The Unborn

  Chapter 1

"It’s another girl. She’s all cut up and her breasts…"

"What about her breasts?"

"They’re gone!"

The conversation replayed in Mike’s mind. Surely it couldn’t be right? There had already been one murder like that in Frey-bourne. Not a month ago, a young woman bearing that same mutilation, was found. Now it sounded like a second girl had suffered the same fate. How he hoped that the Captain had been misinformed of the details, but in his heart Mike knew that he hadn’t.

Mike pulled onto the side of the road and cut the engine. He scanned his surrounding. To the right lay a crude asphalt road, full of pot-holes large enough to swallow a small sedan. On his left was dense bushland, nothing but square kilometres of Eucalypts, Grey Gums and the odd Tallow Wood. The crime scene unit, three marked cop cars and their flurry of red and blue flashing lights, served as an unwelcome intru-sion upon the otherwise picturesque backdrop.

Smoke escaped the interior of Mike’s cruiser when he stepped outside onto the loose gravel, stones crunched loudly beneath his R.M. Williams boots. The cleansing scent of eucalyp-tus filled the air. Mike drew a long, deep breath savouring the purity of the rural setting. It had been a long time since his lungs had experienced anything other than the toxicity of city living. He turned his head to the sky, amazed by the clarity and how very different two environments, only ten kilometers apart, could be. Just five minutes drive away was the hustle and bustle of Frey-bourne, a city of eighty five thousand, spoiled by pollution, progress and careless littering. Yet here, well this was nature at its best. Untouched.

Further up on the shoulder of the road, he saw an ambulance. Two uniformed officers were standing by the open back doors, their note-books in hand, speaking to a man and a woman. Mike assumed they were the unfortunates who had made the gruesome discovery.

The young man had a blanket and his arms around the young woman, rubbing her arms and shoulders so vigorously, it looked as though he was trying to shake the life back into her. Mike stared at her eyes. They had the vacant stare he had come to associate with shock. It appeared that she was incapable of speaking at this point in time, as it was the young man who seemed to answer all the questions. Behind the couple, in the ambulance, a medic was preparing

a syringe. He held a bottle upside down and had the syringe embedded within the small clear vessel. He pulled the needle from the bottle, tapped it a few times with his fingers and then leaned in between the couple and said a few words. The woman held up her arm, without so much as blinking. The medic wiped her arm with a tiny, white swab and administered the shot. He then handed her a small bottle of water before disappearing deeper into the ambulance.

Mike reached into his coat pocket and withdrew his notebook before making his way toward them. Beside the ambulance, he noticed the couple’s backpacks lying on the ground. Clipped to the front pocket of one of the back-packs were a pair of short-range walkie-talkies and an updated map of Postman’s Bay, sealed in a clear plastic slip. He looked back at the shocked duo, their heavy duty hiking boots, wide brimmed hats and high visibility T-shirts told him they were seasoned hikers. Both parties sat in the back of the ambulance. The woman’s eyes were wide and stared blankly at the officers as they fired questions at her and her male friend. One of the officers walked over to Mike.

"Hey, Detective Lynch. Look, I don’t think we’re going to get too much more out of them at this stage." The officer’s name badge read Paul Mitchell. Mike’s eyes narrowed as he read it.