Otherworld 11 - Waking the Witch by Kelley Armstrong

“Cody’s a rich brat who thinks he’s a lot smarter, a lot better looking, and a lot richer than he is. Big fish, small pond. His daddy’s a developer. Cody works for him. Not exactly the Vanderbilts, but around here, they’re high society, which is why they stay.”
    “So it was
rumored
Cody was seeing Ginny?”
    Lorraine snorted and muttered, “No rumor about it. He was and everyone knew it.”
    “Did Ginny threaten to tell his wife?”
    Jacob shook his head. “Tiffany Radu knew all about Ginny. She married the local rich boy and isn’t about to let him go, no matter what.”
    Which sounded like a motive for murder, if that rich boy decided he wanted to permanently relocate to greener pastures.
    “Cody likes to wallow in the mud,” Jacob said. “Tiffany’s happy to let him, as long as he keeps the muck out of her pretty little life.”
    Lorraine shushed him, but only halfheartedly.
    “Are we talking more muck than trashy girlfriends?” I asked.
    “Sure are,” Jacob said. “Dope, parties, hookers. Hell, I’ve even heard he runs a white slavery ring out of Seattle.”
    “Okay, that’s enough,” Lorraine said. She looked at me. “Folks around here don’t have a lot of time for Cody Radu, but all that is just rumor.”
    “Like hell,” Jacob said. “Chief Bruyn’s been investigating him for years. Everyone knows he’s up to a shitload of crap, but the cop can’t pin a thing on him. That’s how he figures Ginny and Brandi got killed. Maybe even Claire Kennedy.”
    “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
    N ext 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,