Constable Molly Smith 01 - In the Shadow of the Glacier by Vicki Delany Read Free Book Online Page A

up some notes, and start sending out feelers on Montgomery.”
    Smith pulled into Elm Street and turned on Front. Light and laughter spilled from the bars and restaurants. She braked hard to avoid two staggering young women crossing the street, arms wrapped around each other, oblivious to everything around them. She stopped at a red light at Oak Street. A group of drifters in tattered jeans, middle-aged tourists in Bermuda shorts, and two elderly couples in suit and tie, dress and pumps, crossed at the intersection. A young woman stepped off the sidewalk with a cocker spaniel on a lead. She caught sight of the police vehicle, yanked on the leash, and scurried back the way she’d come, dragging a confused dog. Winters had more important things on his mind than enforcing one of the town’s more unusual bylaws. No dogs were allowed in the downtown area. At every intersection, the sidewalk was painted with a picture of a dog, in a red circle with a stroke through it. Residents complained, lustily; tourists assumed there’d been some mistake. But the bylaw remained. It was also illegal to play hackisack on the streets of Trafalgar. Winters hadn’t figured that one out yet.
    The light changed to green, and Smith drove on.
    “Give me your home number,” he said. “I’ll call you soon as Dr. Lee’s arranged a time for the autopsy. With luck, it’ll be early. Pick me up at home—dispatch has the address. Then we’ll collect an unmarked.”
    “I don’t have a car.”
    “You don’t have a car?” She might as well have said she didn’t have a head.
    “Nope.”
    “How do you get around?”
    “I bike.”
    “I had a bike in my youth. Got rid of it when Eliza said that if I wanted to marry her, the bike had to go. She didn’t trust motorcycles.”
    “A bicycle, John. I ride a bicycle.”
    “You do?”
    “If I need to go shopping, or somewhere far away, I use my parents’ car. I could ask Mom if she needs the car tomorrow.” Smith pulled into the parking lot beside the police station.
    “We’ll take mine.” Winters passed her the pen and paper he’d taken out to write down her phone number. “Address and directions.”
    Smith wrote.
    “If they’re not ready for us at the hospital in the morning, we’ll pay a visit to Mrs. Montgomery’s friend. She was insistent that we visit him at his office. As her extramarital affairs were apparently of no concern to her husband, I have to guess that her friend is in a marriage not quite so open. Plus we should have a preliminary report from Ron Gavin to work on.”
    “Do you have any ideas?”
    “Early days yet, Molly, early days. I don’t see Mrs. M. bludgeoning her husband with sufficient force to kill him. Arsenic in the coffee maybe, but nothing that would make a mess.”
    “You could have eaten off the floor in her kitchen,” Smith said. “Provided you wanted to.”
    “Perhaps someone will come in to confess. That would be nice. If not, we’ll start looking for a motive tomorrow.”
    “Suspects,” she said. “That’ll be about half of town.”
    Winters got out of the car and they walked through the front doors into the police station.
    ***
    Smith completed her shift report, signed off duty, said good bye to Ingrid, the night dispatcher, and let herself out the back door. All evening she’d kept her excitement dampened down. Now that she was on her own, she punched one fist in the air and pulled her arm back. “Yes!” She was assisting a detective sergeant in a murder investigation. She was on her way. She’d make detective in no time.
    It took a moment for her to realize that she was not, in the literal sense, on her way anywhere. The bike rack at the back of the police station was empty. Her chain lock lay on the ground. Was this a practical joke? Had Evans hidden her bike in pique over her being chosen to work with Winters rather than him? She wouldn’t put it past him. Evans had a nasty streak.
    But he would not have taken her bike—he might