Reynald sat at his usual place on my right. He had promised me that he would stand by me. He’d given me his word. I was about to kick that promise off a cliff.
I took a deep breath.
“People tend to kill for a specific reason. The most common are greed, passion, or revenge. The perpetrators seek to benefit from the murder, and they often know their target. The man who left the body in the Dog Market isn’t like that. His victims never met him. Their deaths do not benefit him. He kills because he likes it.”
I had learned way too much about serial killers during my brief stint in criminal justice. This one hit all the marks for the organized category: He planned his crimes in advance, he went about killing in a methodical fashion, he abducted his victims to torture them in a safe location, and he improved with each crime. He was a monster.
“This killer derives pleasure from his murders, first when he fights his victims, then when he dissects their bodies, and finally when he watches the effect his handiwork has on other people. He doesn’t feel remorse, and he can’t be cured of his urges.”
“So he needs to be put out of his misery,” Shana said.
“Yes. He will kill a new victim every week. Every Firsday, he will display them in the same way he has done in the market.”
I took a nail and pinned the piece of paper with dates on the board. My fingers shook a little. This was not the way I wanted to deliver this explanation. I’d wanted to have a plan in place, so when I explained what was about to happen, I could immediately shift to “and this is how we stop it.” I had expected to have time to formulate that plan, Divine fucking damn it.
“The murderer will choose different public locations, but he will display each body exactly the same way he displayed the first. Splayed open. There will be a total of six victims.” I held up six fingers. “So this one and five more. I don’t know his name or where he comes from, but people will call him the Dog Market Butcher.”
I wrote “Dog Market Butcher” on the piece of paper I had attached to the board. This would’ve been much easier with dry-erase markers.
“How does it involve us?” Will asked.
“I’ve told you before that Hreban has great ambitions. He seeks the throne. By midwinter, King Sauven will give Hreban nearly unlimited power. The Order of the Redeemer will back Hreban, and he will drown the kingdom in fire and blood.”
“Sauven was always a few arrows short of a full quiver,” Gort said. “But that is too far even for him. I could see him raising Arvel like that, but Hreban?”
“Sauven Savaric isn’t in his right mind,” I said. “He has fits of paranoia and they are getting worse.”
“It runs in the family,” Shana said.
I nodded. “It does. Sauven isn’t oblivious. He is aware of what is happening, which is why he’s trying to hammer out a solid foundation to support his son, Crown Prince Kiel. To Sauven, dynasty is everything.”
And every time Sauven would cobble together some kind of rickety scaffolding to hold his firstborn up, Kiel would wreck it with his arrogance and narcissism, but that was a topic for another day.
“Sauven trusts very few people these days, the most important of whom is Colart Jenicor.”
I picked up a picture of a heraldic shield I had cut out from one of the scrolls in my study and pinned it to the board. A golden sun with stylized rays rising on a field of black.
“The Sun Margrave,” Reynald said.
“Who is the Sun Margrave?” Kaiden asked.
“He’s the man who leads the Justice Chamber,” Clover told him. “When people commit crimes against the kingdom, he is the one who brings the cases before the High Court.”
“Margrave is a military title,” Reynald explained. “It meanslord who defends a border. The Sun Margrave also guards a boundary, the one between lawlessness and order.”
“Colart Jenicor is an exemplary Sun Margrave,” I said. “Although he wields great power, he doesn’t use it for personal gain. He cannot be bribed, coerced, or intimidated. None of the Eight Families can sway him. He serves Rellas itself and he has never wavered in that service.”
As far as attorneys general went, Colart Jenicor was above reproach.
“King Sauven knows he is losing his grip, and he also knows that if he pushes things too far, Colart will be there to pull him back from the cliff. The Sun Margrave has been there from the very beginning of Sauven’s reign. Sauven relies on his counsel. It is of great comfort to him.”
I leaned on the table.
“You asked why Sauven puts Hreban in charge. Because after the entire city becomes paralyzed with fear from the constant killings, the Dog Market Butcher will murder the Sun Margrave in front of the whole court and then vanish into thin air. Colart Jenicor will be the sixth victim.”
Reynald’s face iced over.
“The next day Hreban and his guards will stumble on the killer’s hideout and cut off his head. Ulmar Hreban will become known as the savior of Kair Toren.”
