“How come you never wear little skirts like that, Bender?”

I shot him a look. “All right, enough ogling, old man. Back to work. Those people aren’t getting any deader.”

Max gave a watery-eyed last look at our new applicant, then disappeared back behind the partition.

I flipped on my monitor and, while I waited for my system to boot up, checked my voice mail for any salacious overnight news. Lucky me, I had two messages.

I keyed my pin into the Informer’s ancient message retrieval system and heard a male voice in answer.

“Hey, girl, I was at Basque last night and, baby, do I have a good story for you.”

I grinned. One of my informants. A former sitcom star from the nineties who still held on to enough fame to get into all the right places, but whose bank account had nosedived right along with his ratings. He needed cash, I needed insider info—the relationship was a win-win.

I grabbed a pen and listened as the message continued.

“Guess whose dealer was there, talking about how he’d delivered a certain package to someone in rehab last night?…Blain Hall.”

“No way!” I blurted. I did a little happy dance in my seat. Blain Hall was the front man for Dirty Dogs, an angsty rock band that had recently swept the Grammys. Unfortunately, it turned out Blain’s raspy vocals and unending stage energy were due less to natural talent and more to cocaine. A totally eighties drug. A fact I’d pointed out in my column, citing that his choice of vice was almost as passé as his ballads of teen malaise.

Yeah, I probably wasn’t going to be on Blain’s Christmas card list this year.

I made a note to call back for all the gory details and erased the message, moving on to the next one.

At first, heavy breathing was the only sound to come through. I was about to discount it as a wrong number and delete, when the caller finally spoke up.

His voice was distorted and mixed with some sort of electronic equipment. It almost sounded like he was far away or talking in an echoing tunnel. Mechanical, deep, and eerily inhuman.

“I’ve had enough,” the odd voice began. “Enough of your malicious lies. You delight in ruining people. Well, I’ve had it with your kind. Stop printing stories about me. If you don’t…” The voice paused, heavy breaths puffing through the other end before he finished his threat. “…Tina Bender, you’re dead.”

Chapter Three

I froze, my hand clutching the receiver as the voice mail system beeped and asked me if I wanted to delete, save, or listen to the current message again. On instinct, I replayed it, straining for any sign of the caller’s identity. Was it a friend punking me? Some irritated starlet out drinking with her friends? A couple of kids crank calling the local paper?