“Blackmail or extortion,” I said. “They threatened to give Bruyn the proof he needed.”

“You got it. The way those girls were killed? Wasn’t about sex. Wasn’t about rage. It was execution, pure and simple.”

eight

Next stop: the commune.

Before leaving the diner, I’d grilled Lorraine and her patrons on the local cult / commune. They were very reluctant to talk about it, wanting to leave the group in peace. Yeah, right. Show me a town where no one jumps at the chance to gossip about the local religious sect, and I’ll show you a town full of deaf-mutes.

The guy who ran the place was Alastair Koppel, a former Columbus resident who’d gone off to college and never came back. Or, at least, not until he wanted an isolated place to start a cult of nubile young women. According to the diner folk, he had at least a dozen of them living up there. Just him and the girls baking cookies.

Yep, cookies. That’s apparently how they made their living. Like a cross between Moonies and Girl Scouts, I imagined, hanging out at airports, giving away world peace with every box of thin mints purchased.

The cult was on a farm. Otherwise, it wasn’t what I had in mind at all. No guard dogs. No security cameras. No booby traps. Not even an eight-foot fence to hide the orgies. Very disappointing.

As I was pulling off my helmet, an unearthly screech shattered the silence. The frantic clucking that followed didn’t promise anything nearly as nefarious, but I was an optimist.

I followed the sound to the first building past the gate: a chicken coop. Outside it, a blond ponytailed woman was hacking the head off a chicken, the last victim still twitching, headless, by her feet.

I looked around for signs that I’d interrupted an animal sacrifice in progress. Unless cooking pots were the latest rage in occult rites, though, I was out of luck.

I waited until she was done decapitating the chicken before saying, “Got tired of the early morning wake-up calls?”

She turned. She was about my age, but with an air that said she hadn’t acted my age in a long time. Tall, lanky, and beautiful in a way that could make her a model if she deigned to wear makeup, but with an expression that said “fat chance” to that. She wiped her bloodied hands on her apron and gave me the kind of assessment I haven’t had since Paige brought me before the Coven. Considering how that turned out, this was not a good sign.

“Savannah Levine,” I said, extending a hand.

She held her bloodied hands palms up. “You might not want to do that.”

“I’m washable,” I said.

She shook my hand.

I pointed at the dead chicken. “Did he crow at dawn one too many times?”

“No, she didn’t crow at all. They’re laying hens that reached the end of their laying days.” The woman pointed at the pot. “Soup time.”

Nice retirement package. I looked down at the headless chicken, now lying motionless on its side.

“Lorraine at the diner said to ask for Megan,” I said. “I’m guessing that’s you.” If this wasn’t the woman in charge, I’d hate to be the one who tried to order her around.

“I am. You’re here about the opening?”

“No, I’m investigating Claire Kennedy’s death.”

I braced myself for the stiffening back, the hardening face, but she actually seemed to relax.

“Well, then, you’ve come to the right place,” she said. “Claire died here. The victim of an unspeakable sex act gone horribly awry. Isn’t that what you heard?”

“Nope.”

“Then it must be the satanic ritual. We ran out of babies, so we used her. Now we’re down to these ladies.” She held up a chicken. “Sure you don’t want to apply for that opening?”

“The unspeakable sex acts might change my mind, but for now I’m happy with my current employment. The story I heard was that Claire wanted out, so Alastair killed her and dumped her body in town.”

“Boring.”

“I thought so, too.”

She laid the chickens on an old wooden table. “Really, we don’t need to kill anyone who wants to leave. The brainwashing works just fine. If that fails, there are always drugs. And, of course, chaining the girls to their beds drastically cuts back on the runaway rate.”

She started plucking the first chicken. “Yes, Claire was one of ours. She joined two weeks before she was killed. We didn’t know her well, but we’d like her killer caught, particularly since he seems to have a fondness for young women, and we don’t like foxes in our hen house.”

“Understandable. Now, there were two other—”

“Ginny and Brandi. I saw them in town a few times.” She registered her opinion in a single lip curl. “I wouldn’t let them stay here if they asked, and they didn’t ask. This is a place for women who want to straighten out their lives, and those girls liked theirs just fine.”

“So they never had any contact with Alastair?”

“Outside of participating in a few bouts of wild group sex?” Megan set down the chicken. “Let’s get this out of the way now. Yes, we have one man and a houseful of young women, but it’s not what everyone thinks.”

“No orgies? Damn. There goes my application.”

She smiled. “Sorry to disappoint, but Alastair has realized there’s another advantage to having a house filled with young women. A far more profitable one.”

My brows shot up.

She laughed. “You have a dirty mind, you know that? What we sell here, as you may have heard, is cookies.”

She motioned me away from the stink of the coop and I smelled something far sweeter wafting from an open side door up at the house.

“Ever heard of Taste of Heaven cookies?” Megan asked.

“Sorry. I bake my own.” Close enough.

“I guarantee they aren’t as good as ours. We aren’t talking Mr. Christie or even Mrs. Fields. These are top-end gourmet cookies, twelve dollars a dozen, made from farm fresh eggs and butter.” She pointed to the chickens, then to a barn. “Fair-trade dark and milk chocolate. Microfarm macadamia nuts from Hawaii and pecans from Georgia. Organic, kosher, nut-free, you want it, we offer it. Even in today’s economy, we can’t keep up with the orders.”

“Comfort food is recession-proof.”

“So we’re hoping.” She walked back and picked the last few feathers from the chicken carcass. “If you’re looking for lost and vulnerable souls brainwashed into slavery, you’ve come to the wrong place. Yes, we have a few recovering addicts and abuse victims. Alastair was a group home counselor, and he’s a licensed therapist. What you’ll mostly find here, though, is young women overdosed on dreams. Like me. Fast-tracked through an MBA from Columbia, got a Wall Street job, nearly killed myself with uppers so I could make money that I didn’t have time to spend.”

“So you traded in your BlackBerry for ...” I waved at the dead chickens.

“A life of eviscerating poultry?” A sardonic smile. “Not what you’d choose, I suspect. And not what any of the girls here would choose, which is why you don’t see them helping me. I spent summers on my grandparents’ farm. Mucking out cow barns might not be every MBA’s dream job, but after a year on Wall Street, it started looking damned attractive.”

“The simpler life,” I said, trying to sound as if I understood the appeal. “Between the MBA and the farm experience, you must be a valuable part of the, uh, group here.”

“I am. And I’m well compensated for it, too.” She started plucking the other chicken. “But if I wanted to leave tomorrow, I could. No one would stop me. No one would stop any of the girls. Unhappy workers aren’t productive, and we always have an applicant pool lined up to get in. Even if you wanted to join, you’d only get on the waiting list. We’ve filled Claire’s spot already. Alastair is in a therapy session with the new girl right now.”

“Can I speak to him when he’s done?”

“Sorry. He’s tied up until dinner.”