she wasn’t content to try to open adoption records. She started looking for him everywhere she went. We’d be walking down the street and she’d suddenly turn and chase after some random white man of about the right age.”

  “Did you get her any…help?”

  “I tried, but she doesn’t think she has a problem. It’s created an enormous rift between Margo and Ellen, our daughter. Ellen thinks her mother’s insulting Gerald’s memory by wanting to replace him with, and I quote, “some best-forgotten bastard”

  Eliza cringed.

  “Precisely. Margo didn’t care for that and they had quite the argument. Ellen also believes Margo’s denigrating her, Ellen, because she’s a girl and Margo wants to regain the preferred boy child. Which is absolutely not the case, but matters can get out of hand mighty fast when families start fighting. Things are said that can never be unsaid.

  “We’d been planning for a long time to move to a small town when we retired. I hoped a change would help Margo get over this obsession. Obviously, I was wrong.”

  “You need to get her some professional help.”

  “I know, I know. Everything was going great when we came here. She stopped chasing strange men, stopped scouring the newspapers inspecting the face of everyone in every picture. I thought she was over it. Apparently not.”

  Eliza gave him what she hoped was an encouraging smile. “If there’s anything I can do to help, please let me know. I do like Margo. Very much.”

  “Thanks.”

  The door chimes tinkled and two women came in. Well dressed, expensively groomed, laden with shopping bags. Steve nodded to them on his way out.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  “Give me some good news,” John Winters said as he came through the office door, thoroughly discouraged after his chat with Gar O.

  “Two things,” Lopez said, swiveling his chair. “First, Mark Hamilton. I’ve got his army medical records.”

  “Thank heavens,” Winters said, throwing himself into his chair, “for interservice co-operation.”

  “Nothing’s amiss. He got a clean bill of health when discharged. He was never wounded, and there’s no record of him receiving, or needing, psychiatric care. All negatives, from our POV.”

  “Negatives can be positive,” Winters said. “You saw him at the funeral. The man looked like the devil and all the hounds of hell were after him. Total panic. What brought that on? I heard no loud noises, no unexpected screaming or shouting that might have prompted a flashback to a firefight.”

  “Can’t hang a man for being upset at a funeral.”

  “Keep digging. The teachers say Cathy was irritating Hamilton. He tried to avoid her when he could. She appeared not to want to take no for an answer.”

  “So he gave her a no she had to accept?”


  “Perhaps. I’d like to talk to one of his commanding officers. See if you can find someone for me.”

  “He’s been out of the army a good few years. Gone to university, become a teacher, moved here.”

  “He didn’t learn to shoot at teacher’s college, and he didn’t go into a full-blown panic attack because the church was full of well-behaved high school students.”

  “I see your point. In my spare time,” Lopez grimaced, “I’ve been working on the ViCLAS report. I sent it on Friday after you thought about the serial killer connection, while, I might add, Madeleine tapped her toes and waited for me to finish before we went to her friend’s for dinner.” ViCLAS was the Canadian police interagency communication tool used for finding links between crimes in distant jurisdictions. Not easy to use, time consuming, but a lot better than the old days when they’d often not even know about a similar incident a few miles away if it had been committed in another province or state. “Someone must have had time to kill on the weekend, because I got a report back. They might have found something.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “From 1986-1997 there was a series of sniper shootings in Arizona. A place a lot like Trafalgar from what I can tell. Small town in the wilderness, lots of tourists, full of arty types, and transients,” Lopez wiggled his fingers in the air, “in search of their spirituality. Over the eleven years in question there were six sniper killings. All the victims were female, all of them white, all in the thirty to forty-five age group. Otherwise they had nothing in common, not religion, income group, marital status. Nothing. The victims were either hiking in the wilderness or walking in a sparely populated residential area when they were shot. The shooter always maintained a good distance from the victim, and he used a variety of weapons, various types of rifles or shotguns. Never a handgun.”

  “Indicating the perp disposed of the firearm after the killing.”

  “Right. Then in July of 1997, it ended. Not a single incident since.”

  “Grendel,” Winters said.

  “What?”

  “Reminds me of a story. They have any suspects?”

  “A few, but nothing concrete and nothing that would tie anyone to more than one of the victims, other than the fact that, like Trafalgar, a small town’s a small town. No one was ever charged. Law enforcement came from all over to help out. And then it ended. The police pretty much assumed the perp had died or left town and that was the end of that. They were looking for a serial killer, but this case had none of the normal serial killer indicators. No trophies taken, no taunting the police, no cryptic notes to the press. Believe it or not, other than in police circles and the town itself, the case had a pretty low profile. Didn’t get much national attention.”

  “The days before the Internet.”

  “Over the years, officers have questioned men arrested for similar shootings, but no one they came across had a connection to the Arizona business.”

  “That’s interesting, but I doubt it has anything to do with our guy. Just another shooter.”

  “We can only hope. God help us if this was the first.”

  “First of what?” Barb Kowalski asked.

  “Nothing,” Lopez said quickly.

  Barb stood in the doorway, carrying an ominous-looking envelope. She shook it and coins jingled. “I’m collecting. Marlene Hardcastle’s retiring.”

  “Who the heck is Marlene Hardcastle?”

  “The law clerk at the RCMP detachment. I have a card for you to sign, too.”

  Winters grumbled and pulled out his wallet.

  ***

  Men chased each other around the ice. The puck skidded from one side of the rink to another. Sticks flew, bodies collided, the crowd roared their approval.

  Gord Lindsay saw none of it. He sat in his favorite chair, an untouched bottle of beer and an empty bowl of chips on the table beside him. Renee had been through here a few minutes ago, dusting and tidying. She must have thought gremlins had snuck into the house while they were at the funeral—at Cathy’s funeral—to mess up the TV room.

  “Sure you don’t want to come?” Ralph said. “Doesn’t do you any good, sitting here brooding.”

  “I’m not brooding,” Gord said. “I’m watching the game.”

  “Yeah. Right. Suit yourself.”

  Jocelyn dashed around her grandfather. She’d changed out of the skirt and blouse she’d worn to her mother’s funeral and put on a well-worn pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt with sparkly lettering across the front. The sleeves were too short and the hem of the jeans rose above her thin ankle bones. She was growing fast; she’d need new clothes soon. Cathy would…No, Cathy was dead. Gord would have to be the one to take his daughter shopping.

  “Please come, Daddy. Please.”

  “I’ll be here when you get back, honeybunch. Off you go now, your grandmas are waiting.”

  “Please.” She grabbed his arm, started to pull. “Please come.”

  He jerked his arm away. “Will you stop that goddamned whining. You’re not five years old any more.”

  The girl’s face crumpled and she burst into tears. Ralph muttered soft words, put his arm around her shoulders, and led her out of the room, throwing Gord a look that could sour milk.

  “Everything all right?” Renee called.

  The family was going out to dinner. Renee and Ann said they didn’t have the energy to cook, not after the funeral. Gord simply couldn’t face going with them. Squeezed into a booth at the Chinese buffet between his mom and Renee, both of them thinking they were keeping his spirits up by chattering away like a couple of birds who didn’t see the tornado building on the horizon. Ralph shoveling in orange-tinged chicken and ribs coated in sauce the consistency of wallpaper paste.

  Jocelyn’s large sad eyes, watching her father, waiting for him to take all the pain away.

  Bradley had been coaxed out of his room, away from the ever-present computer games, by his grandmothers and talked into accompanying them to dinner. Gord hated to think it took the death of his mother to turn the kid into a half-normal human being.

  He flipped through the channels. Nothing worth watching. He continued flipping.

  The doorbell rang.

  He ignored it. Another well-meaning neighbor bearing a casserole or homemade cake. A stream of which were arriving at the house. Renee put it all in the freezer, provision against the day when they’d be gone and Gord would have to feed his children himself.

  The bell again. Longer this time, as if someone were leaning against it.

  It stopped.

  His cell phone buzzed.

  He glanced at the display. Oh god, Elizabeth. He hadn’t been at all pleased to see her at the funeral. Dressed so no one could fail to notice or remember her.

  He hesitated. He didn’t want to talk to her. He didn’t want her here, but she could be mighty persistent. Elizabeth could be counted on to stand her ground until she got her way. Once, he’d thought that an admirable trait.

  “I can’t talk now,” he snapped into the phone. “My daughter’s calling for me.”

  “No she isn’t,” Elizabeth replied. “She just left. The whole happy family, minus the grieving husband, piled into a van and drove down the hill.”

  “Where are you?”

  The doorbell rang.

  He scrambled out of his chair, bolted down the hallway, and threw open the door, Spot hot on his heels.

  Elizabeth stood there, smiling, dressed as she’d been at the funeral.

  “For god’s sake, are you out of your mind? You can’t come here.”

  “Why not?” She stepped forward. He didn’t move. She took another step until they were almost bumping chests. Gord glanced around, down the street, at the neighbors.

  He stepped back, and Elizabeth walked past him into the living room. Spot followed, sniffing at her ankles. Elizabeth scanned the room, ignoring the curious dog. “Nice house.”

  All neat and tidy. Nothing at all like the home Cathy had lived in
. Gord shifted a china figurine so the arrangement was off center, just because he could.

  “I don’t want you here, Elizabeth. Please, this is Cathy’s home. I live here with my children.”