I hate Mondays. Mondays are always the worst, they're the days when the coffee's bitter and your toast is burnt. Mondays are trouble. It was on a Monday that the dame walked into my office. She was a real high class act, the kind who wears gloves and carries a clutch bag, and always have the stitches on their nylons perfectly in line. I'm a sleuth by profession, but business had been slow lately, and the last thing I was expecting was some uptown dame to walk in and ask to hire me. That's exactly what she did. In a voice that was like silk, or maybe honey, she asked, "Are you Starr?". The room seemed to be filled with some pricey foreign perfume. I nodded the affirmative and deftly hid the half-empty fifth of scotch in my file cabinet. I wondered why such an A-class act would want to procure my service, I'm not the best dick in town. Her wry reply, "No, but you're the cheapest". Turns out she wanted to use me to spy one some Johnny NoOne, some Joe Blow named Christopher Caldwell. She claimed it would be dangerous. But offered to pay me double my normal price. That should've made me think twice. I didn't. I was hard up for cash and greedily latched on to the prospect of money like a kid at a candy sale. The dame pulled a silver cigarette case out of her purse, I thought she was going to take a smoke, but instead she reached inside and pulled out a note. She said it was some sort of code. It looked like gibberish to me, but then, I think I was asleep the day they taught us to crack codes. The dame paid the deposit and then walked out of my life as smoothly as she'd walked in

I needed a starting place. The dame had given me little to go on. Just this character's name, and his picture. Henderson isn't a big city, but mum seems to be the word here. For the first time I started having reservations about taking this case. Grave reservations. I decided to go down to the old Caesura Cafe to see if anyone there'd heard of this Caldwell, besides having a number of underworld connections, they make a mean cup of joe.

The Caasura Cafe is a seedy, smoke-filled dive where this city's lowlifes seem to gather together. I cornered one pale-skinned goth punk who looked like something out of a bad vampire novel. This pencil-necked geek didn't want to rat on Caldwell, but when offered a knuckle sandwich, he sang like a bird. Turns out this character had some artsy fartsy pretentions of being a poet and visited the Cafe now and again. Good. This would only make my job easier.

I hit the street and started asking questions. The more I asked, the more I ended up having. Just who was this Christopher Caldwell guy? Some of the world's biggest rats wouldn't talk to me once they heard the name. Word on the street was he was one tough character. But he was a poet, how mean could he be? Finally I got an old friend of mine to spill some goods on this Caldwell. Turns out he had moved around a lot, a real shady guy. He had a number of aliases and was known to frequent the Internet Relay Chat, where it was suspected that he controlled a ring of criminal agents. I started to ask questions in the shadowside, the back alleys and underground clubs that the internet underworld was known to hang out in. Few people would talk to me. Seems this Caldwell was universally known and feared. Never one to give up a case because of a few dead ends, I started digging deeper. I started looking through public records, arrests, warrants, this guy came up as clean as a whistle. And even the police weren't willing to talk about him. I wondered just what i had stumbled on to. Some underworld bogey man? I didn't cotton much to being given the run around, and I thought it was high time for me to look up that dame again...