I took the back roads to Columbus. Highways and motorcycles don’t mix. Neither do motorcycles and the Pacific Northwest. Like Lucas, though, I refuse to yield to the climate. I ride when I can, and have a rainsuit in my saddlebags. I could have taken Paige’s Prius, but the forecast was clear for the next week. So I was zooming along, enjoying the ride, when I passed a service station warning “last gas for ten miles,” which seemed odd, considering Columbus was only a few miles away. Still, I had under half a tank, so I stopped.

As I filled up, a couple of truckers stood outside a rig, the younger one checking me out, the older one checking out my ride.

“Marlon Brando,” the older guy said, nodding at my ride. “That’s the bike he had in The Wild Ones.”

The younger guy’s gaze slithered over me. “So are you a wild one, hon?”

The older one shut him up with a glare, then turned to me. “Where you heading? There isn’t much around out here.”

I doubted these guys were from Columbus, but if they were on this back road, they were probably familiar with the area.

Channeling Paige, I pasted on a big, friendly smile. “Columbus.”

“Why?” the younger guy said. “Nothing there for a girl like you.”

“And not the safest place either,” the older one said. “They’ve had themselves a few murders in the past year. Young women.”

This was easier than I thought. I only had to say, “Seriously?” and I got all the details. They didn’t tell me anything I didn’t read in Jesse’s reports, though. Not until they’d finished, and the older man said, “If you ask me, there’s something hinky going on in that town.”

“Hinky?”

“Buddy of mine stopped there last fall, making a delivery. Went in the wrong building and found one of them satanic rituals.”

“In progress?”

“Nah, from the night before, he figured. But it was all there. Pentacles. Black candles. Dead cat. He tore out of there like the devil himself was after him. Won’t stop in that town ever again.”

SATANIC RITUALS. I’D be a lot more excited about that if the ritualistic signs left near those bodies suggested anything like a black mass. Still, it was a start—a hint that something supernatural might be going on in Columbus. Which was good, because from the look of the place, I’d never have guessed it.

The articles on the murders had given me a good image of Columbus. Your typical small town struggling to survive, the kids shipping out to Seattle or Portland as soon as they could. There would be a subdivision for commuters, but mostly you’d see streets of small postwar homes fronted by tidy postage-stamp lawns. The downtown would be a patchwork of basic-service businesses that had been there for three generations.