Free Count Catula (Whales and Tails Cozy Mystery Book 9) by Kathi Daley

finally do a book based on it. She’d done a lot of research prior to her trip to Madrona Island. More than she usually does. She didn’t share everything with me, but she did ask me to try to find out information about a person she only knew as Masterson.”
    “Masterson?”
    “If you live on the island you probably know that a man named Dracon Moon was the only real suspect at the time of the murders. Amanda felt that his role as the killer was much too perfect, too calculated. She began to dig around and found that there had been similar killings two years before in a small town in Kansas. That killer was never caught, but some of the locals there believed a man named Masterson was responsible.”
    “And you didn’t have any other name?”
    “No. As far as I can tell, the name Masterson was an alias. I never found out his real name and Amanda assumed it actually stood for Master’s Son. It was common knowledge in the small town where he lived that he was into the occult and other creepy things.”
    “So you had reason to believe that Masterson was on Madrona at the time of the girls’ deaths?”
    “We weren’t sure. Amanda found out that one of the students who had been hanging out with Ruby Collingsworth the night she died had moved to the island recently. He was from the same small town in Kansas where the earlier killings had taken place. Amanda asked me to dig into his background, even though this boy couldn’t have been Masterson because he was rumored to be an adult male. Still, Amanda believed the boy was somehow wrapped up with this Masterson and his black magic. She believed the boy could have been an apprentice of some sort.”
    “And the boy’s name was …?”
    “Conrad Quarterman. His mother had remarried and Conrad didn’t get along with his stepdad, so he moved to Madrona Island to live with an uncle when Conrad was fifteen, a year after the killings in Kansas and a year before the deaths on the island.”
    “So Amanda suspected Conrad Quarterman of killing Ruby and Bronwyn.”
    “Amanda believed he was a likely suspect. I never found anything solid to back up the accusation that he was dabbling in the black arts or that he’d killed those teenagers in Kansas, but given the fact that he lived in the places when both sets of ritualistic killings occurred, one had to wonder.”
    “Yes, one would. Can you tell me anything else about Conrad?”
    Rayleen let out a long sigh. “No. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t have any sort of a record and I didn’t find any other murders in the fifteen years since Ruby and Bronwyn died that might be associated with him.”
    “Is there anything at all you can tell me that might help me with my own research?”
    Rayleen paused. “I don’t know if this will help you, but as I indicated when we last spoke, Amanda was acting weird the last weeks of her life. She was really obsessed with this particular case. More so than any other one I’d ever helped her research. She was anxious and fidgety, and I could see she wasn’t eating or sleeping well. I don’t know why this particular case got to Amanda the way it did, but I do feel there was something more going on than just research for a book.”
    I asked Rayleen how much research she had done on the case and she said that other than looking into Masterson very little. Amanda Lowman had kept her notes and her progress to herself. Rayleen had spent most of her time in the past few weeks researching another book entirely.
    “Okay, well, thank you for speaking to me. I promise to keep you informed as we dig into things. Don’t hesitate to call me if you think of anything else.”
    I hung up and found Renfield sitting next to the exterior door once again. He had that I-wanna-go-for-a-ride look about him. “We already had our adventure for the day.”
    “Meow.” Renfield trotted over to the table and knocked the midweek edition of the Madrona Island News off the table. I’d picked it up when I’d been