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    The Color Of A Ghost (The Secret Coloring Book For Adults Cozy Mystery Series -Book One): The Secret Coloring Book For Adults Cozy Mystery Series
    The Color Of A Ghost (The Secret Coloring Book For Adults Cozy Mystery Series -Book One): The Secret Coloring Book For Adults Cozy Mystery Series
    The Color Of A Ghost (The Secret Coloring Book For Adults Cozy Mystery Series -Book One): The Secret Coloring Book For Adults Cozy Mystery Series
    Ebook89 pages1 hour

    The Color Of A Ghost (The Secret Coloring Book For Adults Cozy Mystery Series -Book One): The Secret Coloring Book For Adults Cozy Mystery Series

    By Delia Dobbs

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    About this ebook

    Anita Johnston may have the soul of an artist but she's determined to establish herself as a criminal investigator even after getting booted from NYPD. When she's hired to track down a serial killer who has escaped justice for forty years, she knows she's getting in deeper than most rookie detectives-- but she's willing to risk everything for the chance to prove herself.

    Samuel Watkins knows the truth about where the killer is hiding. With nothing left to lose except a broken-down farm and a few loyal animals, he can't be forced to say a word. Or can he?

    A CIA agent turned rogue. A town that won't talk. A bad-tempered prize bull who takes no prisoners.

               

    It's a challenge. But Anita will go to any lengths to solve this case... even if she has to color outside the lines to do it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherYap Kee Chong
    Release dateFeb 27, 2016
    ISBN9781524244835
    The Color Of A Ghost (The Secret Coloring Book For Adults Cozy Mystery Series -Book One): The Secret Coloring Book For Adults Cozy Mystery Series

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      Book preview

      The Color Of A Ghost (The Secret Coloring Book For Adults Cozy Mystery Series -Book One) - Delia Dobbs

      The Color Of A Ghost

      (The Secret Coloring Book For Adults Cozy Mystery Series)

      Delia Dobbs

      FREE!

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      CHAPTER 1

      It was an odd assignment from an unknown client. He'd used a go-between, an attorney in Chicago, to hire the Randell Detective Agency to track down the perpetrator of a forty-year-old string of murders. The attorney wouldn't say who hired him. Lawyer/client confidentiality, he'd said. That's all I can tell you. This person needs to see this killer brought to justice within ninety days.

      Fine. It was a challenge. But I'd somehow have to rise to the occasion.

      I looked around the small office. Carolsburg, Illinois, population twelve hundred souls, was a far cry from New York City. Don't get me wrong. Back home in the naked city, I was still an unlicensed investigator-- but at least my desk in Brooklyn wasn't located in the crumbling attic of a failing Mom and Pop general store.

      I went to the window. There wasn't much to see. There was a half-mile strip consisting of the general store beneath my feet, the hardware store, the grocery, a faded movie theater, and a diner. The entire town was surrounded by nothing but endless soybean fields. Some people in New York eat soy. I'm not one of them. I certainly didn't come out here for the cuisine.

      The forty-year-old cold case on my plate had dragged on for far too long. Back in the day, the police knew perfectly well who had committed the fifteen murders of twelve males and three females. Most of the victims were adults, but the youngest had just turned eight. Jon Thorp, a former CIA agent, had wanted the world to know he was the killer. He'd rubbed their faces in it, getting away with a shocking series of murders that shook the nation.

      But no one ever really knew why he did it. What was his motive? And how he had gotten away with it for so long? At the time of the murders, and for many years thereafter, law enforcement officers at every level -- from the lowliest sheriff's deputies to the director of the FBI -- had scoured first Carolsburg, and then the world, for Jon Thorp.

      They'd never found him.

      He'd vanished without a trace.

      Yes, it was a big job. Some people would say it was much too big for me. Although I worked for a detective agency in New York, I still didn't have my private investigator's license. And I probably wouldn’t be getting it any time soon unless I solved something that seemed a little bit bigger than the bail-jumping cases I worked to pay my bills. There was a reason for that-- a reason I preferred not to think about at the moment.

      I pushed a chestnut-brown curl out of my face. I felt like I had an artistic soul but I assumed people would take me more seriously as an investigator if I kept my hair its natural color. My brother, the real artist of the family, often had a purple streak in his bangs.

      Speaking of family, I had a file full of victims' photos that I'd looked at so many times I could see their black-and-white much-photocopied faces with my eyes closed. Their families had waited forty years for justice. And I was morally convinced that there was one person in Carolsburg who knew where Thorp was hiding all along.

      All I had to do was persuade him to talk.

      Yeah.

      Like that was going to be so easy.

      I hadn't brought the file with me. It would be an unnecessary risk. I'd committed the faces and the facts to memory. At twenty-three, I could still do that. My boss had teased me, telling me to wait and see what happened to my mind when I turned thirty.

      Well, it hadn't happened yet. Still remembering all those faces, I turned the pages of my sketchbook-- a black-and-white coloring book I'd created in black ink to help me dive deeper into the problem. Most people use data analytics, but it hadn't gotten them very far with this case. Why would it? They were up against the CIA, who'd had access to the finest computers in the nation at the time of the original murders. I might as well use the coloring book method. I was a visual person. It helped me think.

      And anybody with the CIA who was still on Thorp's side would know what data I was downloading from FBI and Illinois State Police files. They'd know my every move. The coloring books weren't so easy to interpret. A suspicious mind might guess that the colors and patterns I scribbled in its pages held a key to my thought processes-- but they wouldn't know how to read those little clues.

      I tore out a partly colored page and tacked it to the corkboard behind my desk. The pen-and-ink outline was a scene from the dinosaur hall of the American Museum of Natural History. Instead of scales, the skin of the Apatosaurus was a series of Black-eyed Susans on a faded olive background, a flower-print pattern of a type popular in the mid-seventies. Let a snoop try to figure that one out.

      But, to me, the message to

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