A Cold White Sun: A Constable Molly Smith Mystery (Constable Molly Smith Series) Read Free Page B

around. Small and white, the animal blended into the surroundings. It bared its teeth and lunged, but couldn’t reach her. It had been tied to a tree by a blue leash.
Smith took off her winter gloves and pulled thin blue disposable ones out of her pocket before dropping to her haunches. A woman lay face down in the snow, her arms spread out to either side. Smith slipped on the gloves and touched her fingers to the skin beneath the woman’s scarf. Still warm, but cooling rapidly. Nothing moved. Blood soaked the back of the coat, not a great deal of it. The snow had been churned up all around her by bloody paw prints.
Smith got to her feet. She stepped backward, trying to keep her boots in the prints she’d already made.
She touched the radio at her shoulder.
“Five-one.” She coughed to clear her throat.
“Go ahead, five-one.”
“I’m at the trail at the top of Martin Street. I need a detective, and he’ll be wanting forensics. Probably the RCMP dog also.” She looked at the man, watching her with wide eyes. “Is that your dog, sir?”
“No.”
“Better send someone from the humane society too.”
She heard a shout, probably the paramedics, and called out to them.
 
 
 
 

Chapter Five

Eliza Winters wasn’t much of a cook. Good food, to her, was what restaurant chefs prepared. She’d been a model since the age of sixteen, and for many years food, when she wasn’t dining out, was by necessity not much more than rice crackers and carrot sticks. The minimum required to keep body and soul together. Now that she was well into middle age, no longer modeling, she could eat what she liked. But old habits die hard, and she could not summon up much interest in her kitchen.
John stood at the stove, his attention focused on four slices of bacon sizzling and spitting fat in the cast-iron frying pan. He wielded a spatula like a weapon, as if expecting one of the rashers would attempt an escape.
She smiled. Her husband wasn’t much of a cook either, but he did like a hearty breakfast on his days off and had soon come to realize Eliza wasn’t going to stand at the stove in a frilly apron the way his mother had when he was a young man living at home.
“Perfection,” he said, placing the bacon carefully on a layer of paper towel. He cracked two eggs into the hot fat.
“Perfection indeed,” she said, encompassing far more than the plate of bacon.
Toast popped up, and he took his attention away from the eggs long enough to flip a slice onto a side plate and present it to her.
“Thank you,” she said. John massaged the muscles in her shoulders. He smelled of wood smoke, and his chin scratched against her cheek when he bent over to kiss her.
“Fire lit?” she asked, wiggling her shoulders into the most favorable position.
“Might even last this time.”
She twisted to smile up at him, looking forward to a simple day lazing about the house. Together.
The cursed cell phone fastened to his waistband rang.
He tossed her an apologetic grimace and flipped open the phone. “Winters,” he barked, sliding the frying pan off the heat.
Eliza always maintained that John had two personalities. His cop face and his husband face. She could see one morph into the other and didn’t need to be told this was a summons he could not ignore.
Those separate faces had only merged twice, the night they met when he as a young patrol officer answered her 911 call, and about two years ago when a man she’d once known had been murdered. John had, momentarily, actually believed Eliza, his wife of twenty-five years, might have killed him.
It had taken a long time for their marriage to recover from her sense of betrayal.
But recover it had. She got up from the table and began putting together a bacon and egg sandwich for him to eat in the car.
***

Detective Sergeant John Winters drove down the steep mountain road toward town, munching on the remains of his hastily-assembled breakfast. Fortunately, they hadn’t had much snow overnight and the