Apple of My Eye (Tiger's Eye Mystery #7) - Alyssa Day Page 0,9

See what you can see—or smell?"

Jack, to whom that last had been directed, sighed. "As I've told you repeatedly, I'm a tiger shifter. Not wolf. My sense of smell isn't that much better than yours, but I'll see what I can find."

He looked at me. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Yes. I will be." I squared my shoulders and looked at Susan. "By now, I know the drill. You want to know if anybody in my life recently has been acting weird?"

Jack headed for the door but looked back at me, a faint smile on his face. "With your family, that's going to be tough to narrow down."

I couldn't even be annoyed, because he wasn't wrong.

Andy followed Jack out the door, and I moved to the window to catch a glimpse of the sight I never tired of seeing: Jack changing from man to tiger. As he leapt forward off the porch, ignoring the stairs, his body lengthened and transformed in midair into the sleek, powerful, orange, black, and white stripes of an alpha predator. He hit the ground running and headed straight for the trees that lined the back of my large yard, a sleek arrow speeding through the twilight.

"Damn, that's impressive," Susan said at my side.

I sighed. "I know. It's magical. Truly magical. Darn the man."

"Just showed up with no explanation?" Susan knew as much or more about Jack's background as I did.

"An apology, but not really an explanation. Except people needed him, so he had to go." I shrugged. "It's hard to argue with that."

"Especially since you would have dropped everything to help your friends too," she said.

I couldn't argue with that either, so I ignored it and turned my focus back to the box.

"I know enough about jewelry from my business to tell you that the ring is quite valuable. The dark, violet-blue color saturation of the sapphire means that it is very expensive per carat, probably triple-A quality, and it's at least fifteen carats. I'd have to examine it to know more." I pointed at the box. "Whoever wore that ring had real money or was engaged to someone with real money."

Susan tapped a finger on the evidence bag. "That may make it easier. The family and friends of a wealthy person are more likely to have reported a missing person than if the finger belonged to a transient. We'll do our best to find justice for the victim. The immediate question is: Why you?"

"Who would want to give me the finger?" I almost smiled when I realized what I'd said, but I didn't feel much like laughing. "I have no idea. I'd hoped that after the foot in my drawer at the shop, I was done with body parts forever. And 'to the apple of my eye' on the card—what's that about? Jack joked that I must have a secret admirer, but that's not the kind of person I want to be interested in me."

I shuddered, and Susan patted my arm. She could touch me with no fear on either of our parts, because she'd touched me before, and she was one of the people who gave me absolutely no vision of her death. My 'gift' didn't happen with everyone, and I had no idea why. I was just enormously grateful when it didn't.

Watching someone die in real time is not a lot of fun.

Living with the knowledge of how someone is going to die is even worse.

Susan made a couple of quick calls, and I spent the time starting to clean up the kitchen from our quick dinner, because when I'm stressed out I either clean or bake, and the idea of whipping up a batch of brownies or a pie felt somehow disrespectful.

Jack stalked back into the kitchen, still in tiger form, and Lou hissed at him and jumped up on top of the refrigerator so she could be brave at a distance. Jack headed straight for me and nudged his enormous head against my hip, and I put a hand on his head for a moment, caught in his amber gaze. Then the familiar shimmer of magic shivered through the air, and Jack, fully clothed, stood next to me, his face hard.

"There was nothing. Well, not much. I'm not a bloodhound, so maybe there's really all sorts of trace, but I can at least tell when shifters or vampires have been around, and there's none of that. No foul scent of blood magic, either. Andy found something, though."

The deputy walked in the door,