By the time I parked at the side of the police station and walked past the cicada symphony to the back door, Wozza had Jack seated in the large central muster room for processing.

Without glancing his way, I logged on to one of the office computers and began typing the affidavit to support an application for a warrant to search Jack’s house on the probability that he was the sex offender we were looking for. The local paper had dubbed him the Lonely Hearts Rapist. I hated it when the media named offenders—it made them sound somehow dashing and daring, and the victims sound pathetic and lovelorn. Lonely hearts—hardly a fair description of women like me stopping off for a quiet drink at the pub after work. Police media had jumped on that straight away, as had a number of feminist commentators with huge social media followings who watched headlines like hawks. Later editions had the more usual headlines like DRINK SPIKE DANGER, and WOMEN TARGETED AT LOCAL WATERING HOLES, which left those doing the spiking and targeting out of the headlines entirely.

A spate of victims had come forward from surrounding towns in the last three months, all telling a similar horror story. They’d been drinking at pubs, alone or waiting for a friend, when a man ‘rescued’ them from unwanted attention. After accepting a drink from him, the girls remembered little else until the following morning, when they’d woken up, dumped in parks or bushland on the outskirts of town, victims of sexual assault. A couple of victims who’d been tested in time were found to have a drug called chloral hydrate in their systems. It used to be legal, but had been banned a while back. It had its fifteen minutes of fame as part of the cocktail of drugs that killed celebrity Anna Nicole Smith. To me, the fact that two of the victims had traces of it in their systems meant there was a link between the cases, but till now each local CIB—Criminal Investigation Branch—was handling its own cases. The Sexual Offences Crime Unit hadn’t officially come onboard yet due to a lack of continuity in the descriptions of the rapist. Some victims described him as tall, fair and good-looking—just like Jack—while others said dark, or shorter, or stockier. The powers that be in Sex Crimes suggested we were looking at similar but unrelated attacks. I disagreed. It felt connected to me. Pubs where the women were targeted either didn’t have CCTV or the offender knew how to avoid getting his image on the screen. Rape kits had yielded little in the form of evidence. And with gaps spanning several hours in the memories of the five victims who’d come forward, the rapist could take his time to be careful.