Page 22 of Eye on the Ball

“We’ll let you know if we see the sheriff heading this way, so you two can duck out the back,” she said.

“He wouldn’t be too happy to see one of his deputies with the enemy,” I guessed.

“You were never here,” Vicki said, grinning at me. “We’ve been dealing with this guy for years. We have our ways.”

“About Brenda. What happened? I know you didn’t have time to say anything before Lawless threw you out,” the deputy said.

I drank some pretty good coffee and studied him for a minute. Finally, I nodded. “Shapeshifter?”

“Wolf.”

“I’m a tiger.”

He threw his head back and laughed. “Heck, man, even us small-town Riverton folk know who Jack Shepherd is.”

I waited. There would be more; there always was when people recognized me. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good.

When the various councils of supernatural beings in the world got together and let the world know we existed, almost a decade and a half ago, there had been a lot of shock, waves of hatred and discrimination, and worse. Of all of us—shifters, vampires, Fae, and others—the vampires had been the most unhappy with the reaction.

So unhappy that a lot of the more ancient ones had taken over by killing any humans who didn’t bow down and recognize them as kings and queens.

I was one of the fighters who showed them the error of their ways. That’s how I’d met Poseidon’s Warriors, an elite group of fighters from a continent everyone had still thought was mythical. Now that Atlantis had surfaced, the world had changed forever.

Anyway, all of that is a long way to say: Sometimes, when people found out who I was and who I used to be, I got pushback. Sometimes, I got gratitude.

Both made me equally uncomfortable.

His expression turned serious. “I fought in the war, too. Nearly got my ticket punched by a vampire’s human servant. I figure we were on the same side, then, and we’re on the same side, now. I’m friends with Andy Kelly, and he says you’re good people.”

“So is he,” I said sincerely. Deputy Kelly’s misleadingly short stature and young-looking face made many people underestimate him. Including, when I’d first met him, me.

Not anymore.

“Did you scent anything? Or anyone?” Werewolves had heightened senses of smell like their animal counterparts.

“Nobody who shouldn’t have been there. His cousins. Brenda. His softball teammates, the old dude who run the annual ball game, and the like. Of course, foul play—heh, no pun intended—is usually committed by somebody close to the victim.”

I had to grin at “foul play,” but then I told Reynolds about my conversation with Brenda. “I’m pretty sure she was telling me the truth. There was no reason for her to call me if she had anything to do with Ace’s disappearance. She could have just gone home and gone to bed. Nobody would have been the wiser unless he had security cameras.”

The deputy shook his head. “No cameras. No notes. Nothing labeled CLUE.”

Despite the situation, I had to grin. “No CSI Riverton coming to solve the case for you?”

He growled, and I laughed. Everybody I knew in law enforcement complained about how those kinds of shows gave the public a skewed idea of how—and how fast—crimes were solved.

“The problem is that they dated, and she dumped him. It’s common knowledge around here that it was pretty acrimonious, because he got drunk and whined about it at a bar downtown. If he was harassing her, and his history says he probably was, then maybe she got rid of him.”

“Come on. He’s built like a truck, no pun intended. She’s a little thing. How would she do that?”

“As you know very well, guns can level the playing field against a superior predator.”

Yeah. I knew that, despite usuallybeingthe superior predator. “Did you smell gunpowder?”

“No. If somebody’s pointing a gun at you, though, you don’t need them to fire it to be scared enough to do what they say.”

“Point. But we’re back to why would Brenda call me if she did it?”

“I can’t get past that, either. And even our fool of a sheriff won’t be able to arrest somebody for going into a house with her own key. There’s no body. Not even much blood. Not enough to put anybody in jail. Do you know what was weird, though?”