Breach of Peace

  Breach of Peace

  Book 1

  Daniel Greene

  Copyright © 2021 by Daniel Greene

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  ISBN 9780578840789 (e-book)

  ISBN 9780578840772 (Paperback Edition)

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  Edited by Adam Segaller

  Cover art by Felix Ortiz

  Book design by Jay S. Kennedy

  Contents

  1. The Crime

  2. The Madness

  3. The Reason

  4. The Lead

  5. The Mistake

  6. The Flight

  7. The Truth

  8. The Coverup

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  The Crime

  The scene at the front door was seared into Khlid’s mind: a child, hanging by a chain from the second-story window, his swollen, bloody face confronting her as she approached the manor. Protocol was to leave the location of a crime untainted for as long as possible. Khlid had nonetheless ordered a beat cop to remove the horrid sight—the boy, no older than ten, deserved his dignity—but the chain was thick and the officer was still sawing away.

  Now Khlid stood before the servants of the manor, assembled in stunned silence. “We won’t rest until the truth comes to light. God bless.”

  “God bless,” the staff echoed, some through tears.

  Khlid turned to Rollins, standing behind her, reached into her coat pocket, and pulled out her notebook. “Have we counted the dead?”

  “At least six, ma'am. Still checking all the rooms,” Rollins said. The reed-like sergeant was the best the Seventh Precinct had to offer. His age had slowed him down, but he still managed a crime scene better than most. “We are checking the surrounding grounds for anything out of the ordinary. Inspector Chapman is already inside the house making his analysis.”

  Chapman gets first look. Fucking great.

  The next question hurt to ask: “Did we find what was missing of the boy?”

  Rollins inhaled slowly before responding. “No, ma’am.”

  Khlid walked to the house, her head down in thought. Rollins followed close behind. The morning air was wet and cold. The downpour from the night before had evaporated; now all that remained was the mud and fog. Khlid’s feet squished along the ground. Considering the manor’s distance from the city, Khlid expected to hear morning birdsong, or country hounds barking to protest their disturbed routine. Instead, the land itself seemed to hold its breath, as if haunted by the events from the night before. Against the silent backdrop, the rumble of carriage wheels announced the arrival of more officers to protect the scene.

  “How much information do we have on the family?” she asked Rollins, averting her gaze from the front door.

  The sergeant pulled out a notepad. “What do you already know, ma’am?”

  Khlid thought back to the report she had read in the carriage ride over. “Pruit family. Loyalist to their core. Perfect record on paper. The head of the family, Charl, made his money in manufacturing. Mostly providing for the war effort.”

  “Providing what?”

  “Steel.”

  Rollins coughed. Khlid realized she was taking a drag from a cigarette she did not remember lighting. The damn things had become as natural as walking. Rollins had made it well known he hated their acrid smell.

  “Completely right, ma’am.” Rollins turned a page. “One daughter and one—umm…” He glanced at the house. “One son. The matriarch, Muri Pruit, oversaw the import of countless cultural goods to the capital city from across the Empire. Of note, she was recently responsible for acquiring the Royal Stones of Jurridia.”

  “Fascinating,” Khlid said with mock interest. The southern nation of Jurridia had come under Imperial rule about five years ago. Many of their royal artifacts had been taken to be displayed in the Museum of Kingdoms. “Were they socialites?”

  Rollins lifted his gaze from his notes. “Ma’am?”

  “How often did they go to those royal parties in the city? You know, the shit rich people live for.”

  “We don’t know that yet, ma’am.”

  Khlid snatched the notebook from Rollins’ hand. She wrote down three addresses, then handed it back. “Find their address book. If any of those are in there, let me know.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And, Rollins.”

  “Yes?”

  Khlid indicated her cigarette. “I’m sorry.”

  He nodded and headed for a side entrance to the manor. Khlid noticed a workman's shed, roughly fifty meters from the manor. Something that had been bothering her suddenly came into focus.

  She walked halfway over to the shed. There was a medium-sized window on each side—but only one reflected the foggy morning light; the other was a dark maw. “It poured rain all last night,” she muttered to herself. “What are the chances a family this rich has a staff too sloppy to close a shed window during a storm?”

  Khlid tossed her half-smoked cigarette to the ground.

  Nasty habit. Really must stop.

  She looked around. Every hedge was trimmed to perfection. No forgotten tools lay about. The exterior of the house itself was immaculate. “Unlikely.”

  Khlid now saw a small padlock dangling from the shed door’s latch. “Can’t open it from the outside without a key. Can’t open it from the inside if it's locked. Which means...” She was close enough now to see that the window had, as she thought, been smashed.

  Arriving at the shed, Khlid noted there was no glass on the grass outside. “Smashed inward to climb in. So we have…” She leaned in. “Yup.”

  Blood on the shed’s floor.

  “Never climb through broken glass.” Khlid pulled out her notebook and noticed another cigarette burning in her hand.

  Damn it!

  Flicking the cigarette to the grass, she called out, “Bring the cutters.” An officer, standing just outside of a small servants’ entrance, hands on his knees, looked her way. “Yes, you. Cutters if you would.”

  The officer jogged toward the front of the manor.

  Khlid squatted near the window to inspect a mess of footprints in the mud. They all seemed to be one size—medium, if a male—headed both toward and away from the shed.

  What happened was clear. The why remained murky.

  Khlid walked around the shed, but found nothing else of interest. A rising sense of impatience grew within her. She was tempted to shoot the padlock off. Logically, it should work, but she had never actually seen it done.

  As she began to seriously consider drawing her sidearm, the officer returned with a pair of cutters.

  “Thank you, dear.”

  The officer heaved at the cutters, but only got halfway through the lock. Another heave and the lock gave way with a solid clip. Khlid thought she could have managed it in one. True, she’d had plenty of time and tension to exercise over the last couple of weeks, but she was generally unimpressed with officers’ tendency not to keep up with fitness after basic training.

  “Well, this is lavish.” Khlid had never seen a shed so clean and organized. Granted, she had not been in many royal sheds, but this was bordering on ridiculous. She took several beats to take in the room. Clearly, the floor was regularly swept and polished. Most of the tools looked like they had never been used—though this was unlikely, given that the grounds were equally pristine.

  Either compulsively replaced or cleaned. More likely cleaned.

  “O
fficer...” Khlid searched his face for a name. “...Smits. What do you think happened at the window?”

  The officer looked nervous under her stare. “I assume that’s men’s footwear in the prints?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only one set?”

  “Correct.”

  “Someone broke in looking for a weapon, I’d say.”

  “If they were a woman’s footprints, you’d have a different theory?” Khlid took another unconscious drag from a cigarette.

  “I didn't say that. But—have you met many Imperial ladies, ma’am?”

  “I have not had the pleasure.”

  “They aren’t the type to run for a weapon. With the looks of this place, someone would’ve only come to this shed last night looking for two things: a weapon or a place to avoid death. Only one set of prints, so no chase. The royal men like to think they’re heroic. I could see one coming here with a last stand in mind.”

  “Well done, and I believe you’re correct.” Khlid wasn't so sure about the officer’s remarks on upper-class gender politics, but everything else added up. She came to a stop. “But what tool would I take?” Khlid scanned the whole room once again. With a place this organized, it should have been obvious if something were missing.

  “Should I get one of the workers, ma’am? I’m sure a gardener would know the shed well enough to spot—”

  “No,” Khlid cut in. “We don’t want to bring any possible suspects in here until we’ve swept it repeatedly.”

  “Right, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.” He paused, humor slipping into his voice. “It looks fairly well swept to me, ma’am.”

  “Yes, this place is unsettlingly clean.” Khlid hardly even finished the sentence. Her mind was focused on the room now, and barely registered the officer.

  Even the floor was clean. Who in the hell cleans their shed floor? The only signs of disturbance were the broken window and a smear of blood on the sill itself. Likely to have happened as the man climbed back out. Too much blood to be an immediate result of a gash. It had to have welled up over several seconds.

  “Okay, Smits, here is what I know so far. A man came down to the shed after noticing something horribly wrong at the house. We know it was not one of the staff; none of them are hiding cuts. This man did not possess a key—probably one of the royal family; they don’t carry things like keys to sheds. So, he smashes the window. The door is locked from the outside, so he has to crawl back out the same way he came in, and leaves a blood smear on the windowsill on the way out. I suspect he did this well past midnight, after the rainstorm had peaked. Otherwise all that blood would have washed away.

  “What we don’t know is what our mystery man snatched. We also don’t know if he had been in the house when things went to hell, or if he came home and witnessed it from the outside. Either way, he was trying to be a hero. Shame he’s probably dead.”

  A voice different than Smits’ responded, “Well, that was enjoyable.”

  That voice snapped the world back into focus. A grin spread across Khlid’s face. Heart beating just a bit faster, she stood and saw her husband, Samuel.

  Samuel had been away three weeks. Sometimes inspectors were called to investigate matters in smaller towns to help maintain justice throughout the Empire. Samuel must have been handed a simple case: one could hardly do more in three weeks than travel to the provinces, turn around, and come back.

  Khlid would have run to kiss Sam, but Smits still stood in the corner furiously writing in his notepad. She settled for walking over and giving Sam a hug. He placed his hand on her face before recomposing his professional demeanor, stepping away and looking around the shed.

  “I got in this morning,” Samuel said. “I went to the station after I saw you weren’t home and was told you were out here on a homicide.” A grin pulled at his cheeks. It was something Khlid loved dearly about him. He would do whatever it took to be around her more throughout the day, even visit a murder scene, and would do so with a smile on his face.

  “You couldn’t have been far behind us,” Khlid said. “We’ve barely been here half an hour.” After going over her observations, she asked, “Any clue what could have been taken?”

  “Soil knife, I would guess,” Samuel said. “Nobles are all taught to defend themselves with knives, even if they carry a gun. I don’t see a soil knife in here, and if I was going into a house with one or more murderers, I would want something I was familiar with. I believe it was the patriarch, Lord Pruit, himself who came here. Any of the young dead men inside would have already had a knife on them. The older man probably stopped carrying one, even a decorative one, ages ago.”

  Khlid smiled. Damn, her man was good.

  “How many dead inside?” Samuel asked.

  Smits looked up from his notes. “The whole family, plus what appear to be two guests. Six in total, but the family was killed… differently.”

  “How were the guests killed?” Khlid asked.

  “Both killed in their sleep with knife wounds to the heart. Two young noblemen. Very efficient kills.” Smits paused. “Have you been inside yet, ma’am?”

  The image of the boy swinging in the breeze invaded her mind.

  Khlid swallowed before saying, “No. I only got as far as the foyer before I had to handle the staff.”

  “So, you saw the… the daughter?” Smits’ face contorted at the memory. The girl, in her late teens, had been splayed across the foyer floor, extra steps taken to brutalize the body after death.

  “Yes,” she said. “Any word from the medical team?”

  “No, ma’am. And the entire family was handled in a similar fashion.” Smits' voice cracked. “The killers took their time. Only the guests died peacefully.”

  Samuel cleared his throat. “Someone with a clear vendetta, then. First, kill whoever is in your way so you can take your time with the family.”

  Khlid shook her head. “Disagree.”

  “What have I missed?”

  “More than one killer. The guests in bed. Each killed by a direct stab wound to the heart, but no disturbance? And those are the least involved kills. One person could do what was done to the boy, but the daughter? That requires more.”

  The image of the teenager’s splayed rib cage danced in her mind. “Plus—a house full of victims and no escapees.”

  Samuel cocked an eyebrow. “So, why not a vendetta?”

  “I’m fine with the vendetta theory.” Khlid raised her hands in mock surrender. “I’m just not so sure it was aimed entirely at the family.”

  Smits and Samuel exchanged looks. “Does that not look like an extremely personal attack on the family to you?”

  “Yes and no.”

  Smits spoke up. “I’ll bite, why?”

  “Because you don’t leave a display like that for people who are dead.”

  “Oh…” Samuel’s eyes drifted. “This was left for us.”

  “It must have been,” Khlid agreed.

  A stillness hung over them, the thrill of the puzzle overtaken by Khlid’s revelation.

  She touched her husband's arm. “What are you thinking?”

  Samuel remained still. He always did when mulling things over. “I think this is a rebel attack. Like what we’ve seen in the city.”

  Color drained from Smits’ face. “You think it’s related to the attack on the market last year?”

  Khlid answered, “What happened here was clearly meant to send a message. This will spread. No matter how hard we try and stamp out the rumors, eventually the people will know the royal class has been hit. Hit in an extreme way.”

  Smits ran a hand through his blond hair, lost in thought.

  This was going to be bad. Recently, several attacks had been made against the Empire, all to send one message: a powerful resistance still lived. They worked in the shadows, sowing doubt in the sanctity of the Empire. Explosives had been set off in crowded city streets. A shooter had walked into a market within the very capital, and with the help of unknown cons
pirators, massacred dozens. Last month, four priests of the Ministry of Faith had been lynched on their own land. This all fits the rebels’ bloody pattern.

  “Smits,” Khlid said.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “When we get back to the precinct, I need a report on our theories. Mark your missive top priority and confidential, and send it to the Ministry of Defense.”

  Smits nodded and turned toward the manor, but Samuel grabbed his arm. “No word of this to the other officers. Not until we know more.”

  Smits hesitated, as if he took offense at the order. “Of course, sir.”

  Samuel released him.

  Khlid drew her husband's attention. “That wasn’t necessary. Smits knows to keep quiet.”

  Samuel grimaced. “I just know how officers can fucking gossip.” He gestured towards Smits’ receding figure. “The new ones might as well grease their lips every morning.”

  “Hey.” Khlid pulled Samuel’s chin towards her. “What’s gotten into you today? You love the fresh recruits. I’ve seen you put your reputation on the line to back even the freshest recruit’s theory.”

  Samuel met her gaze with his black eyes, a rare genetic trait that accompanied equally dark hair that clashed with his pale skin in a stunning way. Wrinkles now creased his face, and his hair showed the slightest thinning at the edges. But Khlid loved that. Those lines were the fulfillment of his promise that they would grow old together. Besides, Khlid now sported a few wrinkles of her own.

  Samuel grabbed her hand from his chin and kissed it. He leaned down, and their lips met for several thumps of her heart.

  “I’m not sure. Just something in the air today.” Samuel backed away and adjusted his coat. “The case in the country was about stolen chickens.”