In December local media reported that a couple of customers in Walmarts here (Columbia, Missouri) and in three nearby towns bought out the pre-paid cell phones. No one knew what the buyers wanted with dozens of burner phones.

So the media and the audience (including me) speculated. Terrorists hiding their communications from NSA? Drug dealers foiling police trying to trace their calls? Entrepreneurs planning to resell the phones at a profit to shady characters?

We received no answers.

I was on deadline to come up with “A Day in the Life of Phoenix Smith” for a great mystery lovers’ blog, Dru’s Book Musings. Why not let Phoenix solve the puzzle of the purchase of pre-paid cell phones?

I put together the news stories on that with news stories on an illegal use of the phones in a short story. You can read it at http://drusbookmusing.com/2016/01/09/phoenix-smith-2.

—Carolyn Mulford