Dead to the World

care.
    “Are you sure that would be at the top of his list?” Alcee Beck asked, with an attempt at gentleness.
    “So you think Jason shot the panther,” I said, having a little difficulty getting the words out of my mouth.
    “It’s a possibility.”
    “And then what?” I crossed my arms over my chest.
    All three men exchanged a glance. “Maybe Jason followed the panther into the woods,” Andy said. “Maybe the panther wasn’t so badly wounded after all, and it got him.”
    “You think my brother would trail a wounded and dangerous animal into the woods—at night, by himself.” Sure they did. I could read it loud and clear. They thought that would be absolutely typical Jason Stackhouse behavior. What they didn’t get was that (reckless and wild as my brother was) Jason’s favorite person in the entire universe was Jason Stackhouse, and he would not endanger that person in such an obvious way.
    Andy Bellefleur had some misgivings about this theory, but Alcee Beck sure didn’t. He thought I’d outlined Jason’s procedure that night exactly. What the two lawmen didn’t know, and what I couldn’t tell them, was that if Jason had seen a panther at his house that night, the chances were good the panther was actually a shape-shifting human. Hadn’t Claudine said that the witches had gathered some of the larger shifters into their fold? A panther would be a valuable animal to have at your side if you were contemplating a hostile takeover.
    “Jay Stans, from Clarice, called me this morning,” Andy said. His round face turned toward me and his brown eyes locked on me. “He was telling me about this gal you found by the side of the road last night.”
    I nodded, not seeing the connection, and too preoccupied with speculation about the panther to guess what was coming.
    “This girl have any connection to Jason?”
    “What?” I was stunned. “What are you talking about?”
    “You find this girl, this Maria-Star Cooper, by the side of the road. They searched, but they didn’t find any trace of an accident.”
    I shrugged. “I told them I wasn’t sure I could pin the spot down, and they didn’t ask me to go looking, after I offered. I’m not real surprised they couldn’t find any evidence, not knowing the exact spot. I tried to pin it down, but it was at night, and I was pretty scared. Or she could have just been dumped where I found her.” I don’t watch the Discovery Channel for nothing.
    “See, what we were thinking,” Alcee Beck rumbled, “is that this girl was one of Jason’s discards, and maybe he was keeping her somewhere secret? But you let her go when Jason disappeared.”
    “Huh?” It was like they were speaking Urdu or something. I couldn’t make any sense out of it.
    “With Jason getting arrested under suspicion of those murders last year and all, we wondered if there wasn’t some fire under all that smoke.”
    “You know who did those killings. He’s in jail, unless something’s happened that I don’t know about. And he confessed.” Catfish met my eyes, and his were very uneasy. This line of questioning had my brother’s boss all twitchy. Granted, my brother was a little kinky in the sex department (though none of the women he’d kinked with seemed to mind), but the idea of him keeping a sex slave that I had to deal with when he vanished? Oh, come on!
    “He did confess, and he’s still in jail,” Andy said. Since Andy had taken the confession, I should hope so. “But what if Jason was his accomplice?”
    “Wait a damn minute now,” I said. My pot was beginning to boil over. “You can’t have it both ways. If my brother is dead out in the woods after chasing a mythical wounded panther, how could he have been holding, what’s her name, Maria-Star Cooper, hostage somewhere? You’re thinking I’ve been in on my brother’s supposed bondage activities, too? You think I hit her with my car? And then I loaded her in and drove her to the emergency room?”
    We all glared at each other for a long moment. The men were tossing out waves of tension and confusion like they were necklaces at Mardi Gras.
    Then Catfish launched himself off the recliner like a bottle rocket. “No,” he bellowed. “You guys asked me to come along to break this bad news about the panther to Sookie. No one said anything about this stuff about some girl that got hit by a car! This here is a nice girl.” Catfish pointed at me. “No one’s going to call her different! Not only did Jason