Hotline to Murder

effort to work his shift. If the Hotline was so disorganized that he couldn’t even get in, it wasn’t his fault. Looking back over the last few weeks, he had done everything he set out to do. He had taken the Hotline training class and passed. He had survived three mentoring sessions and received good marks. He had shown empathy. In fact, he had learned all the skills that Mona, his boss at his real job, had wanted him to learn, when she had suggested that he volunteer for the Hotline. And although he had agreed to work at least three shifts a month for a year, if the Hotline staff members didn’t keep their part of the bargain, why was he obligated to keep his?
    But back to the present. There was a slight chance a listener was inside, on another call. If so, she—or he, would presumably be coming out in a few minutes—unless she was on a long call. Decision time. Tony decided to wait until five minutes after seven.
    He nervously paced up and down the corridor, wondering when a guard might come by and ask him what he was doing here. None did. At three minutes after seven, he tried the Hotline number on his cell phone again. No answer. He left.
    ***
    Tony went into the third bedroom on the second floor of his townhouse, the one he used as a home office, and fired up his computer. He slept in one of the other bedrooms. Josh occupied the second. Tony decided to check his e-mail. He had an e-mail address at work, of course, but he reserved his home e-mail for his personal life. He could also surf the Internet a little, find out what the stock market did today, visit an adult chat room. After all, he had no girlfriend at the moment.
    His spam filter captured a lot of the junk, but some still got through. There was the usual pleading letter from a high-ranking nobody in Nigeria offering him millions of dollars if he would just share his bank account number. He deleted the letter without reading it. After the first few dozen, they all sounded the same.
    An e-mail message from the Hotline caught his eye. He clicked on it immediately, partly because he was feeling guilty for skipping his shift, even though it wasn’t his fault. It was from Nancy, the Executive Director, addressed to all listeners. He scanned the note in mounting horror and then went back and read it carefully.
    It said, in part, “As you probably know by now, one of our listeners, Joy Wiggins, was murdered last night behind the building in which the Hotline office is located, after she worked the 7 to 10 p.m. shift.” It went on to express the deep shock and sorrow of the Hotline staff and to say that the Hotline would be closed until further notice.
    Tony violently shoved his rollered chair away from the computer with his feet, as if the mouse had burned his hand. He stared at the screen from four feet away, hoping the words would read differently from there, but they didn’t. Joy had been a facilitator for the Saturday class that was held in his townhouse. She was one of the girls and boys who had swum in his pool—and the one he remembered most distinctly.
    He continued to stare at the computer screen, fighting the idea that a beautiful girl like Joy was dead. It must be a mistake. He remembered seeing her laugh, he remembered her bikini-clad body, and he remembered her critiquing one of the role-play calls he had made during that class, with wisdom beyond her years. She had given him a good suggestion about using silence during calls.
    She had been killed almost twenty-four hours ago. Why hadn’t he heard about it before now? Tony went back over his day. He had rushed out of the house that morning, barely taking time to drink a glass of orange juice and eat a piece of toast. He had driven seventy-five miles to a little burg east of Los Angeles and had spoken at a meeting of a women’s club. On the way there, he had listened to a CD on salesmanship—another one of Mona’s ideas. He hadn’t listened to the news on his car radio.
    He had spoken to the women about what his company, Bodyalternatives.net, could offer them. Bodyalternatives.net was a new type of company—one that was based on the Internet. Its website, which was getting over a million hits a month, with the number rapidly increasing, featured help for people who had some sort of problem with their bodies—or who were just plain dissatisfied with them. Most of the company’s income came from plastic surgeons and other healthcare professionals who advertised on the