Chapter 21: Welcoming the Newbie
In the middle of the afternoon at Graheels police headquarters, Joe was at his desk looking through documents and videos. He was desperately looking for any lead.
It had been a week since Rob Anvil was murdered under his watch, and he was pissed. Joe couldn’t stomach the thought of someone under his protection dying. For someone to have the nerve of infiltrating and murdering a witness at the police headquarters was unthinkable.
What little chance he had for bringing justice to his dead friends also died with Rob. He wasn't mentally stable, but Rob still could have provided enough information to find evidence of his former gangs wrong doing. Allowing Joe and his team to criminally convict a bunch of former members. But now, that was all thrown out the window. He was now pursuing a murder case with Rob.
The only problem was that it wasn't being declared a murder.
He had watched the recording of the interrogation a thousand times to try and understand what happened, but the recording ends a few seconds after both he and Mike left the room. So, he couldn't see what had happened to cause Rob's death.
When they examined the interrogation room, there were countless slash marks all over the walls and furniture. The camera in the room had also been cut clean in half and destroyed. Explaining why the recording cuts out.
An autopsy was done and the body was examined. A strange wooden disk-like object was found on Robb's body. The object had strange writing on it and was split perfectly down the center in two. The occult researcher division within the police identified the object as a kind of suicide device. Something that members of the nameless cults carry and use when they're caught. They theorized that it worked by releasing air pressure that would slice the user and anything nearby into pieces. It would explain the slash mark on the wall and camera if true. Combined with Rob's mental state, it looked very likely that he just killed himself. As a result, Rob's death was declared a suicide.
However, Joe completely rejected that. His experience just before Rob's death told him it was something else. That unsettling feeling both he and Mike had didn’t come from nowhere. He believed that there was something that he was missing.
Following that gut feeling, he questioned the occult researchers about the wooden object. He found that those investigators from the occult division couldn’t actually confirm the wooden object was a suicide device, only that it had a lot of similar aspects to other devices they've seen. Following that line, he took the object to some enchanters. Joe suspected that object was enchanted at one point. Unfortunately, they didn't give him much information either. They said if it did have an enchantment, it was long gone.