“Then I’ll take this, and when I have something, I’ll let you know.”

I WALKED JESSE back to his room and we chatted a bit. When I returned, Adam was stretched out on my bed, working on his laptop. He had a box of cookies beside him. Paige’s cookies and the commune ones. Paige’s were gone. I snatched up the others before he finished those, too.

“You got your own box,” I said.

“Yours was open. And I earned them. I found your druidic ritual.” He turned the laptop toward me.

“Seriously?”

“Yep. There’s a reason Jesse’s friend didn’t recognize it.”

He motioned at the screen, which showed a scanned page from our personal database. I checked it out.

“It’s definitely the same ritual,” I said. “Everything fits, including the sacrifice of a woman between her twentieth and thirtieth year.”

He pointed to the label at the top.

“A hunting ritual?” I said.

“Yep. For boar hunting with spears. You dip the tips into the sacrificial victim’s blood and they’ll strike the boar in the heart. Not a lot of call for that these days.”

“So it’s fake,” I said.

“It looks real enough ...”

“No, I mean it’s a red herring. Whoever killed those women wanted it to look like a real supernatural ritual. They dug up something so old that any supernatural investigating would know it was real, but would probably never ID it.”

“Or a human could have dug it up from an old book and decided it’d be away to throw investigators off the trail.”

“Sure, but my explanation is way more interesting. And speaking of interesting, I’ve been thinking about what Ginny Thompson was doing up at the cookie cult ...”

MY THEORY? BLACKMAIL. Someone might have commented on a resemblance between her and Alastair Koppel. She’d found out when he’d left town and put two and two together.

Then she looked at that big farm on the hill and to her, it would seem palatial. Her daddy, who’d never paid a dime in child support, now living the high life with a harem of young women. He owed her, and she was going to collect, and if he didn’t like that, she’d tell his secret to the world.

Or Brandi had pushed her into it. From what I heard of their relationship, that seemed more likely. It was Brandi’s idea, so she’d gone with Ginny to make sure she carried through.

Blackmail was a good motive for Alastair not to call the cops. And a good motive for Alastair—or Megan—to kill the blackmailers.