AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I had kept the original wooden furniture from the old religious colony, only having it sanded and freshly stained. As they’d deemed anything ostentatious as sinful, every piece of furniture had been designed with a focus on sturdiness and efficiency, with simple lines and barely any adornments. A matching chair stood behind the wide, rectangular desk with drawers. In the left corner of the room, in front of the giant screen hanging on the white wall, a worktable provided seating for six people. A filing cabinet, a mini-bar, and a loveseat constituted the rest of the furniture. The only personal touch I had brought to the room were the holographic portraits and photos of the various hybrids and dignitaries who had sojourned with us at one point or another.
Once again, Keran’s face betrayed nothing of his thoughts. But I didn’t miss how his gaze lingered on some of the family portraits. I wondered if he had known or met some of those people back on Braxia before they fled.
“We will be more comfortable sitting at the worktable,” I said, gesturing at it.
Beyond the fact that we’d be too cramped sitting side-by-side behind my desk, having Keran and his guards sitting across my desk from me would have felt awkward and maybe even disrespectful.
The Prince complied, heading straight for the table.
“May I offer you something to eat or to drink?” I added, stopping by the mini bar.
Keran shook his head. “No, thank you.”
To my surprise, the two guards stepped back out of the room after giving it a quick glance.
“They’re not coming in?” I asked.
“They have other reconnaissance tasks to perform,” Keran said dismissively. “They’ll be outside while you and I discuss the situation.”
That made me a little uneasy. I’d already found it uncomfortable having those two mountains of muscles traipsing through every room of our shelter to secure the location without me. Now, the thought of having them in a separate room doing who knew what unnerved me. I wasn’t skittish or paranoid, but my motto had always been “Better a threat you see than one you don’t”.
Failing to come up with a good reason as to why his guards should stay inside my office with us instead, I simply nodded. Silencing my irrational sense of dread, I picked up the datapad on my desk and sat on the right side of the table, facing the giant screen. Keran settled next to me, his chair slightly skewed so that he could partially face me.
“Lay it on me,” he said in a commanding tone.
Chapter 5
Dawn
Igave him a stiff nod, turned on the vidscreen, and tapped some instructions on my datapad to project the murder files onto the screen.
“Over the past eight and a half weeks, these six hybrids have been found dead, their corpses mutilated, following similar patterns,” I said grimly while displaying their faces in a mosaic on screen. “Each one was found in completely different areas that failed to provide any kind of pattern or link that would enable us to identify a potential point of origin as to where the crime would have been committed before the bodies were dumped. Each new victim is always found exactly nine days after the previous one. We found Roman six days ago,” I added, pointing at the last face at the bottom right of the screen.
“Meaning the killer will dump a new victim in three days,” Keran said with a frown.
“That’s exactly what I fear,” I said with helpless anger. “The murders are gruesome. They really went all out making sure the victims suffered for a long time before they died.”
I gave him an apologetic look as I displayed the close-up shots of the corpses of the various victims. That reflex didn’t make much sense considering the Braxian prince would have undoubtedly seen far worse on his homeworld.
“As you can see, they bear the typical marks of a culling,” I explained pointing at the various wounds on the corpses. They were beaten, then attached by their wrists to a pole, before having their legs broken so they would slowly asphyxiate while getting whipped.”
When I glanced at Keran, the murderous anger on his face, and his clenched broad jaw should have frightened anyone in their right mind. But knowing fury at the pain these poor souls had endured fueled that terrifying expression filled me with hope. This was the look of a man determined to bring the culprits to justice.
“However, that’s not what killed them,” I said.
Keran jerked his head towards me, surprise superseding his anger.
“You see these small perforations? At first, I thought they were stab wounds, as if the killer had thrown darts at them in some demented game,” I said, my voice filled with the disgust and helpless rage that always overtook me when I went over these cases. “I asked for a complete autopsy to know exactly all that they had endured, but the coroner keeps dicking me around. The peacekeeping office has only sent me half-baked reports that all more or less conclude that the men died due to the various traumas they sustained.”
“What do you think those holes are?” Keran asked.
It struck me as odd that he didn’t question why the local authorities weren’t properly assisting us. I would have to dig into that further.
“On the fourth case, we had the unfortunate luck to find the victim before the peacekeepers,” I replied, running nervous fingers through my hair. “We performed our own scans, and grabbed as many tissue samples as we could without disturbing the crime scene too much. As the death had been fairly recent, I was able to see that the perforation of the wound had not come from a projectile or sharp object, but from something inside piercing its way out.”
“Kranax Beetles,” Keran said in an icy voice filled with a seething rage.
I gave him a stiff nod. “Yes. The lab analyses of the samples confirmed a large presence of the slime secreted by Kranax Beetle larvae. Considering the number of exit wounds I was able to observe, without flipping the corpse, I suspect over a hundred eggs hatched.”
