Chocolate cake

You are sitting in a café eating a piece of chocolate cake when you get a call. There has been a murder. You get the rest of the cake to go. When you arrive at the scene it is another café in town, and it appears the cause of death maybe from eating a piece of chocolate cake.

The victim is a young woman. She appears to be in great shape. You start to question the patrons and the staff. The patrons are all giving almost the same story, she ordered coffee and a piece of chocolate cake. She started eating the cake and suddenly, she was having trouble breathing then dropped to the floor and started foaming at the mouth and stopped breathing. This makes you think it is some kind of poison. When you question the staff, they tell you the cakes are premade the night before. Some are frozen and some are kept in the fridge. If it is poison it could have been slipped into the cake at any time. The next question is was this a random or targeted attack.

You start to investigate the young woman’s past. What you find is disturbing. She was put into witness protection because she saw her parents murdered in their home at age 6. Her foster family was nice until one of the other children they fostered tried to rape her. That child was charged, and she was given a choice to either stay with the family or get moved to another one. She decided to stay with the family. She did well in school and got into law school. She passed the Bar at 26 and got hired at a very well-known law firm. She made partner at 28. Now at 29 she is laying in the morgue. The question is why. Was it her past coming back to haunt her, was it her job or was it just a random attack?

You work the case for a couple of weeks with no break in the case. A few weeks later you get a call and this time it is a local bakery. They were having a contest of who could eat the most cake in 10 minutes. This time there are two victims. The ones that ate the chocolate and the brownie cake are now dead. The victims are a young health man and an older female. Both had had the same symptoms as your original victim. You are now thinking these are random attacks and that you have a serial killer on your hands. There is no staff overlap but they both use the same supplier. You check into the supplier. They have a stellar reputation, and you find nothing.

You are working this new case for a week and get another call. This time it is at a hotel. When you arrive at the hotel room you see a piece of cake, but you also see drugs everywhere. You are not sure if this case is connected to the others or not.

You finally get the toxicology report back on the first three victims. They were poisoned with cyanide. You finally have one answer but no idea how or who is administrating it.

Then you get a break. Someone has sent a video to a television station claiming they are behind the killings and that there are more victims than you think. He also says that he will never be caught. When the video arrives at the station you have it sent for analysis. You can determine the height and approximate weight and that he is a white male. You could not tell anything from his voice because it was altered.

You investigate his claim that there are more victims. What you find is incredible. There have been more than a hundred deaths in this manor across the United States. You are curious and expand your search to around the world. When the information comes back you are in shock. Worldwide there has been almost a thousand deaths from cyanide in cakes. You are thinking either this person travels the world or there is something else going on.

You gather as many of the police reports as you can. You notice that it is not just chocolate cake. It is all different kinds of cake. You start to look at everything from suppliers to the makers of the ingredients. You finally find a connection. A lot of them have similar suppliers but the one thing they all have in common is the maker of the confectioner’s sugar. You investigate the company that makes the sugar. The company has no idea what is going on.

It takes you another month of digging to find the smoking gun. You find that all the sugar in the murders is connected to one plant. You have the plant shut down immediately and you start to look at all the employees. There are a couple that send up read flags. There are some arrests for battery and assault but nothing that would indicate mass murder.

You go back to the beginning and think who would have access to the sugar at the right time. You are having trouble finding someone that would have the access and opportunity. Then you notice that they have had several break downs over the last year. You investigate the maintenance personnel. There you finally find a suspect. One of the maintenance personnel is a nut job. He has been writing online about mass murder and other things.

You go to arrest him, and he gives up easy. The story he tells is a simple one. He has a family member that has access to cyanide. He asked them to steal some. Every time he was called to work on the machine, he would put some on the machine. That is why only certain batches where poisoned.

You become the hero that caught the worst serial killer in history.