After rinsing out my mouth and spitting into the sink, I caught sight of the face in the mirror. Red spots on my chin and my cheeks. I recognised them from the horrendous morning sickness when I was pregnant with Bella. Hospitalised three times. Or was it four? A cannula and a drip to rehydrate me and the unborn baby. Broken capillaries from the force of vomiting. Puffy red eyes. A white neck. All the blood had rushed upwards.

Where could she be? I must have left the gate unlocked.

Another thought snaked in.

This is my punishment.

7 DETECTIVE SERGEANT CARUSO

7

DETECTIVE SERGEANT CARUSO

DETECTIVE SERGEANT GABE CARUSO AND SENIOR CONSTABLE SUZE NGUYEN had hoped to spend most of the day working on the brief for the Wilson homicide. They’d collated five of the witness statements and Suze was following up on the forensics reports when they’d been called to the missing persons case in Merrigang.

It was Suze’s first time to this sleepy outlying village, even though she’d grown up in Canberra. Early in his career, Caruso had visited Merrigang Primary School with the police mascot, Constable Kenny Koala, to give a talk on road safety. He couldn’t remember ever attending an incident out here, but the Drugs team had identified a hydroponic cannabis set-up on a nearby farm last year.

The triple zero call had come into the comms centre at 10.42 am; the first responders were two General Duties officers who’d been on foot patrol at the Cooleman Court shopping centre, five kilometres from Merrigang. They’d pulled in two more cars, as well as a motorbike from Traffic. None of them had located the girl yet.

The two GDs passed on their initial notes: the mother, Mrs Lexie Parker, went to the shops for ‘373 seconds’, and when she returned, her daughter was gone. A very precise time frame: three hundred and seventy-three seconds. Six minutes. Mrs Parker wasn’t at the playgroup now; she was off searching the streets with her husband. Damn, an officer should have stayed with them.

Caruso could imagine his sister if one of her four kids disappeared—she’d be screaming down every footpath. If it were his five-year-old nephew, the boy would be quivering with fear, but his six-year-old niece would see it as an adventure. The eight- and ten-year-olds were addicted to their phones; they’d never get lost with Google maps, their mum on speed dial and Uncle Gabe in their local police station—unless their phone battery ran out.