Constable Molly Smith Mystery: Winter Of Secrets Part 5

Wendy looked down her nose and snorted. "I dont think so. Take your tray and find another table, before I call security."

"Please, Wendy, hear me out." Meredith thrust her fork into the bowl of stew on the table in front of her. Brown liquid bubbled up. "The police will not be releasing your brothers body any time soon, nor that of his friend. Never mind that your distinguished parents are cooling their heels in town. Recipient of the Order of Canada, eh? Impressive. That makes your family newsworthy. Im interested in finding out why the police have suddenly started paying attention to the accident, and when I saw you sitting here, by yourself, I thought you also might want to know whats going on."

Wendy looked at the black-haired woman on the far side of the large, battered wooden table. Stew had splattered across what were probably surgically-enhanced b.o.o.bs.

She hadnt happened upon Wendy having lunch. Shed probably gone looking for her at the B&B, and Mrs. C or Kathy had told her the group was skiing. Wendyd have a thing or two to say about that. She had a right to her privacy, and the reporter should have been sent packing.

How good could she possibly be anyway, working for the Trafalgar Daily Gazette? Rather than sticking her nose into the Wyatt-Yarmouth family business, she should be reporting on the results of the Ladies Bridge Finals or the Mens Curling Quarterly.

Wendy pressed the paper napkin shed picked up at the checkout to her eyes. "My brother," she said, "was the most important person in my life. Not only did I love him, but I respected him as well. Jason...well, Jason believed in the dignity of every human being. It was his dream to become a doctor and go to Africa and help the suffering humanity. As for my parents," Wendy lifted her eyes to check that what-ever-her-name-was was paying attention, "they are quite naturally inconsolable with grief, and I request that you respect that."

What a perfect lot of rubbish. Wendy adored her brother, that was true, but she had no illusions about him. Jason Wyatt-Yarmouth was no more interested in the suffering people of Africa than she was.

Meredith gave her a smile full of sympathy. "I can tell you loved him very much. May I quote you?"

"If you must."

"Thank you."

"But youre full of garbage. My parents were told this morning we can take Jason home."

"The situations changed."

"Youre lying."

"Seriously, Wendy, I am not. I have contacts, well placed contacts. A good reporter needs contacts. How close were you to Ewan Williams?"

"If I thought this was any of your business, Id tell you he was my brothers friend, nothing more to me than that."

"Then I dont mind telling you that the pathologist found...complications...with Ewans death."

Wendy picked up the almost full plate of Caesar salad and threw it across the table.

Chapter Six.

John Winters wasnt going to speculate about Doctor Lees startling discovery to Smith. He wasnt even going to speculate to himself. The only thing he needed to know, right now, was that Ewan Williams had died before the car accident. That meant one of three things: Williams died naturally, in the car prior to the accident, and no one noticed; Wyatt-Yarmouth had killed him and was taking the body to dispose of it; Wyatt-Yarmouth had not killed him and was taking the dead body who knows where or why. The direction theyd been going in took them away from the police station and the hospital. Which might not be relevant: it was possible that, being an outsider, Wyatt-Yarmouth didnt know where the hospital was.

Did Wyatt-Yarmouth know Williams was dead? Winters would have to check with Lee about the condition of the body at the time of the accident.

All this was speculation. Jason Wyatt-Yarmouth would not be sitting up to answer John Winters questions.

But Ewan Williams might have something to tell Doctor Shirley Lee.

Winters looked out the window, not that there was much to see. Gray clouds, fat with unshed snow, hung so low they covered the mountains. Puffs of mist rose up from the river, black and cold, to his left.

"Have a nice Christmas?" he said to Smith about half an hour outside of Trafalgar.

"Very nice," she said, automatically. The rote answer to a standard question.

"I mean, well," she added, "it was okay, I guess. Mom wasnt at all pleased when she found out how much Id be working. Dad wasnt pleased either, but he doesnt say so. And when my brother, Sam, told them he and his family were going to Hawaii for the holidays, after spending last year at his in-laws, poor mom." John Winters knew Mollys mother well, so he wasnt surprised that shed chatter about her family. Lucky, as everyone called Mrs. Smith, was known, as the phrase went, to the police. Not that shed ever been a criminal but if there was a controversy in the town of Trafalgar, British Columbia, you could be sure Lucky Smith was on one side or the other. And probably the leader of her side at that.

"Christmas was okay, but my days off were great. The conditions at Blue Sky cant be beat. Do you get up there much?"

"I dont ski."

"Brought up in B.C. and you dont ski! You should give it a go. Its the best thing on earth. You know we get free skiing if we carry a radio and help out if they need it? Its a great deal. Ive never been called, although some of the guysve had to break up fights or look into someones pack being s.n.a.t.c.hed."

"Cant teach an old dog new tricks, Molly."

The period at the end of that sentence was so strong, even Smith, young and chatty, knew to drop the subject.

They arrived at the Kootenay-Boundary Regional Hospital in silence.

Before he got out of the car, Winters pulled a tube of Vaseline out of his pocket and dipped his finger in. He handed it to Smith and she also applied a touch of the gel to the inside of each nostril. Otherwise the smell of death would stay with them for days.

"Okay, Doc," Winters said, at the first sight of Doctor Lee standing inside the swinging doors leading to the morgue. "Youve got my attention. You know Constable Smith."

Lee nodded. She wore a regulation white lab coat over a cream blouse and blue skirt cut perfectly to the middle of her knees. Her stockings were sheer and her shoes leather. Her heels were so high that the doctor, who probably had to stretch to reach five feet in her bare feet, didnt appear to be all that much shorter than Constable Smith. Her black hair was tied into a stiff knot at the back of her neck.

"I have no doubt about it," Lee said, turning and heading down the hall, her heels sounding as out of place as a marching band on the industrial-white floor. "Mr. Williams was dead at least twenty-four hours, perhaps more, before his body was retrieved from the water."

"Why do you think that?"

She launched into a description of the degrees of rigor mortise and the stages of decomposition of various body parts.

"You didnt notice right away?" Smith said. "Wouldnt that have been kinda obvious?"

The doctor stopped walking. She turned. Her perfectly made-up black eyes threw chips of ice at the young Constable.

"I mean," Smith said, digging herself further into a hole of her own making, "Bodies start decaying right away, right?"

"When I need to be interrupted in my observations, I will call on you, Constable," Lee said. "Provided youre still in the room and paying attention."

That was a dig. The first time Smith had been present at one of Lees autopsies shed run from the room before the business even began. The second time she lasted it out, only by looking at everything but the table, and thinking, for all Winters knew, of England.

Lee might be catty, but she was a non-s.e.xist cat. Shed dripped scorn all over Ray Lopez, when, for all the detectives years of experience, hed vomited when Lee ripped the toupee off a heart-attack victim they initially suspected might have been done in by the ex-wife. Lopez had thought Leed scalped the man.

"Condition of the body would indicate," Lee continued walking down the hall, heels tapping, a chastised Smith tiptoeing after her, "that it was kept in a cold setting post-mortem. Of course any place outdoors in the last week would provide cold conditions. Locating that place, is, fortunately for me, not my concern, now is it, Sergeant Winters?"

"Ill take it from there, Doc."

"One other thing that might be of interest," she said. "He was fully dressed, in outdoor clothing, but his gloves were in his pocket. His fly was unzipped and his p.e.n.i.s was partially out."

She threw the double doors open, and the group walked into the autopsy room. Lees a.s.sistant, Russ, was waiting.

A man lay on the table, on his back, naked, lit up as if for his Broadway debut. He was white, about five foot eight, slender and lean. Fingernails trimmed, clean. Brown hair, well cut, with an artificially streaked blond bit falling over the forehead.

Face as pale as, well, as death.

It was not hard to notice that, shriveled in cold and death though the man might be, Ewan Williams p.e.n.i.s was enormous.

"You do something to that?" Winters asked, pointing.

Behind him, he heard Smith suck in air.

"Is that some sort of joke, John? If so, it is not in good taste. I do not do anything." Unlike other pathologists hed met, Doctor Lee did not indulge in black humor. Nor did she allow her staff to do so. Which meant that they indulged out of her hearing.

"At first, I a.s.sumed the trauma to the back of the head had occurred during the accident. A foolish presumption on my part." She paused to allow him to agree.

He did so.

"As soon as we removed his clothing we could see that Mr. Williams blood had settled along his side. It had achieved complete lividity. When the heart stops pumping, blood stops circulating and begins to settle. In the same way that if you pour colored liquid into a gla.s.s of water and stir, it will move through the water. Once the stirring ceases, the colored liquid will settle on the bottom of the gla.s.s."

"Im aware of that, doc."

She ignored him. "Mr. Williams was placed on his back while awaiting the autopsy. The admission report also indicated that there had been a minor degree of rigor mortise when he was brought in. Rigor begins to settle in about three hours after death, and achieves maximum at around twelve hours. That is a.s.suming ideal conditions. Regardless of the conditions, Mr. Williams should not have been in any stage of rigor less than an hour after his death, nor should his blood have settled along his right side. I can only a.s.sume such sloppy observation on the part of the night clerk was due to the pressures of the holiday season."

Meaning, Winters interpreted, that someones head was going to roll down the morgue corridor.

"Once I realized that the time of death pre-dated the accident, I stopped work and phoned you."

"So you did."

"Ive been thinking about it since, of course."

"Of course."

Doctor Lee was an exceptionally competent pathologist. But, like many highly intelligent people, she got more than a mite p.r.i.c.kly at times. Winters considered it one of the qualifications of his job to be able to ma.s.sage her gently to get her to spit out the d.a.m.ned point.

"I believe he was kept outside after death. The temperature over the twenty-four to forty-eight hours prior to the vehicle going into the river did move a few degrees on either side of the freezing point. Further investigation will no doubt reveal more." Lee pulled on her latex gloves, and reached overhead to switch on the microphone and recorder. Russ handed her a hacksaw.

Smith swallowed, audibly.

Chapter Seven.

They arrived back in Trafalgar shortly after noon. Cause of death determined by Doctor Lee: hypothermia aggravated by a single blow to the head. She found minute traces of wood and charcoal in the wound, and some ash. She might have been reciting her shopping list, but it was enough to get Winters heart pumping.

What contained wood, charcoal, and ash, but the instruments used by a common household fireplace?

He said nothing until theyd thanked Doctor Lee. She promised to have her report ready in a day or two, and told them shed go over Wyatt-Yarmouth one more time, to make sure she hadnt missed anything the first time. "As unlikely," shed sniffed, "as that might be."

Smith hadnt thrown up, run from the room, or broken into hysterical laughter. Shed stood somberly out of the way, pressed up against the wall, but when on the one or two occasions Winters glanced up, his attention drawn by something Russ was doing, Smith had been watching the procedure.

"Getting easier, Molly?" he asked, as she turned the key in the vans ignition.

"Can I throw up now?"

He laughed and grabbed the radio. "Jim, remind me of where Williams and Wyatt-Yarmouth were staying."

"Glacier Chalet. Its a B&B at 1894 Victoria Street."

"Whos the officer who informed the sister and friends of the deaths?"

"Give me a sec," Denton said.

"Me," said a small voice from his left.

"What?"

"Me. I was the one who told Wyatt-Yarmouths sister."

"Never mind, Jim. Ill get back to you." He put the radio down. "You informed the family?"

"Yes."

"At the Glacier Chalet B&B?"

"Yes."

"Did you go inside?"

"Yes."

"Right inside the house I mean, not just stand in the doorway?"

"Yes," she said, daring a sideways glance away from the icy, steeply sloped, curving road. "Wyatt-Yarmouths sister, Wendy, guessed why I was there and pretty much ran until her back was up against the wall. I followed her in. I dont think Ellie Carmine liked my boots tromping on her clean floors. Why?"

"Did you see a fireplace?"

"Let me think. Yeah, Im sure of it. We went into the living room, nice Christmas tree and party stuff, and I remember thinking that it had been so cold outside and now I was too hot standing by the fire."

Winters picked up the radio again. "Jim, contact Ray Gavin, tell him I want a full forensic team at the Glacier Chalet B&B ASAP. Call me back with their ETA. I also need a patrol car and two," he glanced at Smith, "make that one, uniform to be on site when I get there. Which will be in about forty-five minutes."

"Got it," Denton said.

"The Glacier Chalet B&B, Molly."