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your first day back at work, Buttercup,” Joe Dawson said in his deep baritone.
    Dawson was a gruff, smart-mouthed bulldog of an agent with a take-no-prisoners attitude when it came to his job. He’d come up with the nickname when we’d first met, something that I tolerated. Despite his rough exterior and misogynistic tendencies, we’d managed to become friends and bond over some difficult cases.
    My anxiety level was spiking as I said, “Why do I get the feeling you’re not calling to ask me about celebrity sightings in Hollywood.”
    “I wouldn’t know a celeb if it staggered out of a nightclub and bit me on my big ass.”
    I chuckled. “Stranger things have been known to happen around here. What gives?”
    His voice came down a notch. “You’ve probably heard the latest about The Swarm. Janice Taylor is in custody and is in the process of being transferred to a federal prison in Colorado.”
    Dawson was referring to a case that had been one of the most difficult I’d worked since coming to Robbery Homicide. It had started with a mad woman named Myra, a surrogate killer, who was acting on behalf of someone she called Azazel. They were both eventually stopped, but not before their killing spree took the lives of dozens of victims. Before Azazel was killed by the SWAT team, he told me that he was one of seven disciples determined to seek vengeance in the world for the perceived injustices they’d suffered.
    A few months back, another member of the original seven, a one-time FBI agent named Janice Taylor, had come after me. Before she’d escaped, Taylor had told me there were other members of her group, radicalized killers, who she referred to as The Swarm, waiting for a signal to resume the killing spree.
    “The only better place I could think of for Taylor would be hell,” I said to Dawson.
    “I’ve heard the supermax prison is about as close as you can get.” He paused and cleared his throat. “She wants to talk to you.”
    I took a breath and released it slowly, his words settling into a dark place in my psyche. “What about?”
    “Not sure. She hasn’t said a word to anybody since being arrested in Florida, but a couple of weeks ago she told her attorney she wants to see you.”
    Janice Taylor had held me, and a young girl who I’d met while doing some charity work, hostage. She’d come close to killing us both. “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
    “Greer and your brass cleared it, but I understand if you don’t want to be involved.”
    Peter Greer was Joe Dawson’s boss. He’d been the head of the taskforce assigned to deal with Taylor and the others in the past.
    Dawson’s voice came down even further as he added, “If you’d like, I can go at her alone. Try to get her to talk to me.”
    I was grateful for what he was proposing and for trying to keep me out of the case, but knew it would never work. Janice Taylor had taken a personal interest in me. If she did have a message about The Swarm, I was probably the one that she intended to hear it. And I knew that lives might also eventually hang in the balance.”
    “When…when are you planning to see her?”
    “A few days, not sure exactly.”
    “Give me a call when you’re ready. I’ll be there.”
    “Anybody ever tell you that you’re the best, Buttercup?”
    “It’s been a while. Stay in touch, Joe.”
    As I walked to Lieutenant Oz’s office, I did my best to put the phone call out of my mind. Along the way, Bernie and I stopped and I said hello to several coworkers. My assignment in Section One felt like home to me. The unit was a prototype created to handle some of the department’s high profile cases. It was the brainchild of Bradley East, the chief of police, who used the unit to garner favor with the press when we broke big cases.
    Oz’s large office had been outfitted with so much high tech gear and equipment that Selfie had nicknamed it the bat cave. In addition to TV monitors and computers, the cave had a