Celeste didn't move. She didn't flinch at the roar of his voice or the frantic, purple pulse in his neck. Instead, she slowly stood, brushing a microscopic speck of dust—and perhaps a bit of the Judge's dried pride—from her silk skirts.
"Are we on first-name bases now, Sheriff Miller?" she asked, her voice tilting with a dangerous, honeyed edge.
The Sheriff bristled, his hand instinctively going to his belt. "I said—"
"Because if we are..," She leaned in until the damp, earthy smell of swamp on her boots mingled with the lingering garlic on his breath. It was a shame, she thought, that his stomach was proving to be just as weak as his lead on the killer. "I expect we'll be riding horses together by the weekend. Or perhaps sharing a Sunday roast? After all, you've spent more time sacking me from crime scenes this month than you have actually finding a lead."
The Sheriff's jaw tightened so hard it looked like it might snap. To him, Celeste Merriweather wasn't an investigator; she was a ghost of a high-society past that refused to stay buried and a woman who saw far too much through those analytical eyes.
"Get. Out," he hissed, the word a low growl. "Before I have Fredrick escort you to the parish lock-up for obstructing justice."
"Justice?" Celeste let her gaze drift upward toward the chandelier, where the gold thread glittered mockingly in the heat. "If you found justice, Sheriff, I'm sure the Judge would be the first to let us know. But for now, it seems he's a bit... tied up."
She didn't wait for his explosion. She turned on her heel and walked toward the heavy oak doors, the rhythmic click-clack of her boots sounding like a countdown in the silent foyer. She walked out of the estate, carrying the image of the dead man behind her eyelids.
The walk back to her small, cramped flat on the edge of town was a blur of humid shadows and gaslight. Her boots clicked rhythmically against the cobblestones—a lonely sound in a town that had started locking its doors at sunset.
Once inside, she didn't light a lamp for herself. She didn't need much light to see what was already there. She went straight to her desk, where fifteen meticulous charcoal drawings were pinned to the wall in a grim sequence.
With a steady hand, she sharpened a stick of willow charcoal. And began to draw. She worked with a feverish accuracy, recreating the Montgomery foyer—the grotesque suspension, the sewing of the mouth, the placement of the broken gavel around his neck. She drew until the setting sun began to bleed through the shutters, turning the room a dusty orange.
She pinned the sixteenth drawing to the end of the line and stepped back, her fingers stained black.She stood before the wall, her gaze drifting over the neatly pinned sketches like a general reviewing a battlefield. Each charcoal line traced a tragedy she'd memorized.
She looked at the first victim, a banker. Then the second, a sea captain. Then the eighth, a politician. Her eyes raced back and forth across the wall, tracing the shapes of the bodies and the methods of the art the killer had performed on them.
Suddenly, the air felt thinner. Celeste leaned forward, her heart hammering against her ribs.
"There," she whispered. Realization had struck her like a bell tolling in an empty cathedral, her charcoal-stained finger hovering inches from the paper.
She hadn't seen it at the scenes. No one would—not when looking at them one by one. But here, laid out in a row, the carnage finally spoke. A pattern was emerging from the madness, hidden at the very feet of the corpses.
She staggered back, her eyes frantically jumping from the feet of the first drawing to the last. It was so simple, so mundane compared to the theatrical gore of the scenes, that every other investigator had tripped right over it.
She grabbed a fresh candle, holding it close to the wall
She looked at the first drawing: Barnaby Wickham, the city's Capital banker. He had been found in the middle of a flooded field in Des Allemands, his throat cut so deep he was nearly decapitated. He was wearing polished, hand-stitched oxfords—but they were two sizes too small, the leather stretched to the point of bursting.
Celeste's gaze darted to the second drawing: Captain Halloway, found pinned to the mast of his own schooner at the Harvey Canal. Despite his small frame, Halloway wore shoes so oversized they became the butt of every joke on-site. The men mocked his lack of style, never realizing the heavy truth: those shoes weren't his to begin with.
"Wickham's shoes," Celeste muttered, her charcoal-stained finger tracing the path. "He took Wickham's oxfords, walked to the canal, and left them on the Captain."
She followed the trail of leather and blood down the line. Julian Vane, a plantation heir in Brokeburn. Found with his eyes replaced by silver coins. On his feet? The Captain's salt-crusted deck boots.
Father d'Abadie, the corrupt priest of St. Charles Parish. Found slumped in his confessional, his tongue removed and replaced with a prayer book. He was wearing the silk-topped slippers of Senator Vance, Victim 6.
Archibald Thorne-Croft, a rail tycoon. Found in a Boutte swamp shack, his body arranged like a marionette. He was wearing the mud-caked riding boots of the High Sheriff of Gretna, victim 11.
The cycle was unbreakable. The killer was literally walking in the footsteps of the men he had just slaughtered. He would kill a man, strip the shoes from the warm corpse, and wear them to hunt his next prey. Once the new victim was dead, he would leave the old shoes behind and step into the life and the footwear of the new one.
Celeste looked at her latest drawing of Judge Montgomery. It was absurd. The man was surrounded by the elegance of his estate, yet sporting a pair of muddy swamp shoes that had no business being there
"Which means," she whispered, her eyes wide with a terrifying clarity, "right now, at this very moment, he is walking through the streets of Blackthorn in Judge Montgomery loafers.
The killer wasn't just a monster; he was a collector of status. He was literally stepping into the hierarchy he was dismantling. He was moving through the high-society balls, the cigar lounges, and the opera houses, hidden in plain sight because he wore the very soles of the men they were all mourning.
She looked at the empty space on her wall after the Judge. The seventeenth spot.
"He's wearing the Judge's shoes," she said, her voice growing stronger. "And wherever those shoes take him, that's where the next man dies."
She reached for her coat, the pattern burned into her brain. She knew what to look for. She wasn't looking for a monster in the shadows—she was looking for a man who walked like a Judge but hunted like a wolf.