Limbo by Amy Andrews Page B

apparently to hear out there but she definitely didn’t buy anything, he said. And about thirty seconds after she gets in the car it backs out and drives away.’
    ‘And that was the last actual sighting of her?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Martin’ — Dash tapped on his picture again — ‘starts to get worried when Hailey hasn’t show up an hour later. He rings her several times with no answer. He rings her mother, her sister, some of her friends. No-one has seen her. He figures she might just be driving around trying to blow off some steam but when it gets to ten-thirty and she hasn’t shown and she hasn’t rung or answered her phone he’s really concerned and rings the police. He’s worried she’s been in a car accident. They tell him there’s been nothing logged in the Brisbane metropolitan area. He expresses his concern at this unusual turn of events, they tell him to ring back if she’s not home in the next couple of hours. Four hours after she left, after continually trying to ring her to no avail he rings the police to report her as missing.’
    Hailey looked at the image of Martin. ‘He must have been going out of his mind.’
    ‘At two that morning the police track Hailey’s iPhone to bushland just off the Bruce Highway near the Pine River. They found the car’ — he tapped on a newspaper image of the white Prado — ‘abandoned. No Hailey. No Isabella. No car seat. The phone was inside the vehicle. With dozens of missed calls and frantic messages from Martin. There was no evidence of foul play but the car and the phone were completely wiped of prints. All prints, including Hailey’s and Martin’s. No prints found whatsoever inside or on or around the doors on the outside. Some on the bonnet and the boot area are all either Hailey’s or Martin’s.’
    ‘That’s suspicious?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Joy let that sink in for a moment. ‘Wait…how do they even know Hailey’s prints? Were they already in the system?’
    Dash shook his head. ‘No, the house was dusted and cross matched with the ones they lifted from the boot of the car.’
    ‘Were there footprints or something around where the car was found?’
    ‘There may well have been but it had rained quite heavily in the area around midnight so anything that may have been there was washed away.’
    ‘Bummer.’
    Dash nodded quickly as he kept his eyes glued to the board. ‘An extensive search of the bush area where the car was found was undertaken over the next two days and turned up nothing, but with the car being wiped of prints the police initially worked on the theory that Hailey and Isabella had either been abducted or Hailey had fled with her daughter.’
    ‘From what I’ve read in the last few days, the police seemed to move quite quickly to the abduction/kidnap theory, didn’t they?’
    Joy had been away when all this had gone down but she’d been doing some online catching up too.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Because?’
    ‘Because of the prints being wiped and because it’s really very hard to hide anywhere these days unless you’re a criminal mastermind or you’ve been planning it long and hard, and by all reports, Hailey Richardson was a weepy, sleep-deprived mother. Hailey didn’t have a passport, neither did Isabella, so they can’t have left the country. Her bank account and credit cards haven’t been touched and there’s no record of her opening another one or having other cards Martin didn’t know about. She was on maternity leave at the time so she had no income. Forensics looked at her phone and computer and Martin’s and nothing raised a red flag. No strange searches or anything. All documents, like Isabella’s and Hailey’s birth certificates, have been accounted for. None of her or Isabella’s clothes appeared to be missing, no bags appeared to be packed.’
    ‘She could have squirreled away that stuff over a long period of time. Squirrelled away money too. Taken copies of important documents. She could have outside help.