Chapter 1: A Death for All Seasons

Hamilton Bahn thrust his rigid staff harder and deeper into the writhing, sexy female who was nearing her orgasm beneath him. Spurred by his movements, she used her straining, shapely, silken legs to try and leverage herself up and force him even further into her before the release of climax took hold of them both.

"Fuck me, Ham!" her breathless, girlish voice urged into his ear as the hand that wasn't now hidden beneath the pillow beside her clutched at the taut muscles of his heaving, sweating back and pulled his broad, hairy chest against her compressed breasts.

He could feel her curvy body straining upward, under him, as all of her muscles and sinews coiled before the very moment of euphoric explosion.

He struggled to keep his needed wits about him but there was nothing he could do other than abandon himself to the immense feelings of carnal pleasure. He was about to erupt and his penis swelled even harder, inside of her, as the crest of his own sexual pinnacle was at hand.

He emitted a low, guttural sound as he started to climax, his member lurching and throbbing, deep inside of her, as it began to ejaculate its first pressurized streams of scalding semen.

Feeling the heat of this within her, she angled her wide, lower torso even further upward to receive his final, depositing thrusts even deeper, bringing her over the edge and into the throes of blissful orgasmic abandon.

Just as the onset of climax caused her to breathe deeply inward, eyes closed tightly to reflect the sublime ecstasy taking possession within her, Bahn saw his opportunity and pulled the hidden plastic bag from under their shared pillow and, in a quick motion, pulled it over her head and tightened it around her neck so that she was suddenly unable to draw any inward breath.

She reacted in complete surprise and shock under him, writhing her body with even more urgency as her eyes widened in utter horror at what was happening.

Running his hand up her left arm to hold her hidden wrist firmly against the mattress, he pushed his still ejaculating cock even further inward as he felt her vaginal muscles clamp almost painfully around his erupting member in the rigor of her frantic struggle.

It took almost a full minute before her body succumbed to suffocation and she went totally limp under him.

Bahn withdrew slowly from her and got to his knees, looking down at her motionless, but still curvaceously sexy body, lying still and lifeless on the bed. How long, he wondered, was the road that had brought him to this exact moment? How had things conspired to bring him to do what he had just done?

It was only a few days before that he had been working late at his office in Ottawa, reading intelligence ciphers, filing reports on those decoded ciphers and counting the official beans that those above him thought needed to be counted and accounted for.

Hamilton Bahn's profession was that of a civil servant, more or less. An agent for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service which acts, under the auspices of Parliament and through the Minister of Public Safety, as the primary intelligence gathering service of Canada. Bahn's section, of this agency, was charged with, not only collecting the intelligence, but also acting, with force if necessary, on that collected intelligence.

The head of this trouble-shooting department was a strict, tactful, no-nonsense woman, in her mid fifties, whom everyone called by a conjuncture of her initials EJLS which was pronounced Ells (as rhymes with shells). This was because her last name was deemed unpronounceable, by most, and she certainly did not want her underlings to be on a first name basis with her. She disdained being called Mrs. Whatever but did not object to being called simply ma'am.

"Is that you, Inspector Bahn?" she inquired, her voice stopping him, that day, as he was about to pass by the open doorway of her office. In her brown, austere, business suit you most certainly would not pick her out from among a group of PTA mothers.

"Yes, ma'am," he replied, realizing as she turned her face to him that he hadn't buttoned the collar of his shirt or pulled his tie up. Ells was a stickler for decorum at the office. Just as much as she was about how she was addressed.

"Working late?" she asked, the stern, grey-blue eyes, in the center of her round face, showing wide and clear below the severe bangs of her short, platinum-hued coiffure.

"Yes, ma'am," Bahn said as he pulled the knot in his tie up and into place. "There were a few items to clear up before the holiday weekend."

"Come in," she told him. "I've got a few items here that I want to show you."

Bahn walked over to her neatly arranged desk, the late afternoon sun bathing the office in yellow light from the large windows as he took a place to the side of where she was standing.

Ells picked up a manila envelope and emptied its contents onto her desktop. What appeared, to Bahn, to be four greeting cards fell onto the tan-colored blotter.

"These cards were left at the scenes of four seemingly senseless and very bloody murders," she said as she picked up one of the gaily colored, folded cards and handed it to him.

There was a colourful drawing depicting a turkey on the front and, as he opened it, the message on the inside stated I HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR FEAST. There was no signature but there appeared to be a brownish colored fingerprint where the signature would normally have been.

"That's a thumb print," Ells offered.

"Some clue?"

"The print, in his own blood, is from the right thumb of the victim who was a high justice on Manitoba's Court of Queen's Bench."

"Alistair Mackenzie," he observed aloud. "I remember the news accounts of him being found dead last October. But I don't remember any news of this card."

"Precisely right, Inspector. This card was deemed important inside information by the Winnipeg PD and the Manitoba RC's. A piece of evidence that only the killer himself would be aware of. That and the method of death."