Page 15 of More Than Meets the Eye

I sometimes forgot that Jack has superior tiger hearing.

Still, my fingers shook when I fitted my key into the lock—locking doors in Dead End is another relatively recent development—and finally got the door open. I was so happy to see my cat I almost cried.

“Lou!” Formerly a stray who’d showed up on my porch one night in a rainstorm, Lieutenant Uhura was the first feline love of my life. She weighed about eight pounds, but it was eight pounds of pure love. I dropped my bag, rushed over to the couch, and happily cuddled her in my lap.

“I’ll make coffee and check the security camera footage,” Jack said. “You stay here. That’s Susan now.”

I kept forgetting that the Fox brothers set me up with cameras after one of our many misadventures. That would come in handy.

Sure enough, lights and sirens filled my driveway and then, only a few minutes later, Susan walked in.

“Again?” She sighed and leans back against the wall.

“Sorry. You look tired. Rough week?”

“You could say that.” She looked up when Jack walked into the room with three mugs of coffee. “You, sir, are a gentleman.”

I waited for her to drain half the mug in one long gulp. “Do you know who it is?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s Quark.”

I stared at her. “It’s an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter?”

“What?”

Jack sighed. “We’ve been watching a science series about the Large Hadron Collider.”

“Oh.” She still looked mystified, but shook her head. “No. It’s a deputy from Riverton named Quark. No first name that I know of. Or maybe that’s his first name, and he has no last name.”

Lizzie knocked on my door.

I waved her in. “Hey, Lizzie. Just walk in. Everybody else does.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she said. Lizzie was nearly six feet tall and sturdy. She looked like she could throw a bad guy to the ground and put him in cuffs. No problem.

Of course, she might also be able to do that because she was almost a werewolf.

“Just Tess, please. Or should I call you Deputy Underhill?” I felt bad. Maybe they tell deputies to stick to protocol and I was messing things up.

“No, Tess. Lizzie is fine.”

Jack held up a mug of coffee, but she waved it off. “No. Thanks. Actually, I wanted to talk to you as well as to the sheriff.”

“Me? I mean, of course. It’s my garage. I was at work all day, then I came home to change clothes and feed Lou, and then?—”

“No,” Lizzie said. Then she pointed at Jack. “You. The dead guy is a werewolf.”

“So, you knew him,” Susan accused. “Why did you lie?”

6

Tess

“I didn’t know him. We don’t all have a club,” Jack said with more than a little sarcasm.

“Actually, you kind of do,” Susan shot back, frowning. “The news of this NACOS is out on all the police wires. There’s been a lot of violence surrounding meetings.”

“NACOS?”

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