This case was a nasty one, parents hiring him to locate and extract their daughter from a cult in California.
This was the first piece of my detective’s backstory that I wrote; as I got to know McAnnis better, I slowly filled in the blanks. “The Cult Job” reflects the research I was doing into the 1970s, trying to immerse myself in what was a very violent, unsettling time. This story also reflects some personal experience. I lived in the Bay Area for several years, and it’s where I worked briefly as a newspaper reporter. My last published article was a long investigative piece about a cult in Berkeley. A mother called me with a strange, disturbing story: her husband was in a cult, and they were trying to take away her daughter… (as readers will discover, this story stays with McAnnis in much the same way that it stayed with me).
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Rae Colley
