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Dixon homicide?” he asked, furthering my irritation.
    “Michael, please! I’m busy, so can you find out or not?”
    Hearing his soft laughter through the phone, I found myself smiling. He knew me well and sometimes liked to play just to see my reaction.
    “Okay, Sergeant, when I get to the office I’ll do some checking and call you back. Good enough?”
    “Yes, it is. Oh, and Agent Hagerman?”
    “Yes, Sergeant Gallagher Hagerman?”
    “I love you.”
    “I love you, too.”
    Michael still gave me butterflies, no doubt about it. Hanging up the phone, I wished he were here in my office. It had been a long time since we’d worked a case together, but we made an amazing team. I remembered a time where I thought I had lost Michael forever, thinking he was the victim of a Mafia-related car bombing. It was, unquestionably, the most agonizing experience of my life. Just thinking about it made me tremble.
    Concentrating my efforts on more important tasks, I began to flip through the Dixon file while I waited for Michael to call back. The folder held nothing of significance so I closed it and tossed it on my desk. Losing what little patience I had left, I contemplated rummaging through the stack of less important cases I’d been assigned. Regrettably, my mind was elsewhere and they’d have to take the back burner. I looked at my watch and saw that almost an entire hour had passed. I’d been fighting the urge to call Michael back, so I breathed a sigh of relief when the phone rang.
    “What took so long?” I barked.
    “Sorry, Cee, it wasn’t as easy as I thought. Let me guess, you have no fingernails left?”
    “I have acrylics on. They can’t be chewed.”
    “Fantastic, how many cigarettes have you smoked?”
    “Michael.”
    “All right, all right. I looked everywhere and we don’t have a unit specifically geared toward religious cults. I talked to a guy in Washington and he said that any type of threatening cult or militia falls under domestic terrorism.”
    “So that means Homeland Security keeps their eye out?”
    “Not necessarily. For the most part, if a weird cult pops up somewhere, it falls under local jurisdiction, unless they start stockpiling weapons and such, like that whole Waco thing. It all depends on what they’re doing. If it’s weapons, they’ll bring in the ATF, which in turn will notify Homeland Security or the FBI. For the most part, they’re pretty harmless. He did say they’ve been keeping their eye on the Church of Scientology lately.”
    “There’s a surprise. Any moron could see what’s goingon with those people. So essentially you found out nothing?” I sighed.
    “Oh, ye of little faith. You know better than that, don’t you?”
    I perked up. “Let’s have it.”
    “The FBI put out a report in 1999 called Project Megiddo. It was basically a watchdog report for the new millennium. Remember all the hype on The New World Order and Y2K?”
    “Vaguely.”
    “I’m not going to explain the whole thing, you can look it up on the Internet, but to sum it up, the new millennium brought a lot of apocalyptic visionaries who preached the end of the world at the turn of the century. The FBI put watchdogs on these groups to ensure they didn’t cause some type of social breakdown on a large scale. Thankfully, nothing major happened. I also know they rewrote a lot of the policies and procedures in dealing with ‘doomsday’ cults after Waco. Bottom line, unless a cult is into something illegal on a large scale, it falls on the local cops. Now, you want to tell me what this is all about?”
    “I’m hearing some rumors about a group that moved in south of Butler. I also happened to have a run-in with one of them at the Dixon homicide. He claimed he was a Mormon.”
    “There you have it. Most cults are usually splinter groups of Mormons or Baptists. Unless you get one like the freak in California that had his whole group eat poisoned applesauce so they could board a spaceship.”
    “I