Black Wings, Gray Skies (Black Hat Bureau 4)

10

No surprise, Clay decided to ping his new friends, the wannabe witches, to ask for a ride.

Based on his pinched expression, and their lack of greeting, I decided it wasn’t going well.

“Huh.” He ended the call. “I must have dialed a number wrong.” He shrugged. “Fat fingers.”

Asa drove while I rode shotgun, but I kept twisted in my seat to give me a view of Clay.

“The number has been disconnected.” He stared at the phone. “How…?”

“Maybe it was a burner phone?” I adjusted my seat belt. “They might prefer to handle their rendezvous anonymously.” Hard to do with a floating city as their bachelorette pad, but still. “After the night is over, toss the cell and clean the slate.”

“Their coven is out in the open.” Asa called my attention back to him. “Their practices might not be.”

The last thing they needed was practice if they were weekend orgy hosts, but I knew what he meant.

“I feel so dirty.” Clay dropped his phone onto the seat. “I thought what we had was special.”

He was only half teasing. Getting dumped bothered him. Probably for the same reason it bugged me.

They offered him and his friends a ride, then invited him for nakey beach time where they shared a story that might connect with our current case. Now his only means of contact with them had been cut.

Call me crazy, but that struck me as suspicious.

“We can hunt them down through their public front,” Asa decided, “if it comes down to it.”

“Touch base with the Kellies,” I told Clay. “Ask them to verify the police were called and a report filed.”

People did all kinds of weird things. People lied. We couldn’t trust these women had told Clay the truth.

They might have wanted to impress him and thought pulling out their most gruesome story would do it.

Poor things.

They had no idea that nothing they had seen or ever would see held a candle to his life experiences.

“Okay.” He palmed his phone. “We’ll need to drop the shoe off for testing too.”

One good thing about the cleaners being involved was we could scrape that off our plate onto theirs.

“It’s a twenty-minute trip to Folly Island.” Asa fiddled with the built-in GPS. “We can drive it.”

“Oh.” I leaned back, happy for an easy fix. “I figured the whole ‘island’ thing required a boat.”

“Not in this instance.”

With that settled, I began light snooping into this public coven in the event we needed to talk to them.

What I discovered was an intrepid marketing scheme for an upscale holistic spa experience.

Witchy Ways wasn’t claiming to be a coven. Not online anyway. But that was their cutesy name for the staff, who were, of course, like family. From what I could tell, their big deal was riding out to tourist hot spots, welcoming new friends onto their floating island, then sailing them back…to the spa.

From there, they passed out free vouchers for an event called “skyclad moon worship” to help open your pores or chakras or whatever buzz word fit the mark. I was skimming by that point. Not that a site would advertise any extra services, but I saw no reviews to indicate the sales staff also initiated orgies.

Which meant…

Twisting in my seat, I stared at Clay until he glanced up at me. “How are your nonexistent pores today?”