There's one girl of whom I've grown particularly fond. She adores my dog Iggy and always stops to give him a cuddle, lapping up his affection and he hers, in a mutual love-fest. Sometimes I would ask if she wanted me to bring her back a coffee from my walk, and she would always say yes. Yet, when I returned she was often gone, off in another car, with another client, going through the motions of tending her trade that are as familiar to her as a keyboard and mouse are to me. Other times she was still waiting, so grateful for the simple gesture of a coffee it was as if I were giving her a kidney. I never asked her about her job and she never asked me about mine. We mainly talked about the weather or shared a giggle at the hilarity of my dog bouncing in excitement at her attention. I don't know her name and she doesn't know mine, but I think we would consider each other friends. This week, however, my friend is nowhere to be seen. And I have a heavy feeling of dread I can't shake that if I had asked her name, she may have told me it was Tracy, or Kelly, the name she worked under. Tracy/Kelly is no longer walking the beat, not that many of us would know it. She is on a slab in a morgue having been savagely murdered and left in the van she lived in with her now devastated long-time boyfriend. This attack allegedly happened mid-afternoon in a busy area, yet the dead woman isn't headline news. And I am angry as to why. In fact, I'm just furious full stop.

Even if Tracy isn't my eerily absent-of-late friend, I am still sick knowing that a murderer has entered my neighbourhood and taken an innocent woman's life. Because that's what Tracy/Kelly was - innocent. I don't care that she exchanged sex for money, or that she knew the risk every time she got in a car with a client. I don't give a flying if she was hooking to feed a habit or feed a family. She deserved better. Every woman does. Tracy's death should be noticed and it should be felt - deeply. It also must be avenged. I walk the same streets as Tracy every day on my way to see friends, walk Iggy, grab a coffee, live my life. And I am well aware I could have been Tracy, just as I could have been Jill Meagher. Because men with menace on their minds are predators. They pick on sex workers because they are easy targets. What they ultimately want is to hurt, degrade and destroy - to take a life, a thing. They don't care how a woman makes a living, just that she is alive. After looking for my friend in all her usual places again this morning, I stopped at my local coffee shop, a place I consider like my second lounge room it is so welcoming, warm and safe. Today the space was different. It had an atmosphere of sombreness akin to walking into a wake. We all asked the same questions: what did she look like, did she work the Carlisle/Blessington Way corner? We all had a certain one girl, a friend, we hoped wasn't Tracy. Not that Tracy doesn't count - she does. It felt ironic that Jill Meagher's husband, Tom, was all over the news this week condemning the Adult Parole Board of Victoria, which let Adrian Ernest Bayley, the man who murdered Tom's ''best friend in the world'', free to kill.

I share Tom Meagher's fury because the salient and sad fact is that serious sex offenders are almost impossible to rehabilitate. They must be kept locked up. And it shouldn't just take a pretty brunette on her way home after a fun night out with colleagues to bring home this point. All women deserve safety and justice. Tracy is no exception. I believe that Jill and Tracy are one and the same - women in the wrong place at the wrong time, victims of a system gone wrong. Statistics show it is likely Tracy's killer is a repeat offender, just like Jill's - that he has hurt before and will do so again, and that if the parole board doesn't stop making catastrophic decisions such as releasing Bayley, more Jills and Tracys will lose their lives, leaving those who love them shattered. Even with this menace in mind, I am off now to walk my dog in my neighbourhood. I have to reclaim it as mine and not his, whoever he is. I shall avoid Inkerman Street, where Tracy's blood was discovered earlier this week, because it is almost sacred ground for me now, a shrine never to be walked over again. But I will swing down Carlisle as is my custom, my wont, my right. And I know as I do I will be hoping from the depths of my being for a tug on the lead that means Iggy has spotted our friend. Saturday Age columnist Wendy Squires is a journalist, editor and author. Twitter: @Wendy_Squires