A TERMINAL PAWS (PAPERBACK)

Chapter 1

Jasmine had never realized how much of private investigating involved meaningless cases. Over the last month, she hadn’t solved a single crime, but she had found three loyal spouses, two cheating ones and six misplaced family heirlooms. It wasn’t the type of work that she wanted to take on, but solving miniature mysteries was better than solving none.

By now, she had even cleared all the personal requests. All there was to do was organize her little office, and she had already sorted the drawers in her desk three times that morning. She sighed and leaned back in her chair.

“We could go for a walk,” her golden retriever Luffy suggested. He was waiting by the door, wagging his tail vigorously enough for Jasmine to notice, just in case she didn’t hear him. Their special connection was definitely helpful when they were solving cases, but there were times when Luffy was just being a normal dog. This was one of those moments.

Jasmine sighed and stood. The flimsy walls of her office did nothing to keep out the harsh heat of the summer air, and everything was sticky from living so close to the ocean. Sometimes she wondered how Blackwood Cove lured even the handful of tourists it got each year. Surely the ocean was not worth this awful humidity.

She had a hand on the doorknob when someone started pushing the door open, and she was jumpy enough to get out of the way before it was ajar. She had backed up towards her desk in search of a weapon, and Luffy had taken an aggressive pose before either of them had even thought twice about it.

When Brandon walked through the door, Jasmine felt a little silly about the whole thing.

“You really need a new case,” Brandon said with half a smile as he closed the door behind him. “All that nervous energy needs an outlet.”

Jasmine sighed. “There’s not even an infidelity case within fifty miles. Things haven’t been this dry in… well, since I started honestly.”

“That’s a good thing,” Brandon reminded her. “It means there aren’t a lot of bad things going on that you need to help people handle.”

“Or that the same bad things are happening, and people don’t know where to turn for help,” Jasmine countered.

“Maybe we need to run another ad in Julie’s paper.”

“Or somewhere with a little more reach than that. I know Julie’s your friend, but the papers she publishes barely make it outside of city limits. Maybe it’s time to look for work further outside of town. You know I don’t mind driving you.”

Jasmine nodded. It wasn’t the driving she was worried about; Brandon was right about Julie Barnes being an old friend, and she was worried that finding another paper to publish in would be perceived as a betrayal. With the prospect of a long, hot summer with no more jobs stretching out ahead of her, the risk was starting to seem like it was worth it.

“I wouldn’t even know where to look,” she replied.

“Online,” Brandon answered without missing a beat. “I bet you can find a site that will get you twice Julie’s exposure for less money than you were planning to spend on lunch.”

Brandon had taken over a lot of the marketing responsibilities at his job at the Book Nook, and Jasmine knew she could trust him when he leaned over her desk to work on her laptop. A few keystrokes later, he had a website called ‘Missy’s Messages’ pulled up.

“From what it says, her blog goes out to people all over this region,” Brandon beamed. “She’s got like ten times Julie’s reach, and she runs ads on pretty much everything she writes. Let’s get in contact.”

Jasmine took her laptop back and stared at the website. The background was a bright, almost overwhelming pink that was broken up by blocks of text with pale white backdrops. She didn’t have to read very far into the article to find a heart emoji at the end of a line, and the more she looked at the page, the more she noticed similar things.

“It doesn’t exactly look like a professional paper,” Jasmine pointed out.

“People aren’t looking for professional. Trust me, this is going to get you a million more jobs. It’ll beat spending all summer at the beach with sunburned tourists.”

The reminder that her usually cozy town would be filled with tourists and strangers was enough to get Jasmine on board with his plan. She might have been able to handle being out of work when the weather in town was a little more forgiving and the people were a bit more familiar. During the summer, especially during a summer like this, it would practically be torture.

“You’re right,” she nodded. “This is a business, and that means sometimes I have to make the decisions that will bring in the money.”

There was no automated system for putting an ad up on the website, but there was an email address she could contact for more information. She opened her email to get in touch, but stopped in her tracks when she saw an email there waiting for her.

The subject line read: “MISSING PERSON”. Every letter was capitalized, and though there were no exclamation points, Jasmine felt a sense of urgency behind the words. She shuddered—this may have nothing to do with murder, but it was the closest she had gotten to one in ages. Any thought of widening her advertising net was soon forgotten as she clicked on the email.

“What’s going on?” Brandon asked, leaning over her shoulder. Jasmine knew he could read just as well as her, but for Luffy’s benefit, she summarized the email as soon as she was done with it.

“It’s a missing persons case,” Jasmine announced. “It hasn’t been reported to the police yet because the man hasn’t been gone for long enough, and the woman who wrote the email doesn’t want her family’s name dragged through the news.”

“Are they famous?” Brandon leaned over her shoulder again to check the sign off for a familiar name.

“I don’t think so. But it certainly looks like they’re rich, and rich people usually like being discreet.”

Jasmine couldn’t know for sure just how rich they were, but next to the name Caroline Chaucer was a promised sum far bigger than what Jasmine was used to. It was looking like the perfect case for her to take on.

“I don’t understand people like that,” Brandon said, leaning against Jasmine’s desk. “I really respect you and your work and all, but if I thought someone I loved was in danger, I wouldn’t be keeping it from anyone—I’d want the police, every private investigator and every person who opened a newspaper to help.”

When Jasmine didn’t respond, Brandon turned to face her. She tried a shaky smile, but she could barely manage it.

“Why are you making that face?” he asked, and then his eyes widened. “Are you…? I mean, do you feel one? How long do you have before you…?”

The questions Brandon could not quite spit out all had to do with Jasmine’s psychic visions, which he had only recently learned about. This was the first time Jasmine had felt one coming on since she had explained her powers to her best friend, and her heart was racing even more than usual as she felt the pressure to turn this vision into an example for him.

She probably could have kept herself upright, but she leaned her head against her desk like a kid about to sleep in school. It helped that she was already sitting down. She thought Brandon would have been worried if she fell, even though she was used to it by now.
“Is this about the listing?” Brandon asked. “Do you think the missing person is…?”

“I don’t know,” Jasmine answered honestly. Until she saw what was in her vision, she wouldn’t have any idea what it was referencing, and even then, they usually only showed her vague images that could point to a million different directions. It seemed odd that her first vision after so long would come right as she was looking into a fresh case, and Brandon wasn’t the only one who was wondering if the email had been part of what triggered it. She had little time to respond and only managed to get half of her next sentence out before the world faded away.

Usually, Jasmine was thrown into the action when she got into a vision. This time, it was hard to tell that she had even stepped into one. She was still in her office, still at her desk, and though the lighting had changed, her eyes were focused on the ever-bright screen of her laptop.

Brandon was leaning over her shoulder, but it was the opposite shoulder as it was in real life.

“Are you sure that we should do this?” Brandon asked in her vision. She didn’t answer him, and instead started typing something into the computer. It wasn’t a website that Jasmine recognized, and there were enough random numbers in the URL that she couldn’t memorize it. An unfamiliar login page popped up, but Jasmine didn’t hesitate before she was typing again. The username box was just as hidden as the password, and Jasmine was starting to wonder why when she saw what was on the other side.

Staring back at her, right in the middle of the webpage, was a picture of a woman who was tied up.

Jasmine knew she should have looked for more information on the page. She should have picked up on more details and found a couple of tiny clues—there was writing on the page, and she might have been able to pick out a name or another bit of information if she had been paying attention. Unfortunately, the sight of the disheveled woman was enough to throw Jasmine off, and she only got a few seconds after the sudden appearance of the picture on screen before everything faded away.

When Jasmine returned to her reality, the only thing she knew for sure was that a murder had been committed.
She raised her head, and Luffy ran up to her to tuck his head under her hand. She petted him absentmindedly and managed a weak smile for Brandon—he was looking really worried about her, and Jasmine didn’t want to deal with his anxieties on top of a very real situation.

“That was what a vision looks like.” Brandon’s eyes were wide. “I’ve seen you go out like that all the time—I can’t believe I didn’t realize what was going on.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Jasmine said. “Most people don’t think of psychic visions when they see someone look a little woozy.”

“Do we have to do the small talk?” Luffy asked, putting his paws up on the side of Jasmine’s desk to look at what she was working on. “Your visions are a big deal. What did you see?”

Brandon was getting to that same idea, just a little more slowly than Luffy. “What did you see? Was it about the missing persons case? I mean, I know you don’t know what any of them look like, but did it look like a kidnapping?”

“I don’t get visions about kidnappings unless they end badly,” Jasmine reminded him. “If I’m having visions, it means that someone was killed, and I don’t think it was the missing man from the email—the body looked female to me, but it was a small picture and I looked away from the screen too early.”

“You saw a body? And a screen? What…? I’m sorry, Jasmine. I’m confused.”

“I am too,” Jasmine replied, and for both his and Luffy’s benefit, she explained everything she had seen in the vision. The computer part of things confused Luffy, and Brandon’s face crunched up every time she described the body too vividly, but she got through the explanation in the end.

“That sounds serious,” Brandon mumbled. He looked like he was going to be sick—no matter how many times he helped Jasmine with her cases, he didn’t seem to get any more comfortable with the idea of a dead body. “We should go to the police and warn them about this—it sounds like some sort of dark web thing, and if someone’s dead there needs to be some kind of intervention.”

“I would love to get Lustbader on this,” Jasmine said, pulling a fresh notebook out of her desk drawer. “Or an entire team of officers. But think about what you’re suggesting—what would we tell them? That I passed out and saw a picture of a dead body on the computer? They’re going to think I had some kind of nightmare about a horror movie.”

“Lustbader trusts you,” Brandon insisted. “And we have to at least try—think about that woman you saw in the video. Don’t you owe it to her to get the most help you can on this?”

“I owe it to her to make sure the case gets solved. But until the murder is officially reported, the only way to do that is to look into it myself.”

“But—” Brandon protested, and Jasmine understood the impulse. There was a time when she would have wanted nothing more than to take what she had seen to the police. By now, she was getting used to the reality of dealing with the visions on her own.

“I could really use your help,” Jasmine said. Hopefully, her appeal would be enough to get him on board with the plan. “And I promise, as soon as the police are involved, we will work with them. I just can’t risk losing Lustbader’s trust and my credibility as a PI on the slim chance that they’ll be able to take my powers seriously.”
Brandon looked uncomfortable, and his words were cautious to the point of almost being hesitant. “You know what you’re doing. If you think this is the best way for us to help, I’m on board.”

“It’s the only way we can help,” Jasmine assured him, and his slight nod was enough for Jasmine to know she could count on him.