In the Shadow of the Glacier

by Vicki Delany

  “So you thought. Tell me, what would you have done if she’d admitted that her husband was the killer? Offered her a cup of tea, a shoulder to cry on?”

  “With all due respect, sir, that’s most unfair. Mrs. Tyler did not finger her husband. In fact she didn’t even realize where your rather obvious questions were heading.” Smith plunged on, realizing that she was heading for a cliff, but, like a lemming, unable to stop. She pulled into the police station parking lot, not quite understanding how she’d managed to get here. She shoved the gearshift into park. “I’d suggest, Sergeant, that if Mrs. Tyler had a single ounce of guile she’d have been onto you in a moment and be stringing us a line that would stretch all the way to Kootenay Lake.” Molly Smith watched her career take wings and fly off into the clear sky. “She was so infatuated with you, she’d have admitted that Santa Claus visited last night, if that’s what she thought you wanted to hear.”

  Winters turned in his seat. “How many years of expertise do you put behind that opinion, Constable?”

  She took a deep breath. Oh, well, if she was fired from the police, she could always find work in her parents’ store. “Twenty-six years. Unless you think that we spring fully formed as if from the brow of Zeus the day we leave police college. In that case I have less than one.”

  Winters looked out the window. Smith pulled the keys out of the ignition. She didn’t know whether to get out of the car or sit here and wait until he spoke to her. Always easier to do nothing. So she sat.

  “The Chief Constable seems to think you’ve the potential to make a competent officer,” he said after a pause so long she wouldn’t have been surprised if it’d started to snow. “I’m aware that you know these people, some of them very well. That’s a complication I rarely came across in my years in Vancouver. But you’re a police officer first. You’ll arrest your grandmother if you have to. Think you can do that, Constable Smith?”

  “I’ve thought about that. When I first decided to apply for the force, and almost every day since.” With an activist mother like Lucky, Smith knew that the possibility of her arresting her own mother wasn’t idle speculation. “But I want to be a police officer, Sergeant Winters, and a good one. And I want to live in the Kootenays, at least for now. So yes, I will arrest my grandmother, should she be caught digging up a neighbor’s perennial she’s had her eye on, or hitting a young man with her cane if he’s shown her what she thinks of as disrespect.” Smith looked at her hands, twisting the car keys over and over.

  “Remember your place, Molly, in the course of this investigation. I’m looking to you for local commentary, not intervention. You are not replacing Detective Lopez. Do you understand?”

  She understood all right. It was he who didn’t. This was not the big city, where everyone kept rigidly to their assigned roles. In a town the size of Trafalgar, you had to give and take a bit. “I understand.”

  “I’m hoping that the preliminary report from the forensics team’ll be ready, and we can hear what the officers who visited the shops backing onto the alley found out. Let’s go.”

  As she climbed out of the car, she lifted her eyes to the mountaintops. Sunlight sparked on the snows at the top of Koola Glacier. Winters might be an overbearing jackass, but he’d kept her on the case. And that was all that mattered.

  Constable Jim Denton was at the front desk. A solid, reliable cop of the old school, happy to remain a constable and to staff the desk while watching the calendar flip toward retirement. He gave Smith a smile as they came in. She tried to smile back, but it felt weak.

  “Who was out questioning the shopkeepers this afternoon?” Winters asked.

  “Evans, Sarge.”

  “Ask him to come in, will you.”

  “Right away, Sarge.”

  “Anything I need to know?”

  “Several folks dropped by. Lady that lives up the mountain, name of Jenny Jones, you know her, don’t you, Molly?”

  Smith nodded. Everyone knew Ms. Jones, or at least knew of her.

  “She came into the station.”

  “Wow,” Smith said. “And it’s only July.” For more than thirty years, Jenny Jones had come into town every November, did some Christmas shopping, mailed her parcels to Montreal, and retreated back into the mountains for another year.

  “She hitched a ride down,” Denton said. “Came straight here because she’d seen Reginald Montgomery killed.”

  “I’m guessing by your lack of urgency that Ms. Jones’ statement was none too reliable,” Winters said.

  Denton chuckled. “Saw it happen in the flames in her fireplace, she did. The killer was a dark-skinned man with dark eyes, a black beard, and a cloth wrapped around his head. Shot Montgomery in the heart.”

  “She had a fire,” Smith said. “In this heat?”

  “Old bones, she told me.”

  “Most amusing. Is there anything more reliable I could be working on?” Winters asked.

  “A couple of calls from the people who always let us know that they’re on hand to help if we need it. And that’s it, I’m afraid, Sarge. The Vancouver papers called, but the CC handled them. A bike theft this morning. Lady didn’t bother to lock up her bike before going into the co-op for milk, and when she came out it was gone.”

  Smith blanched. She’d forgotten to report her own stolen bike.

  “Send Evans in when he gets here. Molly, write up your notes. Come to my office when Dave arrives.”

  She watched Winters head down the hall to the office he shared with Detective Lopez. Then she turned to Denton. “Speaking about bike theft, I have something to tell you.”

  □□□

  A shout of male laughter followed Winters down the corridor. The detective’s office was barely large enough for two battered antique desks. A beautiful painting of a child playing in a yellow meadow hung over one wall, a long-ago gift from a grateful citizen. Otherwise the beige walls were covered with official notices and wanted posters. A bookcase, crammed full of papers, coffee mugs, manuals, and family photographs, separated the two desks. Having worked here longer, Lopez had the desk beside the window, where he tended a row of African violets on the windowsill. They needed watering. Winters threw himself into his chair and switched on the computer.

  There was an e-mail from Ron Gavin, the RCMP scene-of-the-crime officer. The report was very preliminary: they’d found nothing to indicate that Montgomery, or anyone else, had been either in the apartment above Alphonse’s Bakery or on the roof in at least a week. No sign of the murder weapon, nothing in the bags of garbage behind the shops in the alley. Heavy foot traffic complicated the scene—lots of shoe and boot and paw prints, cigarette butts, marijuana butts, a coffee container, residue of dog poop. A bicycle had rested up against the door to the bakery recently—there were no footprints on top of the treads. Strands of hair had been found between Montgomery’s fingers. Short hair, about an inch long, brown, no dye or hair spray used. A couple had roots still attached, so they might be able to make a DNA identification. If they could find something to match it with. Montgomery’s wallet and cell phone: wiped clean.

  A whole bunch of nothing.

  Winters’ friend in Vancouver had sent him an initial assessment of Montgomery’s company, M&C Developments. Apparently a solid business, they’d built condos in Vancouver, homes in the suburbs, a small resort near Golden, a slightly bigger one in Radium Hot Springs. The Grizzly Resort development was bigger, in terms of luxury and cost, than anything they’d tried before, and they’d put themselves very far out on a limb for it.

  The CC had given him Molly Smith because he thought that this killing had local political ramifications. Winters had largely dismissed the CC’s initial evaluation as an attempt to cover his ass and had decided to concentrate on Dr. Louis Tyler. The man was screwing the wife of the deceased; he’d lied to the police about the time he got home the night of the murder, and he had, according to his wife, a good hour unaccounted for. The very hour at which the murder was taking place. But pe
rhaps there was something to the political situation, after all. M&C Developments wasn’t some faceless international corporation, with unlimited backing, for whom the death of an executive would be a minor speed bump on the road to riches. The death of Reginald Montgomery might well derail the entire project.

  Would someone kill a man to save a bunch of Grizzly bears?

  This was British Columbia. Of course they would.

  Winters eyed the list of numbers pinned to his wall, grabbed the phone, and punched the buttons. “Molly, get in here.”

  □□□

  How humiliating. Someone had been murdered last night, and before she could write up her notes on the investigation she had to fill out a report on the theft of her own bike. Denton had laughed as if it were the funniest thing he’d heard in ages. It could have happened to anyone—actually it did seem to happen to just about anyone these days—but she’d look like an incompetent fool who couldn’t even look after her own property at the police station, of all places. And if the press got wind of it, the Trafalgar City Police would be made to look mighty incompetent as well. The Chief Constable wouldn’t be best pleased at that. Not to mention that it might be the nudge Winters needed to get rid of her.

  The Ride of the Valkyries announced that her cell phone was ringing. “Molly Smith.”

  “Hey, Mol.”

  “Christa.” Something else she’d forgotten. Her promise to help Christa.

  “I was expecting to hear from you, Mol.”

  “I am so sorry. It’s this case I’m working on. Montgomery. Did you read about it in the paper?”

  “Yeah. I guess you’re busy, eh? Never mind, it was a stupid idea.”

  “No, it wasn’t. Charlie won’t leave you alone unless you do something about it. I’m here now. In the station. Are you at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be waiting at the front desk. And we’ll put a stop to Charlie Bloody Bassing and his nonsense right now. Okay?”

  “I’m working on my essay. I have to get it finished.”

  “You need to do this now, Christa. How’s the essay going? Not well, I’d guess, right?”

  “I keep thinking about Charlie.”

  “Move it, Chris. Now’s the time. I’m waiting.”

  Christa gave a weak laugh. “You are so tough, Molly. You make me feel tough. I’ll be right there.”

  As Smith pressed the button to disconnect the call, the phone on her desk rang. She didn’t even have time to say her name before Winters barked into her ear.

  □□□

  It was mid-afternoon, but Christa was still in her pajamas. All she wanted to do was work on her essay. All she wanted to do in her life was to finish her degree.

  She’d loved to learn but had hated school. And so she’d dropped out and headed for Vancouver the day she turned sixteen. After a few years of drifting between one McJob and another, she heard about distance education and correspondence courses. She knew that she could study, if she didn’t have to sit behind a desk, or walk the corridors with leering boys and jeering girls. She came back to Trafalgar, leaned on her father to pay her tuition and rent and supply her with a good computer. Now she was on the verge of getting her B.A. After that, Christa was determined to go for a master’s, and maybe a Ph.D. She’d find a way to make education appealing to all the lost girls like she’d been.

  She ran down the stairs two at a time. The first floor brats were yelling that they didn’t want grilled cheese. Their mother screamed something back about starving children in India who’d be thrilled to be offered grilled cheese. They were quick enough to threaten Christa with eviction if she so much as stepped on a loose floorboard, but didn’t seem to notice that the tone of their own family would wake the dead. She threw open the door to the street.

  “Hi, Chrissie. I was just passing by.”

  “Go away, Charlie.”

  She pushed past him and walked down the road, trying to keep her stride long and determined. Forceful, the way Molly walked.

  He fell into step beside her.

  She stopped walking. “Go away, Charlie. I do not want you around me. Never. Do you hear what I’m saying?” Most of the houses on this street were very old, some in very bad repair, broken up into flats, some gentrified to Victorian perfection. The street was moving up in the world. It was more likely that the run-down homes were being fixed up than allowed to fall further into decay. Large walnut trees cast cooling shadows onto cracked sidewalks. A fat marmalade cat streaked across the street to disappear under a crumbling front porch.

  An elderly man was watering a profusion of white and purple annuals in his front garden. He watched them, water streaming from the hose in his hand like a classical statue of a peeing cupid.

  “Don’t talk to me like that, Chrissie,” Charlie said.

  Christa resumed walking. “Get lost, loser.”

  Charlie stopped. She turned around. The smile on his face had died.

  Blotches of red began to pop up on his face. His eyes opened wide, showing too much white, and a vein pulsed at his temple. He reached out.

  Christa took a step back and looked around her. At the far end of the street a car started up and drove away. The gardener had dropped his hose and gone to the back of his house. There was no one else in sight. The sun was hot on the back of her neck.

  Charlie’s fist closed around her arm. He pulled her close, his breath sour in her face. “Molly put you up to this, didn’t she? That bitch.”

  “You’re hurting me. Let go. Please, Charlie.” All her bravado had fled, and she hated the sound of pleading in her voice.

  “What’s going on there?” The gardener had returned, carrying a pair of pruning shears. “Let go of her, you young punk.” He held up the shears.

  Charlie dropped his hand. “Mind your own business, Grandpa. We’re just having a friendly chat, right, Chrissie?”

  “I’m calling the police,” the man shouted.

  “All right, I’m leaving. I’ve got better things to do than stand here arguing. Tell Molly to butt out of what doesn’t concern her, or the Trafalgar cops will be short one officer.”

  Christa watched Charlie saunter up the street, moving in and out of the dappled sunlight. His hips swayed under his oversized jeans as if he owned the neighborhood. He pulled an iPod out of his pocket and fitted it into his ears.

  “Do you want me to call someone, Miss?” the gardener asked.

  She let out a deep breath, and blinked away tears gathering behind her eyes. “No, thank you. He’s gone.”

  “Punks today. Wouldn’t have bothered a girl on the street in my day.” He snapped a dead cane off a rosebush.

  Chapter Ten

  Winters had barely replaced the receiver before Smith ran into the detectives’ room. She’d taken off her hat and strands of hair escaped her braid, flying around her head like the golden halo of a mischievous angel. The scowl she’d worn in the parking lot when he’d reprimanded her was gone, and in its place her face was bright with anticipation and enthusiasm. Winters scarcely remembered what it had been like to be that excited about the job.

  “You called, John?” He almost expected her to snap her heels and salute.

  “Take a seat and tell me everything you know about the Grizzly Resort and the Commemorative Peace Garden.”

  She sat in Lopez’s chair and wheeled it across the room, pushing her heels into the floor. “Some people think it’s a bad idea to build a big resort in that area. There’s a creek runs right through there, so it’s kinda like an animal highway. Others say we need the jobs and the resort’ll bring in lots of tourists. Most of those people aren’t from around here.”

  “Do you think the people of Trafalgar are mostly opposed to the resort?”

  “I’d say so. But nobody would kill Montgomery to stop the resort. No point, is there? He’s just the front man, right? These giant corporations have plenty more executives ready to step up to the plate.”

  “Remember that I’ve only bee
n in Trafalgar for a couple of months, Molly. Tell me more. You’re opposed to the resort?”

  “We don’t need more wilderness destroyed, and we don’t need more outsiders coming just ’cause there are jobs here. Oops, sorry. I mean some outsiders are okay.” Her cheeks turned pink. If she was to be an effective officer, Winters thought, she’d have to control that blush.

  “What about the peace garden?”

  “I guess I can can see people coming to blows over that. The town’s divided pretty much in half about the park.”

  “Will Montgomery’s death have any effect on negotiations for the property?”

  Smith looked out the window at a cruiser pulling into the parking lot. “It might make it easier for the garden to go ahead. My mom was worried that Montgomery was influential enough to derail the plans, once the mayor died.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She’s uh…well, she’s one of the people in support of the garden.”

  “I’d like to meet your mother.”

  Smith’s eyes flashed blue. “My mother didn’t kill Montgomery.”

  He raised his hands. “I didn’t suggest she did. I only meant that I’d like to meet your mother to talk to her about the political situation.”

  “That’d be okay, I guess.”

  “You wanted to see me, Sarge.” Dave Evans’ head popped around the door.

  Winters glanced at his watch. It was long past three and he was starving. “You went to the shops and homes on the alley this morning?”

  “Yes.” Evans looked at Smith, sitting in the detectives’ office chair, her hat off, her hair mussed. His lips tightened with disapproval.

  “I need to hear what you found out, but it’s long past lunch time. Have you eaten, Dave?”

  Evans shook his head.

  “Let’s go then.” Winters got to his feet. “We can pick up sandwiches on the way. Molly, get your hat. We might not be back.”