A Striking Death

A Striking Death

by

David Anderson

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

A STRIKING DEATH

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Copyright © 2012 by David Anderson. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

Cover design by Joanna Anderson

Cover Art: Copyright © iStockPhoto # 15465257 Baseball bat leaning against wall

Edited by Joanna Anderson and Ian Anderson

ISBN: 978-0-9916719-0-8

The correct reading order of the Detective Sergeant Nicholas Drumm books is:

An Indecent Death

A Striking Death

A Cuban Death

“For it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out…”

-- Jack Norworth

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my appreciation to my family, without whose love and support I would accomplish nothing. So thank you Anne, Ian and Joanna.

The following people have been of great assistance: Michael and Diane Sale for their invaluable help with the policing aspects, Tom Shephard and Helene Taylor who make sure I get the diabetes stuff right, Randi Lucas (
http://www.randilucas.com
) for her help with Emily’s real estate business, and Stephanie Morley. Any errors are solely my responsibility.

And then there’s Wilson, my faithful friend, who continues to be annoying, amusing and terrific, as Shelties are supposed to be.

for Anne, as always

prologue

The human head was like an egg. The killer had read about it. Done his homework. An egg had a thin shell which protected the chick inside. Shake the egg and the life inside would bang and rattle about until it was extinguished.

The killer looked down at the old head with its thin grey hair resting on the pillow. Shaking might be the way to go: thumbs into the scrawny neck, jerk the head up from the pillow, throw back down. Repeat. Shaken baby syndrome, only with an old man. The killer considered it briefly, rejected the idea.

Eggs could also be shattered, like with a hammer. Much faster, much more effective. The killer grimaced. It would be messy, very messy. Could it be done? Was the necessary determination there?

The killer picked up the baseball bat, found the right grip, knew the answers. The bat came down slowly, stopped just above the forehead, measuring. A fractional adjustment. The bat ascended steadily until it was behind the killer’s head, then came down much more quickly.

The killer had been right. It
was
messy.

one

February, 2001

“Why do I have to do this shit, anyway?” Realizing he had said it out loud, the speaker glanced up to see who might have heard. Unfortunately for him, the teacher had.

“Jeremy! Language!” The kid really ought to have known better since he had been in the class for many months. But then Jeremy Saunders was no scholar, not even a mildly bright light. In fact, he was as dumb as a post. Still, he should have known by now that Mr. Billinger was a patrolling teacher, one of those who strolled around the room looking for trouble. Arthur Billinger carried a yardstick and walked up and down the aisles, twirling the stick when he could, tapping it on desktops, pointing out things on the bulletin boards. He hovered over students, looking over their shoulders, turning suddenly and changing direction, so that his eighth graders never knew what he was going to do next.

Some teachers were sitters. They sat behind their desk, they gave directions from their desk, they meted out discipline from their desk and they taught lessons from their desk. They were sitters. Arthur Billinger was not a sitter, he was a patroller, because this was the style that he found worked best for him. Eighth grade was challenging, and he needed every weapon in his arsenal to maintain order. Especially as he was teaching FSL, or French as a Second Language, as the school district called it. French was not a popular subject, especially with the boys. In fact, while some of the students liked French, most of the boys hated it, and they were capable of making life miserable for a teacher, if they were allowed to do so. Arthur Billinger didn’t give them the chance.

A tall, slight man, Arthur Billinger could nonetheless be quite intimidating. This was an image that he cultivated. He carried himself with dignity and aplomb, walked erect, was correct and precise in his speech and rarely smiled. When he did, his students were usually surprised. He had perfected the teacher’s “death stare” and could freeze a misbehaving lout with a single glance from his pale blue eyes. He was fair and firm and his students always knew where they stood with him, what was expected and what they could and could not get away with. He was fifty-one and still had most of his hair, even if it was half grey. His face was thin, almost gaunt, and more than once he had been compared to Vincent Price. By other teachers, of course: his students had never heard of that particular actor.

The “shit” that Jeremy Saunders had been referring to was a “fill-in-the-blanks” assignment, where the appropriate French noun had to be supplied. Since most of the kids couldn’t read French and weren’t interested in learning, they had difficulty coming up with the right answers and couldn’t see the sense of it anyway. Which was why Mr. Saunders had seen fit to express his frustration. Privately Arthur Billinger agreed with him. It
was
shit. This was the wrong way to teach French: paperwork and dull tasks. The language should be learned orally, with lots of conversation and repetition, and preferably starting at an early age. These eighth graders had taken French for five years, long enough for many of them to realize that they were no good at it and never would be. They had given up long ago and only did the small amount of work that they did do because he forced them to. By patrolling.

“Sorry, Mr. B.” Jeremy mumbled his apology.

Billinger gave him a final bleak look and continued his walkabout. After another pass around the room, he sat down at his desk to give his legs a break. He didn’t have as much energy as he used to, and he needed the occasional sit-down now. But never for too long; if he stayed where he was for an extended period of time, then trouble would develop. Even now, as he pretended to be absorbed with something on the desk, he could see some giggling and nudging from the back of the room. He raised his right hand and snapped his fingers, looking directly at the two guilty students. The finger snap sounded almost as loud as a gunshot in the quiet room and the giggling stopped immediately.

Billinger smiled to himself. As a classroom management technique, it couldn’t be beaten. Without speaking a word, a powerful message had been sent to everyone in the room: noise won’t be tolerated. It had taken him awhile to perfect that snap of the fingers but the practice had been worth it. The less he had to speak to keep control, the better. And when he did speak, the students would listen because he did it only when he had something important to say.

He leaned back in his chair and surveyed the class. The majority of the kids were what used to be called “C” and “D” students; there were no “A” students and only a couple of “B” level kids. This was because at this school, the best students elected to go into a segregated French immersion classroom, starting at fourth grade. In that program, instruction was about three quarters in French, one quarter in English. Only the best students could handle it. The rest carried on with the regular program, which gave them about forty minutes of French a day with him, or someone like him. These students he was looking at would drop French as soon as they possibly could.

This class of twenty-eight was fairly typical for eighth grade: eleven girls and seventeen boys. For the most part, the girls only tolerated him. He wasn’t cool or interesting to them in any way. Their reaction didn’t bother him in the slightest; he was used to it. With the boys it was different, and he had a decent rapport with several of them, partly because he was male and partly because he was able to chat with them occasionally about things that interested them. Sometimes he would relax his tight control and allow the class to go off on a tangent and discuss movies or sports or the latest popular TV show. It was all part of his classroom management strategy.

Billinger also operated a homework club two nights a week after school, where he assisted kids with their assignments. Attendance was strictly voluntary and he helped them with any subject, not just French. He wasn’t inundated with kids wanting help but there was always someone there, and in this way he was able to satisfy his principal’s request that all staff supervise some kind of extracurricular activity. Most of the attendees were boys.

Academically, Jeremy Saunders was one of the worst students in the class. There were seven others just like him: Kyle Mollett, Tina Jarvis, Chelsea Livingstone, Chris Carpenter, David Bowness, Matt Wilson and Tim Arnio. Inevitably, as Tim was over six feet tall already, he was nicknamed Tiny Tim. If you combined their eight brains, Billinger thought, you might just get a decent one out of it. They were not scholars.

He felt sorry for the three good kids in the class, the ones who actually wanted to learn. For various reasons, their parents had denied them permission to go into the immersion class, and they were stuck here with the sluggards. Tomo Takeda, Lydia Burnett and Padma Banerjee, three students who tried their best and wanted to please their teacher. They were also a sign of the changing demographics of the city of York and its increasingly ethnic population.

The rest of the class were the middle of the roaders, the average kids, the jokers, the quiet ones, the type of student that most teachers would have trouble remembering a few years later. Representative of this group were Sara Liccio and John Forrest, two quiet kids who hardly opened their mouths, but would occasionally show up at Billinger’s homework club.

Yes, a pretty typical class, Billinger thought, glancing at his watch. Time to get a move on and take up the assignment before the bell rang. “
Alors, qui a obtenu la réponse pour numéro un?
”

two

October, 2011

Well, it wasn’t as bad as usual but it was bad enough. Detective Sergeant Nicholas Drumm was trying one of his infrequent runs. Occasionally he would feel the urge to get out on the road and test his legs and try to rediscover the joys of running. He had recently turned forty-nine and was conscious of a belly that wanted to expand just by looking at food. So now and then he would get in the exercise mood, determined to become a fit and conscientious runner.

On this fine, sunny October morning, he was labouring along, his breathing wheezy and his legs leaden. Drumm’s resolve was dissipating quickly as his discomfort increased. What was he doing, anyway? At his age should he really be putting his body under such stress? Should he not be enjoying the cool, crisp fall air, and the kaleidoscope of colours in the trees along the streets? Most men his age would be content with a relaxing and refreshing stroll on a lovely autumn day, in the company of a faithful dog.

Will was the other reason Drumm’s run wasn’t going so well.
His
faithful dog, Will, was a sable Shetland Sheepdog. Intelligent and lively, Will was a heeler, as all Shelties are. He nipped at the heels of the sheep in order to herd them where the dog wanted. The problem was that it was bred in the bone of the dog to nip at the feet of anything that moved. Which was why, when Drumm tried to run with Will, the dog was constantly crowding in front of him and turning his head to steer him in another direction entirely. Put that together with leaden legs and gasping breath and you had an unhappy and frustrated detective.

Drumm began to walk, hoping that his heart and respiration rates would slow down. Will slowed down too, hardly panting at all, and looking like he could keep going all day. He was on his lead, of course, and now that Drumm was no longer running, he behaved like a normal dog, trotting along happily and giving his master lots of room. Drumm had seen all this before and had known that his run probably wouldn’t work out very well, but he often felt guilty about getting Will out for the exercise that he needed. So every now and then he would give it a try. Shelties were peculiar dogs in lots of ways. The herding instinct made Will bark and twirl in a complete circle at the craziest things: closing Drumm’s briefcase, using an egg beater, even shutting the front door. In every case it was the movement that triggered the barking and twirling. You might as well try to stop Will from eating as get him to cease this behaviour.

Drumm finally conceded to himself that this particular run was doomed and headed back home. The quiet suburban streets with their neatly maintained homes were slowly coming to life as people went about their business. Drumm’s detective eye noted the expired license plate sticker on a passing Honda Civic and a couple of kids on a yellow bicycle riding double and without helmets. He saw this kind of thing every day and ignored all of it, partly because he had to live in the neighbourhood and he wanted peace and quiet. More importantly, he was a detective in the Violent Crimes Unit with the York Police Services, and minor traffic violations were not his concern.

Drumm turned the final corner towards home. He stooped and unclipped Will’s lead, allowing the dog to trot the final hundred yards or so free of restraint. Will was used to this routine and would stay safely on the sidewalk, happily sniffing and looking for dropped food. Drumm kept an eye on him as they approached his house. He was already planning what he would do next: shower, breakfast and head off to the office, unless there was a call waiting for him. There were several cases on his desk at the moment but nothing too urgent. It looked like being a routine day.