Case 31: 'Saint Metāliska'

The building belonging to the infamous religious cult is found to be set ablaze and destroyed, with the crucified body of Bolverkr, their leader, in front of it all, a stake through his heart as his hands and legs are tied by spiked wire.

## Beginning

It was the dawn of a new morning, and the police station was receiving several calls complaining about a strange burning smell in their area. The two Detectives, Audria and Khaalida were sent to investigate the scene. They managed to track down the source of the foul smelling smoke, only to find a large building slightly detached from the main city that was on fire and looked to have been caught in an explosion. The two quickly called all available fire fighters to the scene, but as they waited, they noticed this wasn't any normal fire, above the door of the building was the crucified corpse of Bolverkr, his face permanently frozen in an expression of fear. After the firefighters arrived and put out the fire, the detectives would be able to discover the rest of the building, which was a smouldering shell of what it once was, and it was also filled with the dozens of charred bodies of all the cultists.

A slightly burnt uniform baring the religions symbol was spotted just outside the building's remains with a blue hair sample, little CCTV cameras were found that provided functioning footage but they were sent to the lab regardless. There was also an interview conducted at the local demolition store about the use of explosives.

## Middle

After several lab tests, the cause of death was identified as a stab to the heart and the subsequent shock that followed, but Bolverkr also sustained minor burns.

The blue hair samples were also identified to be synthetic, so it was suspected that the killer wore a blue wig for whatever reason.

The interview with the shop owner confirmed that the killer was a cautious one, traces of sleeping gas were discovered and the owner himself had no memory of selling such a vast amounts of explosives to anyone.

Interviews were also conducted on various local citizens, all of which had a distaste for the religious cult and knew of its whereabouts and all seemed glad that it had been taken care of. Some were even previous die hard fans of the dead celebrity and had flown over to Walread to get some answers themselves as to what happened. They were all taken into custody.

## End

Although there were decent cases to be made for the suspects, nothing was very concrete and would be ultimately difficult to fight for in a court case, everything in this case seemed to be almost inhuman and it grew increasingly complicated to pinpoint certain events. Everyone was about to drop the case, but Audria remained determined, taking the computer storing the jumbled CCTV footage and taking it to her own room and decided to try and crack it herself. After many hours of fiddling and almost loosing the footage entirely, she managed to decode it, and what she saw shocked her to her core.

Khaalida was the killer. It was plain as day. As a piece of debris fell on the killer's face during the explosion as they approached their screaming victim, it revealed Khaalida's face for a brief moment before the footage was cut off.

Khaalida would corner Audria about this. Revealing her true identity as Cobalt Alexander and her motives for this heinous crime. That was when Audria was offered a choice, hand Cobalt over to the authorities with this new damning information, or let her go free.

*The case went cold, and a killer was never found...*