Shrew would justify her civil and literary disobedience by pointing out that if she hadn’t written the story about Marilyn’s murder, the world wouldn’t know the truth. It was the right and moral thing to do. Besides, the Boss never posted breaking news, so why should the Boss care if Shrew did? The Boss wasn’t particularly concerned about breaking anything except the hearts and spirits of whoever was on the radar.

Shrew logged out of the website and started surfing television channels, certain that somebody had picked up her startling revelation. She expected to see Dr. Scarpetta on CNN talking about it with Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzer or Kitty Pilgrim. But no sign of the famous medical examiner whom the Boss seemed to hate, and no mention of Marilyn Monroe. It was early yet. She drank bourbon, and fifteen minutes later logged back in to the website programming to check the numbers again, and was dumbfounded to discover that almost a million people had clicked on the morgue photo of Marilyn Monroe. Shrew had never seen anything like this. She logged out of the programming and on to the actual site.

“Oh dear God,” she said out loud as her heart seemed to stop.

The home page looked demon-possessed. The letters spelling Gotham Gotcha! continuously rearranged themselves into OH C THA MAGGOT! and in the background, the New York skyline was blacked out, and behind it the sky flashed blood-red, then somehow the Christmas tree from Rockefeller Center was upside down in Central Park, and ice skaters were twirling inside the Boathouse restaurant while diners ate at tables on the ice of Wollman Rink, and then a heavy snow began to fall, and thunder clapped and lightning illuminated a horrendous rainstorm that ended up inside FAO Schwarz before turning into a sunny summer’s flight along the Hudson, where the Statue of Liberty suddenly filled the screen and deconstructed as if the helicopter had flown right into it.

On and on, over and over again, the banner was caught in a crazy loop that Shrew couldn’t stop. This is what millions of fans were seeing, and she couldn’t click her way out of it. All of the icons were unresponsive—dead. When she tried to access this morning’s column, or the more recently posted bonus column, or any column archived, she got the dreaded spinning color wheel. She couldn’t send an e-mail to the site or enter Gotham Gossip, where fans chatted and had spats and said terrible things about people they didn’t know.

She couldn’t visit the Bulletin Bored, or Sneak Peeks, or the Photo Swap Shop, or even the Dark Room, where one could see Sick Pics or Celebrity Overexposures or the wildly popular Gotham Gotcha A.D., where Shrew posted photographs taken after death, including the most recent one of Marilyn.