Laura and Agent Norris took the elevator in the FBI's Seattle office, and stepped off. They walked down the tan-painted hallways, and found an office labeled 'Forensic Document Examiner.' They knocked and a faint voice called back, "come in."

Norris opened the door to a large, open office. A large table stood in the middle, covered with journal pages and an empty evidence box. A technician busily worked with his back to them, feeding journal pages into a large scanner. Another technician sat at a desk with a large monitor, scrolling through scanned pages.

The third person looked over from her desk and smiled. "Oh! Hey, Constantine."

Laura smiled back. "Good to see you, Balakrishnan"

She shook her head. "I told you, if you want to stick to last names, call me Bala. Four syllables is two too many."

"Sure, Bala."

Bala spun and wheeled her desk chair forward, then waved to two empty seats in front of her desk. "I've been waiting for you guys. You've got to see this."

Laura pulled up a chair, and Norris sat beside her. Bala pushed her chair back in, and pushed the corner of her monitor to swivel it toward them. She pulled up a scanned image of a journal page. "The journals you found aren't in great shape, but we've seen worse."

She gestured at the full table. "First order of business, we put them in the fridge so they wouldn't grow any mold sitting at room temperature. Then, we started separating, cataloging, and numbering all of the pages." She pointed to a large machine in the corner of the room that looked like a beige oven. "Then, we put them into an environmental simulation chamber."

Norris blinked. "A what?"

"It's basically a dehydrator on steroids. We can control the temperature and humidity, and make it anything we want. We're using it to gently dry the pages."

"Huh."

She opened a scan on her wide, curved monitor. "Then, we started pressing them flat and scanning them, one by one." The image was a messy blur of blotchy blue ink around hard to decipher handwriting. "The top pages are the worst. They got the most direct rainfall."

She panned around the image, clicking and dragging. "This is a lot of blur to remove. I tried a Fast Fourier Transform." She flipped to another image, a bit clearer. "Then a Laplacian filter." She flipped to a third image, which was grainy and almost uniformly blue. "Then, a blind deconvolution algorithm." She flipped to a third image with faint but readable text. "That worked out the best."

Laura leaned forward to read. In scrawled handwriting, the line read:

"Day two, and the end is near for us. I have the itch and the yellow skin. The world is spinning, soon it will be ablaze. Two already gone to Him, and the others are delirious. We are so close."

Laura leaned back. "Huh."

"Yeah," said Bala. "That might be the least weird, actually." She flipped to another image, this one clearer and with neater handwriting.

It read:

"After the flood, God promised to never again destroy the earth with water.

But by His word the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the Day of Judgment and destruction of ungodly men.

If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.

Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?

If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him, for the temple of God is holy, and that is what you are.

I know that everything God does will remain forever; there is nothing to add to it and there is nothing to take from it, for God has so worked that men should fear Him."

The three read, then sat in a tense silence. Bala pulled up two images from the journal and put them side by side, each zoomed in on a single word. "We see a lot of changes in the handwriting through the journals, but everything I've seen so far was written by the same person."

The left image's writing looked regular, neat, and clean. The right image was scrawled, sloppy, and difficult to read. Bala pointed. "They're different, obviously. The one on the right is clearly written in a hurry, or possibly under the influence." She panned both images. "But, the letter slant and pen lifts on the letters are the same, and the sizing is consistent." She zoomed in further, so both images showed the letter 'q.' "See the letter formation here? The shape of the tail of the 'q' is identical."

Laura sat in thought. "Could the handwriting change that much if the person were dying?"

Bala nodded slowly. "I mean, sure. If they lost some motor function or coordination."

Laura rested her elbow on the office chair, and her chin in her palm. "What else did you find so far? How much of the journals are scanned?"

"About half. I'll send the full scan when I have it." She opened another image file. "This was an earlier page. Less damaged. Stood out to me, at least."

"1. WE MUST TEACH THE FEAR OF GOD TO OUR ENEMIES. ONLY FOOLS teach only their friends and the minds friendly to their cause

2. The city of GOD is built with living stones. We are judged in the end by how much we built with him, and how much we built without him

3. We cannot live in the world without Him

4. Anything not built in His divine image will be consumed by fire.

5. GOD has tested us by trial and fire before, and it will return."

Laura stood up from her seat. "Thanks, Bala. You're amazing."

She nodded. "Thanks, Constantine."

Laura and Norris walked out of the office in silence. In the beige hallway, Norris shook his head. "I don't know what to think about that journal. It's nutty."

Laura pressed the elevator button. "I'm heading up to Williams' office. We need someone to tap in that's worked with cults before."

They rode up four floors, then stepped off the elevator and turned down another hallway. Made for offices and not labs, it was carpeted and painted an off-white. They passed by closed office doors with brass name placards, finally coming to SAC Williams. Laura knocked and then opened the door.

Williams looked at her over the top of his wire framed glasses. "Constantine. How can I help?"

Laura wordlessly took a seat in front of his desk, Norris shutting the door and following. She crossed her legs and folded her arms. "We just got back from forensic documents. They're still working on scanning and cleaning up the journals we found, but what they have so far is really out there. It looks like quotes from scripture, mixed with some personal thoughts on some pretty extreme religion. The most recent page talks about how they're ready to join 'Him.'"

Williams leaned back in his desk chair, then unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and rolled them up above his hairy forearms and crossed his arms. "Well, that's a development. Accidental poisoning doesn't seem very likely."

Norris shook his head. "Nope. They also have a lot of references to 'cleansing fire.'"

Williams shrugged. "Haven't seen that before. But when you get a delusional person's journal, it's not all going to make sense. The guy writing might have been schizophrenic." He turned to face Laura. "Constantine, what's your read then? Why come up here?"

"I think we need someone who has worked on cult cases before. Or at least knows how they work. If this is an intentional poisoning, it's a suicide. If it's a group suicide with a dash of fervent religiosity, it starts to feel like the end of a cult."

Williams looked up at the ceiling, drumming his fingers against his arm. "I know a guy that worked the Heaven's Gate cult in California. I'll see if he'd consult on this one."

Norris tilted his head, his eyebrows in the shape of an unspoken question.

Williams chuckled to himself. "I forget how young you guys are sometimes. You don't know about Heaven's Gate?"

Norris shook his head. Laura said nothing.

"About 20 years ago, a cult rented a compound in Southern California. The men all practiced abstinence and most of them castrated themselves. The cult leader convinced them that a spacecraft was coming to take them away from Earth to the kingdom of heaven. He said the spacecraft was following in the trail behind a comet called Hale-Bopp."

Norris leaned forward. "Is that the actual name of a comet, or did they make it up?"

"Sounds fake, but it's a real comet. It orbits the sun, but it takes 4,000 years." He cleared his throat and smoothed down his hair. "The comet crossed paths with Earth, and that night they dressed in matching clothes and drank vodka spiked with barbiturates."

Laura whistled. "Yikes."

"Yep. Close to 40 bodies. No struggle."