Girl on the Run

New OCR, lightly proofed (because this is actually a romance and I lost interest), formatted, v1.2.

The town of White River hadn’t had a crime like this in 100 years. Local Sheriff Jim Shapely called it “the most cold-blooded, brutal act I ever come across,” and the townspeople had promptly collected $1000 with which to hire a private detective to find the murderess. They knew who she was: Cathy Sinclair, the twenty-year-old niece of the victim, who had stabbed her aunt with a breadknife, taken $800 from the sugar bowl, and fled to Florida. There her trail ended.

Steve Gregory, from the Brandt Detective Agency, thought he knew where Cathy might be headed. Steve was a trained operative, and, more often than not, a good guesser. It seemed a relatively simple matter to bring the attractive, strangely aloof girl back from Panama. But how wrong, how deadly wrong, could a trained operative be?

Scene: New Hampshire, Florida, Panama