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second shift, catch the third as they were punching in, and stay for the morning crew.
    Garcia dragged a hand down his face. “Let’s have our Minneapolis guys do the cafeteria ladies and office folks. You and I will stick with the medical people.”
    “No cameras, spotty security at the door,” said Bernadette. “Reality is, anyone could have walked in off the street, jimmied the lock, and slipped into the room.”
    “They’d have to know about the room,” said Garcia. “It’s kind of a secret.”
    “Try keeping a secret in a small town.”

CHAPTER SIX
    I t was shortly before midnight, in the cinder-block basement of a house on the edge of the forest. Twenty black-robed adults stood in a circle around an altar, which in its previous life had been an oak dining-room table. The rectangle was covered with a purple cloth, its center embroidered with a pentacle. Pillar candles flickered at each corner of the table. The altar stood in the center of a five-pointed star that had been drawn on the concrete floor.
    Two robed couples stood at the altar, a set anchoring each end of the table. The younger couple carried a baby boy dressed in a black velour romper, gold pentacles embroidered on the front and back. The boy was crying and hiccuping, and his mother and father kept passing him back and forth to each other.
    “Come on, sweetie pie, one burpy” cooed the mother, holding the infant over her shoulder, which was draped with a Winnie the Pooh spit rag. “Come on, Tommy.”
    “You shouldn’t call him that,” the father whispered into her ear.
    “The ceremony hasn’t started,” she said. “He doesn’t have his pagan name yet.”
    “You can still use it,” he said, taking the boy from her.
    “It’s against the rules,” she said, and looked across the table toward the older couple, the priest and the priestess. “Isn’t it?”
    The white-haired, bearded man shrugged, and his silver-haired female companion whispered to the younger pair, “We’re not following a set form here, dears. This coven doesn’t have hard-and-fast rules. We do our own thing. Just go with the flow.”
    “What about the ceremony?” asked the younger woman, adjusting the hood on her robe. “This isn’t just a bunch of made-up stuff, is it? I want it to mean something.”
    “It will,” the priest reassured her.
    “We got the ritual from a coven out East,” added the priestess. “Tweaked it a bit to make it our own.”
    The other adults ignored the discussion that was taking place inside the circle. Two of the robed men had pushed their hoods back to have an animated argument about the value of various ice-fishing electronics.
    “If you ask me, a depth finder that goes for under five bills has gotta be shit.”
    “Any depth finder is shit if you don’t know how to use it.”
    Three of the women were comparing corn-pudding recipes.
    “A box of that corn-muffin mix, a can of creamed corn, a can of regular corn, three eggs, a carton of French onion dip from the dairy case, and a stick of melted butter.” The woman tucked her hands into the voluminous velvet sleeves of her robe. “Make sure you spread the batter out in a wide pan or it’ll never bake through.”
    “I like to use fresh corn when it’s in season; otherwise I stick with frozen.”
    “Fresh, canned, or frozen, it all tastes the same if it’s buried in a hot dish. This one time I tried substituting the onion dip for a carton of—”
    “Time to get started,” announced the priest, clapping his hands together.
    “Quiet, please,” said the priestess, stepping over to the wall and dimming the lights. The black-painted walls of the room became blacker.
    Hoods that had been pushed off were put back up and the room fell silent, except for the sound of the hiccuping baby.
    The silver-haired woman retrieved a bowl of salt from the altar. Standing with the bowl cupped between her hands, the priestess addressed the group in a clear, strong voice. “This child has