Private Eye: A Tiger’s Eye Mystery (4 page)

Loud shouting interrupted whatever fine speech I’d been about to make, and we all looked around. Deputy Kelly was headed toward us, dragging a skinny guy with a face like a ferret over to us. The man was wearing old, ripped-out-knees jeans, a wife-beater shirt, and boots. He had a scraggly beard and greasy hair, and he looked like he’d last seen a dentist when Nixon was president.

“You found him,” Susan said. “Excellent.”

“Yep,” Kelly said. “Meet Chet DeKalb.”

Leona and the guy who must be Ned rushed over when they saw Chet.

“That’s him,” Leona said, pointing one trembling finger at the man.

“No, I’m not,” Chet shouted, making no sense at all.

Ned put a comforting arm around Leona, and she turned and started sobbing into his chest. I felt my heart squeeze uncomfortably in my chest, but I didn’t know how to comfort a woman I didn’t really know over the death of another woman I really didn’t know, so I stayed where I was.

“I told Deputy Freckles here that I don’t have no idea what happened to that chick,” Chet slurred, clearly more than three sheets to the swampy wind. “Barbara.”

“
Brenda
,” Kelly said, shaking Chet a little, probably for the freckles remark. “Brenda Norris.”

“He was making unwanted advances on Brenda last night,” Leona’s companion said sternly to the sheriff, and then he looked at me and smiled a little. “Ned Pendergast. Delighted to meet you. Any granddaughter of Leona’s is, well, family to me.”

“Granddaughter?” Kelly said, eyeing me.

“We just need to take your statement, Mr. DeKalb,” Susan said crisply. “Perhaps you might start with why you have blood on your shirt?”

S
usan and Deputy Kelly
took Chet off to jail to test the blood, or whatever they did at jails, and Leona, Ned, Jack, and I headed over to her RV, for lack of anything better to do. I texted Mike and Ruby, and then we sat in lawn chairs outside and Ned opened a very nice bottle of wine.

That’s what he called it—a “very nice bottle of wine,” then he told me it was five o’clock somewhere (it was actually almost five o’clock in Dead End, too, so I was fine with that). I wasn’t exactly a wine expert, but my taste buds were very happy with it, so I was inclined to believe him.

“That is one nice rig,” Jack said, checking out the giant silver-and-black behemoth of an RV.

“Yes, I got it for under three-hundred grand, if you can believe that,” Ned said, with the fervor of a true enthusiast.

“And then Everett thought I bought it, and threatened me,” Leona said in a shaky voice.

“Everett?” I didn’t even know Everett and I wanted to punch him. Aunt Ruby must be rubbing off on me.

“Everett is Carstairs’ illegitimate son who thinks Leona cheated him out of his inheritance. He’s quite a nasty piece of work,” Ned said, his elegant face hardening. “I set him straight on the RV issue.”

“But he called me some very bad names,” Leona whispered. “They weren’t true. I was never unfaithful to Trey, although he cheated on me all the time, including with Everett’s mother.”

“I’m so sorry,” I told her. “Nobody deserves that.”

Jack stood up and started pacing with such intensity I could almost hear the swish of his tiger tail. “Nasty enough to kill banshees to get back at you?”

Leona’s mouth opened into a perfect O. “That’s—no. No. I never thought of that, but what would it gain him? He wants to break Trey’s will and get all of his money, even though I offered to split the estate with him right down the middle.”

“What would his motivation be for killing
other
banshees, Jack?” I asked.

“Maybe to shake Leona up so much that she didn’t have the nerve for a legal fight?” Jack abruptly shrugged and sat down next to me. “I don’t know. But I don’t believe in coincidence. Especially when murder is involved.”

Ned looked like he was trying the idea on for size, but he finally shook his head. “Maybe. But he lives in California, trying to be a movie star, and the attacks have been on this side of the country.”

I stretched out my legs, took a deep breath, and asked the questions I really didn’t want to ask.

“So let’s put Everett aside for now. Brenda. How did you know her?”

Leona looked at Ned, who leaned forward in his chair and answered. “Well, I knew her first, of course, since I’ve been with NABR longer.”

Jack glanced at me.

“The North American organization for Banshee Rights,” I told him.

He shoved a hand through his hair and slouched down in his chair. “Of course.”

Ned continued. “Leona is new to the group, since her husband wouldn’t let her join, officially—”

“But now I’m president,” Leona interjected, a little of her perky spirit returning, in spite of the dead woman.

Ned patted her knee. “And a very fine president, too,” he replied warmly.

“Anyway…” I prompted, thinking this was going to be a long story, at this rate.

“Anyway, the banshee disappearances started about a year ago. Six that we know of, over the course of the past year. A few banshees have gone missing before, but we always assumed it was the usual thing—”

This time, Jack, ex-rebel commander and newly minted private eye, interrupted. “The usual thing?”

“Sometimes it is just too hard to keep on going,” Leona said, her quiet voice filled with sadness. “Always seeing deaths, having people hate you for a curse that you can’t control…sometimes it’s too much.”

“They shouldn’t hate you for that,” I said, not really knowing if I meant her curse—or my own.

“But they do. Everybody hates banshees. We cry out the hour of their deaths,” she said, staring off into space.

Jack didn’t look at me. But he reached over and took my hand, and I tightened my fingers around his.

“So Brenda was helping us investigate a lead,” Ned said, and then he drained his glass of wine.

Jack and I looked at each other in mutual frustration.

“
What
lead?”

Leona blinked. “Oh. I’m sorry. It’s been an…
eventful
…day. Even before Brenda.”

“We were talking on the NABR email loop earlier this year and realized that the disappearances all circled around the southeast United States. But when we tried to talk to the police or P-Ops, nobody wanted to hear it,” Ned said, pouring us all more wine.

“And then we had our first real clue,” Leona said. “Perrin Jones went missing, and his mother had a find-a-phone app, because Perrin is a college student with a penchant for getting into trouble.”

Jack tilted his head. “There are male banshees?”

“Yes. Not many, but yes,” Leona said.

“We traced his phone here,” Ned added.

Jack put his glass down on the little metal table and leaned forward. “Okay, I have a few more questions. First, you have an
email loop
?”

Ned frowned at him, so Jack shook his head and rattled off his remaining questions. “Two, it was
here
here? In the RV park? Did you tell the police?”

“Here in the swamp,” Leona said, waving an arm in the direction of Black Cypress. “The last ping showed it right smack in the middle of the swamp, and then the phone signal shut down, probably destroyed or out of power.”

Ned chimed in. “And no, we didn’t bother with the authorities, because they’d never believed us before. We heard you were here, and of course we know about you, so—”

“So seeing me was just a lucky coincidence,” I finished, shocking myself with how bitter I sounded.

Leona stood up and took a step toward me, but she stopped when I shook my head.

“Oh, Tess, it wasn’t like that at all. I’d always planned to come visit you as soon as I could, and get to know you again,” she said, almost pleading.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the mood for pleading. “Sure. Fine. But Brenda? She was helping with all of this
why
, exactly?”

Leona sat down hard, as if the muscles in her legs had quit working. “But we told you. Brenda is—
was
—a banshee, too.”

J
ack
and I drove across town to my house in complete silence. I didn’t know how to process everything that had happened to me, and Jack was keeping his thoughts to himself.

When he stopped in the small gravel-covered space that served as my parking lot, I was more than ready to go inside and cuddle my cat alone. But he turned off the truck.

“Here we go again. But this time it’s dead bodies and banshees,” he said, staring out the windshield. “Is it me? Is it Dead End?”

“How can you even say that? This is
my
family,” I told him, clenching my hands into fists.

“And Jeremiah was mine.” Jack’s uncle had been murdered—literally—by an evil witch, and it was the first case Jack had solved, with my help, when he came back to Dead End.

“Jeremiah was my family, too,” I said quietly. I’d worked for him for ten years and loved him like another uncle.

“I know. And we solved that case. Now we’ll solve this one.” He opened his door, but I stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Jack. I don’t need a babysitter.”

“I’m not your babysitter. I’m your friend. Also, your cat likes me,” he said smugly.

I couldn’t argue with that.

I loved my house. I’m kind of a homebody, odd for a twenty-six year old, I know. It was small, and nearly a hundred years old, but it was mine, and I took good care of it. It was white with deep-blue storm shutters, and I had flowers in pots on the porch. I could feel all my tense muscles relaxing as I walked up to my front door.

Jack had never owned a house. He’d told me a little bit about his life as a soldier, and then as a rebel, and finally as a rebel leader. Ever since the supernatural creatures of the world had come out into the open to take their place in society, there had been some that tried to fit in and others who tried to take over.

Some of the older vampires were the worst of the lot. Jack and his comrades-in-arms had held the line between the power-mad and truly evil of the supernatural creatures and the rest of us—the humans and the normal, non-evil supes. He’d took part in fighting back a demon invasion, too, in the lost continent of Atlantis when it rose from the sea after 11,000 years—lost no longer.

The Atlanteans considered him a friend and brother, even the Atlantean king, who’d married an American woman. The news had raved for months about the social worker who’d become a queen. Jack said Riley—Queen Riley, who also happened to be Quinn’s sister—was a very nice woman.

I couldn’t imagine meeting royalty, so I took his word for it.

When I unlocked the door, Lou ran out and leapt on me, purring loudly. My sweet cat. I’d named her Lieutenant Uhura after a Star Trek character I’d been watching when she’d shown up on my porch, bedraggled and emaciated, one rainy night. Since then, we’d kept each other. She loved me fiercely, but didn’t like most other people. The trauma that had happened to her when she was a kitten, mangling the tip of her tail, had made her aloof and wary of strangers.

Oddly enough, she loved Jack.

He lifted her off my shoulder and stroked her back, and her purr grew to a ridiculously loud level.

“Traitor,” I said, laughing.

Jack grinned. “It’s a cat thing, remember?”

“Are you staying for dinner, then? I’m not sure I have enough food to feed you,” I told him, kicking off my shoes and heading for the kitchen.

“We can order pizza.”

“Or you could order pizza at home, and I could go to bed early,” I said pointedly, glancing back at him. “Still don’t need a babysitter, Jack.”

He gently dumped Lou on the couch, then followed me into the kitchen. “I’m your friend. If somebody was killing all the tiger shifters in the country, would you leave me alone to tough it out?”

No way in hell. I had a shotgun, and I knew how to use it.

I fed Lou, who appreciated me, and ordered pizza for Jack, who was a pain in the butt. Then I came up with a good argument.

“I’m not a banshee,” I pointed out.

“No, but if anybody knows you’re related to Leona, especially if this Everett jerk is involved, how will they know the difference? You could become collateral damage,” he said, in a reasonable voice.

“I hate when you use the reasonable voice,” I muttered, giving in. There was no point arguing with a tiger. “I may as well buy you a cat bed, you stay over here so much.”

Jack grinned at me and reached into the fridge for a beer. “I already have a great cat bed here.”

It wasn’t until a few hours later, after pizza and a rousing game of Street Fighter on the Xbox, that I discovered what Jack thought was a ‘great cat bed’ for a five-hundred pound tiger.

Mine.

“
O
h
,
hell
, no.”

I’d walked out of my bathroom, face washed, teeth brushed, and totally exhausted, to find two cats on my bed. One human, and one purring.

So
not happening.

Even though I was just the teensiest bit tempted.

Sleepy Jack was even more gorgeous than awake Jack. He was still fully dressed, except for his boots, which sat at the end of my bed. His wavy bronze hair was almost golden in the light from my bedside lamp, and his eyes were deep, shining green. His hands were clasped behind his head, which was on my pillow, displaying the muscles in his arms in more glorious detail than was good for a single girl who hadn’t had sex in way, way too long.

I swallowed, hard. “Jack. You can’t sleep with me. We’re not even dating.”

His lips curved in that slow, sexy smile he was devastatingly good at, and I tried not to fall into his hot green gaze. “Do you want to be?”

“Dating?” I squeaked.

Lou, curled up at Jack’s side, gave me a curious look, like she was wondering what her human was up to now.

I was kind of wondering that, myself. It would be wrong to just jump him, right?

Damn. Moral dilemmas on top of murder on top of magically appearing grandmothers. This was a weird freaking day.

I bit my lip, trying to decide which way to go—order him out of my room or kick start a wild night of deliciously carnal sex.

Jack suddenly sat up and swung his legs off my bed. “I’m sorry. You’ve had one hell of a day, and I’m making it worse by teasing you. Get some sleep, okay?”

“You’re going home?” I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

“Nope. Not till we catch whoever’s killing banshees.”

The now-familiar tingles of his magic washed over me, and seconds later there was a Bengal tiger curled up on the braided rug next to my bed. Lou hissed at him, talking big for an eight-pound cat, and I sighed.

Definitely disappointed.

When I skirted his huge body to climb into bed, Jack surprised me by nudging his head into my hand. Caught off guard, I froze, but then relaxed and smoothed one of his ears with my fingers.

“So this is where all that superior hearing comes from, I guess?”

His eyes gleamed amber, hopefully in appreciation for my superior sense of humor, and comforted, I curled up on the edge of the bed and fell asleep, one hand hanging off the side of the bed, still resting on his fur.

T
he banshee wailed
, and shrieked, and screamed at me that Jack was going to die. I shook her, and then I slapped her, and then—I couldn’t get her to shut up—I shoved a banana in her mouth.

Wait.
What
?

I sat bolt upright in bed, suddenly wide awake.

“A dream,” I said, blowing out a sigh. “More like a nightmare.”

Jack, human now, stood next to my bed holding out my phone. He had a weird grimace on his face, and I realized he was looking at my hair. A quick glance into the mirror over the dresser revealed that I looked like a poodle caught in a windstorm.

Not my best look.

Sadly, not my worst look, either.

“It’s Alejandro for you,” Jack said, grinning at my attempt to calm my hair down a little.

“What? Why?”

Special Agent Alejandro Vasquez, originally from Guatemala, and currently with P-Ops, the FBI’s Paranormal Operations division, was so hot that butter probably melted when he walked by the dairy case in the grocery store. Not quite as hot as the tiger currently invading my space, but almost. He was scary good at his job, married to a garden witch who lived in Ohio, of all places, and he’d helped us out with our evil witch problem a few months ago.

Alejandro, like Jack, had fought on the side of the Atlanteans. He had zero jurisdiction in Dead End, but he’d pulled some strings to help us adopt Shelley, so he was high on my list of good guys.

I took the phone, and said “coffee?” to Jack, with extra desperation, after I glanced at the clock and saw that it was only six a.m.

“After we hear what the Fed wants,” Jack said, folding his arms across his chest and leaning against the wall.

“Do you want me to put it on speaker?”

“No need. Superior—”

“Tiger hearing, I get it.” I raised the phone to my ear. “Hey, Alejandro. Caught any evil basilisks yet?”

It was kind of a running joke, since we’d found out his rookie assignment had been to capture basilisks, which are about the size and shape of a chicken crossed with a lizard.

“Funny girl. I hear you’re related to the president of NABR,” he said in his warm voice with the seductive accent that his wife must really, really love.

Jack growled at me, and I rolled my eyes. “I can’t help it. He has a great accent.”

“Thank you, your accent is delightful, too,” Alejandro said. “Now about the missing banshees?”

“How do you find out about this stuff? I just learned I had a grandmother that was a banshee
yesterday
.”

Miffed, I threw the covers back, causing Lou to hiss at me, and got out of bed.

“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you, and I don’t really want to have to take on your tiger boyfriend,” he said, amusement plain in his voice.

“I’d kick your ass, Fed,” Jack called out.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said.

“Yet he is in your bedroom at six in the morning? Perhaps I need to have a chat with the tiger about the proper way to treat a lady,” Alejandro said smoothly.

“Perhaps I need to send your wife a sympathy card for being married to an asshole,” Jack said, snatching the phone from me.

I put my hands on my hips. “What do you—oh, never mind. I need coffee for this phone call, anyway. You two have your bromance chat and then we’ll get back to whatever Alejandro is calling about.”

I made myself a hot cup of vanilla-toffee—thank you, gods of Keurig!—and drank most of it while they talked smack at each other. The funny part was that Jack and Alejandro really respected each other. In fact, Alejandro had even offered Jack a job as his partner, which I was very glad he’d turned down.

I studied Jack as he looked out the kitchen window, talking to Alejandro. It was a very nice view. Jack had one of the best butts I’d ever seen on a man. It was bite-worthy. His body tapered from that amazing butt to a narrow waist and then back out to his strong back and thickly muscled shoulders and arms.

Jack suddenly turned and caught me drooling over him. His eyes flared hot amber for a second, and I dragged in a shaky breath. The man was sex personified, and I’d been pretending it was perfectly innocent to let him sleep over at my house—in my bedroom. I was finally going to have to admit to myself that I needed some distance, or else I was going to take a flying naked leap at him and climb right up all that gorgeous, muscled perfection.

My nipples got hard just thinking about it, and he was a man and a predator, so he definitely noticed.

He abruptly hung up the phone and prowled over to me, all tall, bronze deliciousness.

“Tess, if you keep looking at me like that, we are
not
going to get out of this house today,” he said, his voice low and rough in a way that sent shockwaves through my poor , sex-deprived body. “Maybe for the next three days.”

For the life of me, I couldn’t come up with a single reason why that would be a bad thing.

My phone rang.

“Ignore it,” Jack commanded.

“Ignore what?”

The phone stopped ringing.

He pulled me up out of my chair, scary hair, morning breath, and all, and gently cupped my face with his hands. “I’m going to kiss you now.”

“Uh-huh,” I agreed. “Now is good.”

My cellphone started ringing again, except this time my house phone and Jack’s phone both started ringing, too. It was a cacophony of bad
freaking
timing.

I tried to smile. “Saved by the bell?”

Jack’s eyes narrowed. “I think not.”

Then he kissed me, and my mind disintegrated. Oh, holy hormones, the man could kiss. He’d kissed me before, but he’d been drunk. That had still been a good kiss, but this was a stratospherically good kiss. He pulled me into his arms and kept kissing me, taking my mouth with heat and barely leashed ferocity, and the world and all the ringing phones in it disappeared.

Nothing was left but Jack. The feel of his hot, hard body against me. The taste of his mouth. That tantalizing scent of green forest with a hint of something sharp and spicy and masculine that was all man. All Jack.

When he finally raised his head, I inhaled a couple of long, shaky breaths.

“Wow. You… I…This…”

His arms tightened around me, but a shadow of something dark crossed his eyes. “Yes.
You
.
This
. I’m not sure why that happened. I won’t apologize, because I’m not sorry, but I sure as hell didn’t expect
that.
”

I didn’t know how to take his words, so I started to get girly and neurotic, but then I mentally slapped myself and smiled at him instead. “At least the phones stopped ringing.”

Jack looked around, with a dazed expression on his face. “They did?”

Suddenly, I wasn’t feeling neurotic at all. I’d knocked him just as off-balance as he’d done to me, and wasn’t that interesting? I wanted to sing, but I refrained, because my singing has been known to cause dogs to howl, flowers to die, and inanimate objects to run screaming out of the vicinity, as more than one person had told me.

This was a little bit hurtful, but possibly true.

“Jack—”

The phones started ringing again, and somebody started pounding on my front door.

“Somebody really wants to reach us,” Jack said, not moving an inch or showing any sign of letting me go.

“Great. I get to be the sensible one. I’m
so
not cut out for that role,” I said, sighing.

The pounding at the door sounded again, and this time whoever it was started yelling my name.

“Do you want to get that while I get dressed?”

Jack’s gaze travelled slowly down my body and then back up to my face. “I’d rather help you get dressed and we ignore the idiot on the porch.”

He pulled me even closer, and I realized that the hardness I was feeling meant that a certain tiger shifter was very,
very
happy to see me. In spite of the crazy hair and morning breath.

This relationship had potential.

Wait.
Relationship
? Okay, now might be the time to panic.

Just then, a man’s voice bellowing through a bullhorn sounded from the front porch.

“TESS CALLAHAN, OPEN THIS DOOR AT ONCE OR I WILL ASSUME YOU ARE IN DANGER AND BREAK IT DOWN.”

Jack snarled and headed for the door, shifting into his tiger form between one footstep and the next.

I’d been wrong, before.

Now
was the time to panic.