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return address had caught her attention completely.
    This was it. A response on the “LV PR Job of the Year.” She ripped open the envelope to scan its contents. And rescan them. Again. Stamped her size five feet in their Via Spiga slides to wake the dead, i.e., the unfortunate tenants in the room below her, who were probably off at work anyway.
    Temple stared at the form letter in her hand.
    She couldn’t believe it.
    “We thank you for your interest but—”
    She’d lost the hottest PR account in town to... Crawford Buchanan, fellow freelance flack and part-time gossip guru for KREP-AM radio! Pronounced KREEP in her book, as anything relating to Buchanan was.
    Nattering Nabobs of Negativity! This was so unfair. She had the background—former TV news reporter, former PR director for the prestigious Guthrie Repertory Theater in Minneapolis, current PR rep for the classiest hotel in Vegas, the Crystal Phoenix. What was there not to prefer over Awful Crawford? Plus she was a girl, and you’d think that would be an advantage on an account like this for once!
    Temple stared at the hot pink headline over the bad black-and-white news.
    CALLING ALL TEEN QUEENS! The letters were an inch high and as curly as her natural red hair, TV’S HOTTEST NEW REALITY SHOW HITS VEGAS! FROM ‘TWEEN IDOL TO LEGALLY LIVE BAIT! THEY COMPETE FOR THE GUY, THE GOLD, AND THE GOOD LOOKS!
    And the sleaziest PR hack in Vegas, not to mention the biggest lecher on Las Vegas Boulevard, would be handling all the publicity, not to mention the contestants if he could.
    Temple shook her head. She hadn’t been entirely at ease with being head flack for a reality TV show anyway. Especially one that would turn the twenty-four-hour spy cameras on vulnerable young women of tender years. If you could find any of that breed around these days.
    She deposited the letter in the wicker wastebasket near her living room sofa.
    The position paid spectacularly well, and she certainly could have done a better job with it than Crawford, even with one manicured hand tied behind her back, but que sera , sera. She was probably better off out of it. The potential PR headaches were as big as the payoff.
    The possibilities unscrolled in her mind.
    Number one, permissions. You don’t put underage kids on TV without parental permissions up the wazoo. Then, too, how do you run a peep show involving minors without getting hit with child endangerment or abuse charges? More parental permissions.
    Then there was the financial tangle of who would benefit from any resulting prizes or payments. Kids, or parents?
    Not to mention the ugly matter of stage parents who push their kids into this kind of media exposure for their own needs, otherwise known as JonBenet syndrome. One thing that ugly unresolved investigation had never made clear was where that offbeat name came from. That answer might explain a lot.
    Kids tote a heavy load of parental expectations, Temple mused. Cats too. Maybe Louie hadn’t really wanted to be a TV commercial spokescat.
    Nah. Louie had been born to attract attention, unless he was sneaking around, up to feline mischief, and then he was Mr. Invisible.



Mail Call

    Lieutenant C. R. Molina was doing a surprise inspection of her clothes closet and not liking what she saw. Not that any of her wearable troops were out of uniform and disorderly. Quite the contrary.
    A row of black, navy, and brown pantsuits in serviceable twill for winter alternated with a row of taupe, navy, and charcoal gray pantsuits in sturdy cotton for summer.
    They weren’t cheap, but they all came from conservative career clothing for women catalogs, where she could find styles long enough for her five-foot-eleven-inch frame.
    At the other end of the closet hung the limp folds of a few choice silk-velvet evening gowns culled from vintage stores in Los Angeles and Las Vegas over the past fifteen years.
    She looked from one end of the closet to the other. “Lieutenant Jekyll and Ms. Hyde,”