Read Hotline to Murder for Free Online Page B

up for future shifts. If so, she should have come in earlier. Now he would be obligated to walk her out, because of the new rules.
    Tony came out of the listening room, realizing that he looked forward to walking her out of the building. But instead of looking at the calendar, she was signing in on the daily time sheet.
    “Hi,” he said. “I-I didn’t know you were working tonight.”
    “Maybe if you’d looked at the calendar, you’d know,” Shahla said with a slight smile, as she also entered her hours in the logbook.
    “But the per…” Tony stopped, realizing that he was about to make a complete ass of himself. S. Lawton. Of course. Shahla Lawton. He had pictured Shahla as having an unpronounceable last name. “One of my new year’s resolutions was to learn to read. I guess I’m going to have to get going on that.”
    “You are,” Shahla said, leading the way into the listening room and setting a book she had brought with her on one of the tables.
    Tony followed her and went back to his table. Shahla was wearing a skirt tonight. It wasn’t short—it came to her knees—but he was glad to see any kind of a skirt on a girl. It made her look feminine. Skirts seemed to be few and far between these days. Mona always wore slacks to work at the Bodyalternatives.net office, as did the other women. And most of the girls in his Hotline class had worn jeans or shorts.
    He sat down trying to think of something sensible to say. “Uh, I didn’t see you at the meeting.”
    “I came in late and sat in the back.” Shahla wasn’t looking at him. “I almost didn’t come at all.”
    “You were close to Joy, weren’t you? This must be very difficult for you.” He wouldn’t have said that before he took the Hotline class.
    “Joy was my best friend. We double-dated to the prom last year.”
    Shahla still wasn’t looking at him. She was suffering. Tony could picture it. He remembered the rule about showing empathy but not sympathy. He said, “You didn’t have to come back.”
    “I came back because I want to make sure that the guy who killed Joy gets caught.”
    “Detective Croyden seems to be competent. I’m sure he’ll find whoever it was.”
    “I’m not so sure. At least as long as we have a confidentiality policy about our callers.”
    “Well, he was given a copy of the Green Book.” The policy had been bent to that extent. That fact had come out at the meeting. “Do you think one of our callers is the…suspect?”
    The phone rang before Shahla could answer. She said quickly, “I’ll get it,” and picked up the receiver. “Central Hotline. This is Sally.”
    She listened for a few seconds and then put the call on the speaker. Tony heard a male voice say, “…found Joy’s murderer yet?”
    “Who’s this?” Shahla demanded rather than asked.
    “Let’s just say I’m a friend.” The caller talked softly, with pauses between sentences. “But you’re looking in the wrong places.”
    “Where should we look?”
    “If I told you that, it would make it too easy for you. But you don’t think she’ll be the last one, do you?” There was a click.
    Shahla hung up the phone and said, excitedly, “I know who that is. That’s the Chameleon. I can tell by the way he talks. He made scary calls before Joy was killed, too. He would call at night and say he could see us. That would freak us out, even though if you look out our window there’s nothing but the parking lot and the park. How could he see us?”
    “Try calling him back with star sixty-nine,” Tony said.
    “We can’t call out from these lines.”
    And the phone system didn’t capture the number that was calling. Tony had never spoken to the Chameleon. He suspected the Chameleon hung up whenever a man answered the phone. He had read his profile in the Green Book, however. The Chameleon was a longtime caller. True to his name, he used many aliases. He had a gadget that disguised his voice. Sometimes he impersonated females. He had a