The cordless handset rings—a burbling sound she associates with old people. Kiara finds it on the bedside table and recognises the number on the screen.

  She answers. ‘Hi, Sarge.’

  ‘Kiara. Got an update for you.’

  Rohan’s voice is comforting. Being alone doesn’t usually bother her—she can sit in a police car on the side of the highway for hours without a problem. But when she’s with Elise, and Elise is angry, the isolation hurts. Nothing is so lonely as a relationship that isn’t working.

  ‘I’m on holiday,’ Kiara says.

  ‘Yeah, I told my wife about that. Turns out I was wrong—she thought a minibreak at the murder house was a terrible idea. Shows what I know about women.’ He laughs.

  Kiara sits on the bed next to the mountain of clothes. ‘You called to tell me that? Because you’re a little late.’

  ‘No. I called to tell you Cole Kelly is missing.’

  Kiara stiffens. ‘What?’

  ‘After you found the kid, Cole’s lawyer argued he should be granted bail, since there are now four other suspects for the murders.’

  Kiara squeezes her eyes shut. ‘Seb Basking isn’t a suspect.’

  ‘The magistrate disagreed.’

  ‘What about the rape?’

  ‘We haven’t charged him. There’s no prospect of a conviction without the victim’s cooperation, which we don’t appear to have. Clementine has amended her statement.’

  ‘God damn it!’ Kiara can’t believe this. ‘Why?’

  ‘She wouldn’t say. You know how it is.’

  Victims are often reluctant to pursue charges in sexual assault cases, but Clementine seemed so determined. What changed?

  ‘I gave Cole the usual spiel about not leaving town,’ Rohan continues. ‘But I had a hunch he wasn’t listening. Sure enough, I just went to his house, and there’s no one home.’

  ‘Could he have gone after Clementine?’

  ‘She’s still in hospital. I’ve posted a constable outside her room at the hospital, but Cole hasn’t turned up.’

  ‘You checked the gym?’

  ‘Yep. No one there.’

  Kiara’s fingers twitch, like she’s typing. They don’t have enough evidence to prove that Cole is the killer, and he knows it. So why would he run?

  Maybe because there’s something they haven’t found yet. Something he thinks he can dispose of.

  ‘Get a trace on his phone,’ she says.

  ‘Already did, but there’s nothing from any of the towers. It must be switched off.’

  A chill grows in Kiara’s chest and spreads all the way to her toes. ‘Or,’ she says, ‘it’s in an area with no reception.’

  ELISE

  The chopping board clatters onto the kitchen bench. Elise lines up two carrots and dices them as loudly as she can. They’re bendy, and the zucchini is soft. When Constable Vickers was told to bring food, maybe she raided her own fridge and selected the things she was on the verge of binning.

  Elise has no appetite. The smell of death lingers in the house. But she’s not going to give Kiara another excuse to complain. If they’re hungry on the drive home, it’s not going to be Elise’s fault. She’s perfectly capable of roasting vegetables. She can do all sorts of things by herself.

  Kiara is in the bedroom, thumping and rustling, packing all the things Elise refused to pack for her. She scrapes the carrot slices onto a tray lined with baking paper, then gets to work on grating the zucchini.

  When did things go wrong? Elise can’t pin it down to one moment. A week ago she was sure she wanted to be with Kiara forever. An hour spent without her was an hour wasted. Bad shifts were made bearable by the thought that she could tell Kiara about them on the weekend. But now it feels like nothing she does is good enough. Kiara thinks she’s irrational, emotional, unreliable.

  They love each other. So why does it feel like she’s walking upwards on an escalator that’s going the other way?

  Elise dumps some wedges of red onion on the tray and splashes too much canola oil over them. She works the pepper grinder as though wringing a chicken’s neck. Is it too much to ask, she wonders, to be given the benefit of the doubt? When she says or does something that can be interpreted a number of ways, couldn’t Kiara choose the one that doesn’t piss her off?

  The kettle boils, and she pours the water into a saucepan. Then she realises she hasn’t preheated the oven.

  That’s the worst part of all of this: Kiara is right. Elise is unreliable. She says things without thinking. She ruins the mood with dark comments. She can’t even cook a basic dinner without screwing up.

  Blinking back angry tears, she twists the temperature knob. A light clicks on inside the oven, but something blocks most of it out—a dark cloud on the inside of the glass.

  Frowning, Elise pulls the door open.

  A ghastly smell erupts from the oven and hundreds of flies boil out. A few are sucked up into the extractor fan, while others bounce off her skin and crawl through her hair, up her sleeves, down her collar, into her nose. She screams, and the flies fill her mouth, buzzing like live wires against her tongue.

  She staggers backwards, flailing and choking, as Isla Madden’s body rolls out of the oven and tumbles to the floor.

  TWO HOURS EARLIER

  FELICITY

  It’s a two-bedroom, one-bathroom place with shuttered windows, peeling paint and a lawn overrun with weeds. The rest of the cul-de-sac isn’t much better, sad little townhouses phalanxed up against one another under mossy rooftops. Felicity has been here a few times, since Cole is her husband’s best friend—was his best friend—but she never realised how lonely the dwelling looked until now.

  No one answered when she rang the doorbell, pounded on the door, rapped against the windows. Now she’s parked at the end of the cul-de-sac, shivering. She hasn’t turned on the heater, because the inside of the Tesla smells like Dom’s cologne, and she doesn’t want to displace the scent. If she closes her eyes, it feels like he’s sitting beside her.

  ‘God, I miss you,’ she whispers.

  Her husband says nothing, because he’s not there. How is she supposed to go on without him?

  An engine rumbles. Felicity opens her eyes in time to see a Ford Mondeo enter the cul-de-sac and park in the driveway. Cole is in the driver’s seat. Someone must have loaned him the car while the police are examining the Tarago. Lucky Cole, having such generous friends. He’s a parasite, Felicity thinks. He takes a car here, ten thousand dollars there. He even tried to borrow Oscar’s wife.

  She squeezes the steering wheel so tightly it creaks. Journalists have camped outside the police station, and she’s been following their feeds. She couldn’t believe it when she saw the post: 30-year-old man released on bail.

  She already told the detective Cole was the killer. Surely Clementine said the same thing. Why did the cops let him go? Even if they can’t prove the murders, he should be facing an assault charge. Felicity still doesn’t know what went wrong on the night of the partner swap, but she overheard the argument upstairs last Sunday: she knows what Cole did to his wife. A chilling thought strikes her: if they’d all picked different bedrooms, it could have been Felicity getting chained up and strangled.

  Then again, if they’d chosen differently, Dom might still be alive. Felicity would endure anything for that.

  Cole gets out of the car, dressed in trackpants, running shoes and a polyester jumper. Fiddling with his keys, he strolls towards the house like a man without a care in the world.

  If the police won’t do their jobs, Felicity will do it for them.

  She gets out of the Tesla and slams the door.

  Cole hears the sound and turns, leaving his keys in the lock. His face is handsome and gentle as ever, but it doesn’t fool Felicity anymore. She knows about his violent streak.

  Dom would beg her to walk away, but he’s gone. He won’t talk her down ever again.

  ‘Felicity.’ There’s no feeling in Cole’s tone. A blank void behind his eyes.

  Felicity’s heart is racing, but she keeps her voice even. ‘We need to talk.’

  Cole nods slowly. He unlocks the front door and steps aside.

  Felicity hesitates, her resolve waning.

  Cole smiles. ‘After you,’ he says.

  NOW

  KIARA

  Kiara storms into the police station and slams her fist into the forensic examiner’s jaw.

  Jennings flies sideways off his chair, tea arcing from the mug in his hand. He makes a startled grunt as he hits the carpet, bewildered and red-cheeked. His clip-on tie pops off.

  ‘You dickhead!’ Kiara roars.

  She didn’t intend to hit him. Wasn’t expecting him to be here on a Sunday evening. She planned to file an official complaint against him with Rohan. But she got more and more worked up on the long drive back to Warrigal, the ammonia stench of maggots still in her nostrils, Elise sobbing in the passenger seat. So, when Kiara saw Jennings’ smug, stupid face, sitting at someone else’s desk, she lost it.

  ‘How dare you!’ he blusters. He tries to pick himself up off the floor, but Kiara kicks him in the side, so hard her toes hurt. Hopefully his ribs hurt more.

  ‘You didn’t check the oven!’ she bellows. ‘There was another body! You left it for my girlfriend to find, you incompetent—’ She kicks him again. ‘—stuck up—’ And again. ‘—piece-of-shit, boozy fuckwit!’

  Isla Madden has been dead this whole time. That changes everything. If Jennings had done his job properly, the magistrate might not have let Cole out on bail, and Elise wouldn’t be in bed, sweaty and trembling like she has the flu. Kiara isn’t sure of the worst thing that could happen on a romantic weekend getaway, but finding a rotting corpse in the oven must be in the top five.

  Kiara can hear Rohan running towards her. She ignores him, gripping Jennings’ collar and hauling him into a sitting position. Their faces almost touch—she can see the cracked veins in his nose and smell the wine on his breath. ‘Get out of my town,’ she growls. ‘Or I swear to God I’ll—’

  Rohan grabs her shoulder and yanks her so she falls on her arse. ‘Detective!’ he snaps.

  The word pours water on her fury. ‘Sarge,’ she says, breathing hard.

  ‘Go home.’ He points to the door, like she might not know which way home is. ‘Cool off. Understood?’

  She bites her lip. ‘Sarge,’ she says again, then storms out.

  The cold doesn’t cool her off. The goosebumps under her leather jacket are just one more thing to make her mad. She wishes the weather could somehow be Jennings’ fault, too.

  She walks around to the side of the building and leans against the brick wall in the dark. She hasn’t smoked since she was a teenager, but has the craving now. If she saw a butt on the footpath, she’d pick it up and try to light it.

  She’s furious with Jennings, but she’s also angry at herself. She knew Elise was unstable and took her to a recently cleared crime scene anyway, with one key witness still missing. Kiara didn’t think to check the oven, even though she’d noticed the smell. Now the case is unsolved—perhaps unsolvable, without Isla’s testimony—and Elise is even more of a wreck. It’s all Kiara’s fault.

  She blinks away tears and takes deep breaths. Holds her hands a fraction of a centimetre apart, feeling the energy between them—a calming technique Rohan taught her years ago, which sounded like hippie bullshit at the time. It seems like hippie bullshit now, too. She drops her hands to her sides, as miserable as before.

  Jennings will tell the deputy commissioner. That will be strike three. Kiara’s first case as a detective will be her last.

  She wishes she could tell Dad about this. He’d understand. He might even see the funny side.

  She trudges back to her car on heavy legs and sore toes. Slams the door. Sits in the driver’s seat for a while, her thoughts chasing each other around in circles. Then she starts the engine and heads home.

  As she cruises past Kingo’s, she sees that it’s buzzing, by Warrigal standards. The windows have steamed up, blurring the lights inside: the media, maybe, drinking while they wait for an update. When they hear that a third corpse has been found, Kiara will need gumboots just to wade through their drool.

  She drives over the spot where she and Elise found Anton Rabbek a month ago. No reporters came to town for him. A hit-and-run is less newsworthy than sexual misadventure, even though the victim is no less dead.

  She passes Barton Street, where Dom and Felicity lived. The big townhouses are dark and silent, the trees smothering the streetlights. Kiara is almost home when she suddenly does a U-turn. She tells herself it’s not because she isn’t ready to face Elise: she wants to find out why Clementine changed her statement.

  The hushed voices of nurses echo through the corridors. The lights in the ward have been dimmed. The whole place smells like Elise’s uniform.

  Clementine is at the window, her hands on her belly, staring out over the town like a ghost in an attic. The thin gown draped around her adds to the illusion. She’s been here for a week. She has no physical injuries apart from minor bruising to her wrists and throat, but the psychological trauma must be significant.

  She sees Kiara’s reflection in the glass, and turns around. ‘Visiting hours are over.’

  Kiara says, ‘How are you holding up?’

  Clementine turns back to the window without speaking.

  ‘We found Isla Madden,’ Kiara says, watching her carefully.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  Clementine’s shoulders stiffen. ‘How?’

  ‘She seems to have been stabbed.’ Kiara is trying to guess if Clementine already knew this, but the back of her head is impossible to read.

  There’s a long silence, then Clementine says, ‘We always assumed we’d die at the same time. Even when we were little kids. Our parents thought it was morbid, but it wasn’t—I just couldn’t imagine life without her. Literally couldn’t picture it. So it seemed like my heart would stop when hers did.’ She hugs herself. ‘But here I am.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kiara says, wishing she’d had a childhood friendship that felt like that.

  ‘Yeah. Me too.’

  The lights of the town wink out one by one as people go to bed.

  ‘In a letter to Isla,’ Kiara says, ‘Oscar threatened to leave her and take their son.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did she mention the letter to you?’

  ‘No. And that doesn’t make sense.’ Clementine’s brow crinkles. ‘Oscar didn’t even seem to like Noah.’

  ‘He said he knew something about Isla. Something that would make a magistrate side with him. Do you have any idea what that might be?’

  Clementine considers this. ‘You know about the video? With Dom?’

  ‘What video?’

  Clementine explains. Apparently Dominic filmed a sexual encounter with Isla when they were both in high school. The video somehow got out, ruining Isla’s reputation.

  Privately, Kiara calls bullshit on the word ‘somehow’. Dominic would have shared the video himself. She’s seen it a million times. This gives Isla a motive to kill Dom, but it wouldn’t factor into a magistrate’s decision over custody. If only there had been details in the letter. It was so vague, as if …

  Kiara’s breath catches in her throat. As if Oscar didn’t write it.

  ‘Did your husband know that Oscar didn’t have a good relationship with his son?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m not sure. Why?’

  If Cole was planning to kill Oscar, he could have faked the letter to shift suspicion onto Isla. But then why would he murder Isla afterwards?

  ‘I thought you already caught the killer.’ Clementine tilts her head towards the screen hanging from the ceiling in the corner of the room. ‘I saw it on TV.’

  Jurors aren’t allowed to watch the news. Kiara wishes the same rule could be enforced on witnesses and victims, who often rewrite their memories to fit the narrative they’re offered.

  ‘We found a teenage boy,’ Kiara says. ‘He’s a person of interest. But my lead suspect is your husband.’

  ‘Cole didn’t kill anyone.’

  ‘That’s not what you said the last time we spoke.’

  ‘I already told you I didn’t witness either of the murders. I thought the killer might have been my husband. I changed my mind.’

  ‘What about the rape?’

  ‘There was no rape.’ Clementine won’t meet her gaze. ‘I consented.’

  ‘Consent can be withdrawn at any time,’ Kiara says. ‘The second he put those cuffs on you—’

  ‘I didn’t withdraw it.’

  Kiara can feel a headache building. Her job would be so easy if people just told the truth, in detail, immediately and resolutely. Instead, witness statements are like sand dunes, easily reshaped by a changing wind, or washed away at high tide.

  She’s so tired. Police work is never easy, but there are usually breaks. Twelve to sixteen hours of decompression in between shifts. She’s been on this case around the clock for days, and she’s sick of it. Sick of the whole job. She’s actually looking forward to getting fired tomorrow.

  She persists: ‘While the two of you were barricaded in the upstairs bedroom, did Cole threaten you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But he brought a knife upstairs. That suggests intent.’

  ‘So did I.’ Clementine’s voice is flat. Some people perceive a lack of feeling as a sign of deception, but Kiara has learnt to suspect the opposite. Emotions are finite—after extreme experiences, there’s often nothing left.

  ‘If you thought he was innocent, why were you pointing your knife at him when I arrived?’

  ‘Like I said, I was confused.’

  ‘He must have told you to put it down. What did he say?’

  Clementine sighs. ‘I don’t remember. Ask him.’

  ‘I would, but he’s missing.’

  She whirls around. ‘What?’

  ‘The magistrate approved his application for bail,’ Kiara says. ‘He took off straight after.’