I got awkwardly out of my car at the crime scene, the faces of four or five uniformed officers turned toward me, and each was completely unreadable. The police in Crimson Lake had mixed feelings toward me. For all they knew I was guilty of attacking Claire Bingley, a dangerous pedophile running wild on their beat, an imminent threat to the children of their town. To them, I’d thumbed my nose at the justice system—every breath of free air I took was a personal insult. And then there was the fact that I worked with Amanda Pharrell, who’d been cheeky enough to get herself approved for a private detective’s license despite the killing in her late teens. She’d been a juvenile when she stabbed Lauren Freeman and, having served her time, she’d successfully convinced a panel of experts that she could and should be approved to investigate crimes on a private contractual basis. To the Crimson Lake cops, Amanda moving in on the law enforcement game in the very same town where she’d committed the murder of one of their high school golden girls was just rubbing salt into the wound. No one here was ever going to accept Amanda Pharrell, or me. We were utterly alone together.

Police and private investigators are always at odds anyway; people only hire us because they believe, however truthfully, that the cops aren’t doing their job. It also didn’t help that I actually used to be one of them. I had spent five years as a drug squad detective back in Sydney. Pictures of me in uniform had been circulated by the newspapers during my trial, smiling broadly when I graduated the academy, frowning sternly as I put a pimp into the back of a police car. I was a traitor to the force. The ultimate insult.

It should have been all-out war between the Crimson Lake cops and Amanda and me, but things were not that simple. On our first case together, Amanda and I had solved a murder. This put one of the Crimson Lake police department’s only unsolved homicides back in the black. The Crimson Lake cops hated us—but they also owed us.

They stood now beneath the sprawling branches of a two-hundred-year-old fig tree dripping with Spanish moss, immaculate uniforms, shining boots. The Barking Frog Inn had been almost completely consumed by the rainforest at the edge of the creek. A tangle of poisonous vines with furry sprouts crept up over its wood-paneled walls and across the corrugated iron roof, a blanket of green making it seem as though the bar had popped up from beneath the earth, a trapdoor spider’s lair exposed with glowing window eyes peering out. Some brave spirals of native wisteria had joined the fray along the porch rail, but its cheerful purple blooms were struggling under the grip of the weeds and were browning at their tips, thorns piercing new branches, dripping sap onto the boards.