The Tenth Caller

He’d been up there with the biggest of them, shock-jock extraordinaire, on the biggest stations, in syndication in every major market in the country. It had been quite the fall, all right, his last gig ending when the station manager didn’t accept the fact that jail time was a valid excuse for not showing up for work. With good behavior, he was out in two years, but he’d become a media scum at that point, blackballed and forgotten, doomed to doing the graveyard shift on godforsaken AM at a 5,000-watt piss-ant station in Andersonville, Indiana, home to a million cold crows, where the highest rated program was the tornado report.
Andersonville, Indiana—not exactly the center of the radio broadcast universe, but at night and under the right atmospheric conditions, the “mega-signal of the Midwest” can be heard for a thousand miles, and in the wee hours between midnight and six a.m., the lonely, the depressed, and the depraved gather on the broadcast doorstep of Gulliver McKnight to confide in his wisdom. Some call it a cult following. Others call it a radio freak parade. At 3:16 a.m. on November 8th, Gulliver takes the tenth call, but the caller isn’t interested in the chicken dinner Gulliver is giving away. He’s into murder.
There hasn’t been a murder in Andersonville in twenty years, and now there are two in as many months. After some investigation, it’s discovered that the killings are but the most recent in a string that goes back decades, and it’s Julie Hernandez’s job (Julie’s a he, not a she) and Sam Olsen’s job (Sam’s a she, not a he) to stop this serial killer who’s found that calling in to Gulliver’s show is an interesting new way to get his jollies. The killer calls repeatedly, he’s always the tenth call, and he knows Gulliver from way back. The question becomes: who is he, and how is he always the tenth call? Oh, he’s into riddles too.
Ultimately The Tenth Caller is a story of inner conviction, or stubbornness, depending on one’s point of view, with enough insight thrown in so that it could be interpreted as persistence. Good thing for Julie, for the last intended victim turns out to be his own fiancée.