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.

As I drove into town, though, I joined every local kid in chomping at the bit to be someplace else, anyplace else. Ghost town was too fanciful a term for Columbus, conjuring up visions of porch swings creaking in the breeze and tattered vintage Coke signs flapping. This place was a zombie, rotting before my eyes, dead but still somehow functioning.

The population sign looked as if it had recently been reduced from four digits to three, even that estimate bearing an air of desperate optimism. I drove past three businesses on the outskirts of town—a boarded-up bowling alley, a used-car lot with three mud-mired clunkers, and a darkened gas station.