The Unborn

Chapter 11

Mike walked through the station house doors and spotted Ben sitting at his desk, the telephone glued to his ear and a fed up look on his face. A small laugh escaped him, he knew just how frustrating it was trying to pry information from some uninterested receptionist or witness over a phone. He continued across the room and pulled the chair away from his desk, seating himself he leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.

"So you’ll fax me copies of the bar and restaurant tabs?" Ben looked up from his papers and rolled his eyes at Mike. "And they definitely stayed from the seventeenth to the nineteenth? Can you fax me their check in and out times also?"

Mike made the shape of an L with his finger and his thumb and held it up to his forehead. Ben nodded his head and continued with his phone call.

"Okay, okay… That would be appreci-ated. Thank you. Ok, sure. Bye."

The receiver made a loud clunk when Ben slammed it down on the cradle. His eyebrows raised and his lips pursed with frustration. Just when he thought his people skills were develop-ing for the better, he comes across somebody who makes him want to scream abuse down the phone line. He directed his attentions back over to Mike and saw the amused look on his face.

"Don’t be a smart ass, Mikey or I just might send you down to Bayside to have a nice little chat with her, I’m sure there are no words to describe her lack of intelligence!"

"That helpful, eh?"

"Helpful! I’d be surprised if the woman even remembers my name, let alone what I phoned her for."

"So what’s the deal with Bayside any-how? New lead?" Mike asked.

"Nah, not really. Just covering all my bases, leaving no stone unturned… you know the drill." Ben slipped the sheets of paper into a cardboard jacket on his desk and then returned to his conversation. "So, did you get anywhere with our friends down at the Wellness Clinic?"

"I sure as hell did… I even got a name for our Jane Doe." A proud grin tugged at Mike’s lips, the excitement bubbling within him was about to explode.

"No kidding? Gees Mikey, that’s fantastic. So who was she?"

"Twenty-one year old Kylie-Anne Saunders. No next of kin known as yet, but now we have a name for her we can run her details through the computers and see what we come up with."

Mike pulled his notebook out and thumbed through it, jogging his memory of all the details he’d written down. "Apparently, she was a client of good old Dr. Sugars, scheduled in for a scrape out next week, or so Marla told me."

"And what did you think of her? Odd?"

"I believe we have found the Ice Queen of Freybourne! Cool and collected but definitely not impenetrable."

"Don’t tell me you cracked her?" asked Ben, more impressed with each detail Mike was feeding him.

"I wouldn’t say cracked, but melted for sure. A few more visits and I am positive I could crack her, though." He said, as if he was under the impression that Ben was offering him a challenge. "Gotta take these things steady, steady, catchy monkey," he went on.

"Kudos where they’re due Mikey. Well done," said Ben, his hands clapping the air in mock applause.

Carrying on with the game of station house charades, Mike leaned forward in his chair and took a bow. "Thank you, thank you…"

"So what else did you get from them? Anything of value?"

"Basically they gave me a run down on their procedures, yada, yada, yada…" Mike thumbed through his notebook some more. "There is one thing Ben, I don’t know that it means anything, so don’t go getting all flippity over it."