In a letdown of titanic proportions, it was only Deputy Kelly on the porch. By the time I got there, Jack had the poor guy treed on the porch railing.
“Jack! Let the nice man down.”
Jack turned his giant tiger face to me, and I swear he winked. Stupid cat. I pushed past him and held my hand out to the deputy.
“Come on down, he’s not going to hurt you.”
Jack shimmered back to human and gave Kelly an unfriendly look. “Not that you don’t deserve it. What the hell are you doing banging on Tess’s door at this time of morning?”
Kelly, to his credit, didn’t back down. “I might ask you why you’re here this early, too, preventing Miss Callahan from answering her door, when she’s in this state…this state…”
He looked at me, obviously baffled as to how to phrase the “state” I was in.
“State of bedhead? State of morning breath? State of just woke up to all my phones ringing and somebody banging on the door? What’s going on, Deputy Kelly?”
He blushed, making all those cute freckles glow. “It’s Andrew, ma’am.”
I winced. Not the dreaded “ma’am.” I was too young for this.
“Call me Tess, please. Now, why are you here, with your bullhorn, assaulting my poor door?”
Andrew held out his phone, and his voice dropped to an awestruck whisper. “Special Agent Alejandro Vasquez would like to speak to you.”
“I’m going to kill him,” I grumbled, taking Andrew’s phone, but being careful not to touch him. I did not want to know how sweet Andrew died.
“That might be a federal offense,” Alejandro said into my ear, laughing.
“Any female judge in the country would consider it justifiable homicide,” I told him. “Now I’m going to give the poor deputy his phone back, walk inside, get more coffee, and answer my cellphone, which you’re going to call in three minutes. Is that okay with you, or do I need to call your wife and describe your actions to her?”
Jack whistled. “Bringing out the big guns.”
Over the phone, I could hear nothing but silent panic, or so I imagined. Then the click of the call disconnecting.
I gave Andrew back his phone. “Thank you. Hey, what did you find out about Chet? From the RV park?”
He paused and then shrugged. “I guess it’s no secret. The blood on his shirt was from his own hand, not anybody else’s.”
Jack nodded. “I tried to scent the area, but there had been far too many people there, and I’m no wolf or bloodhound.”
Huh. I hadn’t even noticed him leaving yesterday. He saw my surprise and shrugged. “Ned was opening bottles of wine and telling you something about five o’clock. I took a few minutes to smell what I could smell.”
“Okay, well you should probably go talk to the P-Ops agent, ma’am, um, Tess,” Andrew said, blushing again.
“I will, and thank you. I’m sorry for Alejandro’s control freak tendencies.”
He nodded, but then glanced at Jack. “Um, do you need me to stay and protect you from anything else?”
Jack’s eyes narrowed. “Kid, do your worst.”
I jumped between them. “No, no, no. No worst, no nothing. I have a strict no-aggression policy on my porch. Cut it out, Jack.”
I all but shooed the deputy off the porch and waved, then dashed back inside. I could at least get another cup of coffee before—
The phone rang.
Stupid Feds.
“Okay, what? I have you on speaker phone, not that Jack needs it, Alejandro. What’s going on?”
Jack sat down at the table, stretched out his long legs, and stared at the phone with an unhappy look. I knew just how he felt.
“All right. Sorry for the pushiness, but I’m on a plane in forty-five minutes. I want you to be on the lookout. We have become aware of a serial killer operating in your general vicinity. Given how weird Dead End and its inhabitants are—”
“Hey,” I protested. “Watch it, buddy.”
Jack grinned at me.
“Sorry, Tess,” Alejandro continued after a beat. “Other than you and your family. Anyway, we have almost no evidence and nothing in the way of clues. Your grandmother probably knows more about it than we do.”
“The serial killer is after banshees?” Jack sat up, all business now. “You heard about the death last night.”
“We did,” Alejandro said in a grim voice. “There have been at least eight in the past year.”
“Leona and Ned only know about six of them,” I said.
“This is just between us, please, but the other two were a judge’s daughter and one of our agents.”
I put my coffee mug down hard on the table. “Not easy to catch and kill a P-Ops agent, I’m guessing.”
“No, it is not. Far easier to go after an unprotected pawnshop owner,” Alejandro said.
Jack leaned forward and spoke directly into the phone. “If you truly think she is unprotected, my friend, why don’t you come down here and test out that theory?”
Alejandro laughed. “I know better. I know you, Jack Shepherd. But your arrival in Dead End and your connection to Tess is not widely known. So an attempt might be made.”
“Let them try,” Jack growled.
I stood abruptly. “I would like to remind you that I’m right here. And if you’re talking about using me as bait, the bait would like to have a say in this plan.”
Alejandro said, “Are you willing?” at the exact same time Jack said, “Over my dead body,” and suddenly there was a whole lot of tension in my kitchen.
Lou picked that moment to hop up on my lap and start meowing at me for her breakfast, so I busied myself with that, while I thought about the ramifications of what Alejandro was saying.
“You mentioned a plane. Are you coming here?”
“No. We’re currently dealing with a rogue pack of werewolves in Idaho. And we have too little information to send anybody after the banshee killer yet,” he answered me.
“Motive?” Jack asked.
“We have no idea. It just doesn’t track. We don’t even know if the killer is supernatural or human,” Alejandro said, frustration clear in his voice. “No idea what the motive might be, either, except possibly a general hatred for supernatural beings, or a specific hatred of banshees. That’s not exactly uncommon.”
I felt my face scrunch up into a grimace. “I actually know somebody like that here, so I know what you mean. Felix Wildenhammer, the toy maker? A banshee screamed a foretelling of his wife’s death when they were on vacation. Their son Oskar, a friend of mine—well, acquaintance, more like—was devastated. He’s hated banshees ever since.”
“What do you know about Felix’s whereabouts last night? Or Oskar’s?”
We could hear typing in the background when Alejandro spoke.
I rolled my eyes. “I wasn’t offering up a suspect. Felix is an old man, and Oskar takes care of him. Felix used to let the local kids go to the toy factory for field trips, but after his wife’s death he quit doing that, even quit making toys for a while. He just became a recluse. I run into Oskar at the grocery store sometimes, usually in the sweet potato aisle. Felix loves sweet potatoes, I guess.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Tess, you understand that even killers can enjoy sweet potatoes, right?”
“Right. A sick old toymaker and his son are murdering banshees across the country in between batches of sweet potato casserole. Whatever. What about Leona’s husband’s illegitimate son, Everett?”
“Who?”
Jack and I filled Alejandro in on Everett, whom he hadn’t heard about and promised to check on, and then we wrapped up the call with my promise to be careful and Alejandro’s promise to bring his wife Rose to meet me one day.
Jack stood up and stretched, and I tried not to stare at his perfect eight-pack abs. When he caught me lusting over him again, he took a step toward me.
This time, I took a step back, the word relationship still ringing in my skull.
“Nope. Step away from the pawnbroker, fur-face. I need to get a shower and some breakfast and then head for the shop.”
He sighed, but quit advancing on me. “Actually, I need to get going, too. I want to head out to the swamp and talk to the boys, see if they’ve heard of any strangers around.”
The “boys” were a group of guys who’d come back from fighting for various branches of the U.S. military, mostly in the Middle East, and now lived out in the swamp. Many of them suffered from PTSD and didn’t consider themselves fit for human company, but they’d had our back when we went in to rescue Shelley from the black magic coven, and that was good enough for me. I called them Jack’s swamp commandos; they called him Commander, and one of them—Lucky—I knew from the trips he made to my shop.
Jack went out there every so often with a case or three of beer, and they’d talk about everything and nothing, the way soldiers and sailors did. Or at least, so I heard from Jack. He said they wouldn’t be comfortable kicking back and sharing war stories with a civilian around, and I respected that.
The one time I visited the old wooden shack one of them called home, we were in battle planning mode. I’d seen them in action and I was very glad they were on our side.
They were honorable men, hardened by war, but they were also kind. Sometimes, when Shelley’s pain from losing her mother and grandparents and her memories of being captured and held for human sacrifice grew to be too painful for her to hold inside her tiny nine-year-old self, Jack would take her out to the swamp, and she would spend an afternoon riding around on the airboat with the men. They all adored her, and saved special treasures for her; fossilized frogs, bits of shiny quartz or—her favorite—Spanish doubloons from the pirates who’d wandered the area more than a century ago.
Shelley, who had her own metal detector for treasure hunting and was pretty handy with it, adored them right back. Especially Jack, her hero, who’d turned into a tiger to rescue both of us from a burning building.
Anyway, all of this was just a long ramble to circle me around to realizing that Jack was right. If anybody nefarious happened to be lurking around Dead End, they’d know.
“Great. Go see your commandos. It’s too early for beer, though. Take them donuts.”
“It’s never too early for beer, woman,” he told me in a mock-offended tone. “We can have beer with our donuts.”
Then he started stalking me around the kitchen table again.
“No. Bad kitty. No Meow Mix for you,” I said sternly, while backing away like a big chicken. “You, swamp. Me, pawnshop. Busy day. Busy, busy, busy.”
Jack’s lazy grin told me quite plainly that he knew I was running, and he was going to let me escape—this time. “Really? What does a busy day look like in the pawnshop world?”
“I have to see a man about a goat.”