There wasn’t much to go on. So far all Hubbard could prove was that Julie Dawson occasionally take lunch at non-standard hours and liked fancy underwear. Not even odd, let alone a crime.

He liked working in the City Hall complex at night. It was quiet, there were less interruptions and he could think clearly. There weren’t any guards or supervisors around to question why he’d occasionally sit back in his chair stare at the ceiling. Hubbard was reasonably sure they wouldn’t understand he was piecing together information in his mind as opposed to daydreaming.

The cold hamburger and fries sat pushed to the side of his desk while he reviewed the phone records of the young secretary. It was tedious work but necessary to ensure he was covering all his bases. So far he had been successful, in part, because of his willingness to cover all those bases.

Numbers seemed to blur together on the page as he sifted through a months of phone calls. Much like at the apartment, he found nothing odd about the places she had been calling from her workspace. Moving on to her home records yielded the same result.

He was about to give up when he opened the thinnest file of the three, the records of the payphone at the gas station. Scanning through the called numbers it didn’t take long to notice one number repeated itself.


Like a dog’s ears that pop up after catching the scent of its prey, Hubble went back to the records from her apartment but found no sign of the number. Diving into the records of her work calls, however, he soon spotted the number in a number of places.

“Interesting…..” he said aloud as he thought about what those numbers might mean.

Out of curiosity he went back to her in/out logs from the security checkpoints and that’s where he found it: the phone number showed up on her workstation phone on the same days she took the oddly scheduled lunch breaks. Sometimes the number was incoming, mostly it was outgoing but they nearly always coincided with a late lunch break.

That was far more interesting than what he had uncovered thus far.

Picking up his phone he carefully punched in the number and waited for it to ring. After several rings it went to an answering machine. Hearing the message he couldn’t believe it. He was still young enough to be surprised by things in life, and this would be yet another shock to add to the list.

Gently hanging up the phone he sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. He wasn’t ready to report his findings yet, but something odd was going on.

The words rang in his head for several minutes. “You’ve reached ClarMar Farms after hours…..”