He told me about the Sherman Oaks cult. It was a devil cult with an odd calling card that caught the attention of local authorities. Evidently some pets—cats, dogs, a rabbit, and a ferret—had gone missing. One by one, the pets were discovered dead, flayed, and skinned like trout. Each pet was found at a different site in the woods surrounding the town, and at each site satanic symbols were found. Nothing too obscure or arcane, pretty much what you’d find on any respectable Metal album. Pentagrams and goatheads, that kind of shit.

The locals were freaked, but things got worse. Much worse. Kids started disappearing, babies and toddlers. That’s when Sam was called in by a cop named Ted Dawson of the Sherman Oaks Sheriff’s Department.

Sam got to checking around, and he found that it was more than just your run-of-the-mill, satanic-ritual-for-kicks case. There was some bad mojo going down. Strange things were suddenly happening around Sherman Oaks, California. Bad things. First, a teacher at the local middle school melted like butter in a microwave at a school assembly, and then some winged creatures were spotted plucking bodies from graves.

Sam was stumped until he tracked down a small crowd of teenage boys. All three—Carl Potter, Brian Hogue, and Billy Fuller—were your typical pimple-ravaged rejects. When Sam checked records at the local library, he discovered the three boys had checked out every single book on witchcraft and black magic, along with a half dozen volumes on alchemy and serial killers. Sam knew he had his suspects and he was ready to move in on them.

But something happened before Sam could lower the boom: Brian Hogue got hit by a hipster’s pick-up truck outside a Bob’s Big Boy in North Hollywood. The driver said the kid wandered into the road like a zombie and just stood there waiting to get hit. The truck dragged him face down on the pavement for half a block. He died on the scene.

Next, Carl met with a mysterious demise when he drank a gallon and a half of liquid drain cleaner as Sam walked up the steps to his house. Carl’s parents said that they tried to pry the jug from their son’s hands, but it was like he was possessed. By the time he’d emptied the jug, the drain cleaner had passed through the poor punk, turning his guts into liquid that poured onto the floor via his asshole. He died on the way to the hospital.

“So it was the kid Billy?” I asked, “He was the ringleader. He was on to you and he killed the other two to sever his ties.”

“Yeah, he was on to me, Einstein.”

“How did he know you were onto him?”