Her desk was even more of a mess than usual. It looked like Izzy had been playing here again despite its out-of-bounds zoning. While she waited for her computer to boot up she attempted to create some order in the chaos, sliding Lego pieces into their box, picking up scattered crayons and textas. At least Izzy had had the foresight to protect the desk with a newspaper, Stevie thought, until she saw the page it was open at—the personal columns. Various lurid pleas and advertisements had been singled out and decorated with rainbow borders, love hearts and stars. Shit. She could only hope Izzy hadn’t been able to read any of it. Imagine if she’d planned on taking this artwork to school for show and tell?

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She snatched the paper from her desk and crushed it into a tight ball. Christ, she thought, I’m officer in charge of the cyber predator team and I can’t even keep this junk out of my own home, away from my own daughter. Although this wasn’t quite what she dealt with at work, the core elements were still the same, it was all a question of exploitation. Sometimes she wondered what chance in hell they had in stemming this flood.

She looked at the picture of Izzy on the mantelpiece. It was her first day at school, her school dress stiff and new. The wide, gap-toothed smile seemed to say, look at me, I’m about to take over the world. Like her dad before his health scare, she thought she was ten feet tall and bullet-proof. Stevie saw a row of little faces in the photo album of her mind, exploited little boys and girls she’d come across during the course of her career, many who would have once been like Izzy. Her mind went to the abandoned Pavel baby—God, how could she protect them all?

She took a swig of beer and tried to calm down. The day had left her overwrought. Things weren’t all doom and gloom, she tried to console herself; her team in the cyber predator unit had proved that the system could work.

She scrolled through her mail and found the memo telling her what time she was expected in court tomorrow. It looked like it was to be an all day session, which meant nearly ten hours of skirt-suit and heels. Shit.

Luke Fowler’s face filled the TV screen in their bedroom, pleading to the public for information regarding the whereabouts of Delia and Jon Pavel. The woman at the deli thought they sounded Russian: close—the newsreader said they were Romanian. Photos of the couple were broadcast along with their car rego and a picture of a green Jaguar similar to the one missing from their garage.

Earlier, between bites of lasagne—Monty had been right, it was one of the best she’d ever tasted—Stevie had recounted the details of her afternoon, including her brief imprisonment in the upstairs bedroom.

‘Good old Blinky Bill, coming to the rescue,’ Monty said again, killing the TV with the remote and plunging them into darkness.

She wriggled further into the covers; the nights were still chilly despite the warmer days. ‘Yeah, well he may have got me out of there, but he didn’t do anything to help when I had the blow-up with Fowler.’

‘How could he? You were blatantly out of line.’

Stevie snorted. ‘I thought you at least would support me. Fowler seems to think he can get me sacked for tampering with a crime scene.’

‘Bullshit, it’ll just get brushed under the carpet. You’re the hero of the hour, the flavour of the month, walking on bloody water in fact.’

Ice clinked as he drained the last of his whisky then thunked the empty glass upon his bedside table—more than a little drunk, she suspected. He shouldn’t have been drinking so close to his operation, but she couldn’t chastise him now, not when he was saying things she needed to hear. ‘There’s not much you can do wrong at the moment,’ he went on. ‘Milk it while you can, it won’t last.’ He said it with no bitterness, despite the uncertain direction of his own career.

She snuggled into his back. He was a large man who carried his weight well. She had always thought he was fit too, despite the cigarettes. Until the onset of angina last year, he had jogged along the beach most mornings. It was hard to reconcile this outwardly fit body with its inner frailties.

‘I managed to get a bit more from Trotman when Fowler finally climbed back under his rock,’ she said. ‘According to the people in the street, neither of the Pavels has been seen for four days.’

‘The baby can’t have survived alone for four days.’

‘I know that. But the date corresponds to when Jon Pavel was last seen at work and Delia was seen at the supermarket. It doesn’t necessarily mean that was when they last tended to the baby, though going by the state of him I’d say he’d been on his own for some time. ’

‘What does Jon Pavel do?’

‘Businessman.’

Monty grunted. ‘That covers a multitude of sins.’

‘Runs a couple of restaurants in West Perth and a nightclub in Fremantle.’

The phone by their bed rang. Monty swore. Stevie groped for the light and leaned over him to answer it.

With no preamble, Skye gave her a rundown on baby Pavel’s condition. She said he was improving and the doctors were cautiously optimistic he’d get through the physical ordeal with no lingering ill effects. ‘But what about his mental condition?’ Skye said with a hitch in her voice. ‘That’s what I want to know. Can you imagine the psychological effect this will have on him? I mean, the poor kid was obviously adopted in the first place, so who knows what hell he’s already been through?’

Stevie sat up in bed. ‘Adopted? Who told you that?’

‘I don’t need to be told, it’s obvious. I noticed it straight off, didn’t you? The kid’s Asian.’

Stevie paused and thought back to their discovery. Yes, come to think of it, she had noticed Asian features under the dirt and grime. But as she hadn’t known anything about the child’s parents at the time, she hadn’t given the matter much thought. The penny should have dropped when the deli woman mentioned that the parents were eastern European. She chided herself—she was usually more on the ball than this. Just as well this wasn’t her case, that her leave was almost due. Monty, the cyber-predator case, the house; the stressors were adding up. She was more tired than she’d thought.

With her hand over the receiver, she told Monty Skye’s news. He lay on his back with his hands under his head and stared at the ceiling, his face mirroring her own perplexed look.

Stevie listened to Skye a while longer and tried to reassure her that everything was being done to locate the baby’s parents. ‘She’s not handling this very well,’ she said to Monty when she finally extracted herself from the phone. ‘This baby business has really upset her, she’s a sensitive soul.’

Monty turned and raised an eyebrow as if to say: and you’re not?

‘At least I can detach,’ she said, flipping the light off again. Despite almost half an hour under the hot shower, she could still detect the sour odour of the baby on her skin. In some ways, she reflected, its associations made it worse than the scent of decay.

Monty said, ‘You’ve always said Skye was a bit, what was it, unbalanced?’

‘No, not unbalanced, just highly strung and with a keen sense of moral justice.’

‘Sounds like someone else I know.’

She didn’t rise to the bait. ‘I get the feeling Luke Fowler and Skye know each other. She certainly doesn’t seem to have much faith in his abilities. There’s some history there, I’m sure of it. He strikes me as a bully—he’d better not be giving her a hard time over this.’

‘I’ve come across him once or twice; did a course with him in Adelaide. He seemed okay to me.’

‘He might be okay to prop up a bar with after a day of lectures, but you’ve never had to actually work with him.’