4338.213 · August 1, 2018 AD
A Prepper Household
Four officers from the Adelaide Metropolitan Police arrive at a suburban Craigmore house on intelligence that a suspected serial killer is heading for the property. They find a lived-in home with no one inside it, a hallway trolley stacked with toilet paper, and a half-cleared bulk food storage room. The assessment writes itself. The assessment is correct in everything it sees and wrong in everything it doesn't. Behind the garden shed, two brothers are watching the search through the fence palings, holding completely still.
The call comes from Tasmania. Detective Karl Jenkins has been working a series of disappearances in Hobart and has identified Luke Nathaniel Smith as his primary suspect, and Luke Nathaniel Smith has just been sighted at Adelaide Airport heading for his parents' house in Craigmore. Detective David Santos puts a four-officer team on the road within the hour. By the time they reach the property the house is quiet, the family is missing, and the front door is unlocked.
Inside, the house is wrong in a way the officers cannot quite name. Family photographs on the walls. Beds made. Dishes in the kitchen. A converted bedroom stacked floor to ceiling with bulk food storage shelving that has been mostly emptied. A trolley of toilet paper sitting in the hallway like an exhibit. A single barrel of rice on the patio with no one beside it. One officer says the word preppers. Detective Kelly Muscat does not disagree. The assessment is close enough to true that it would have held.
Behind the garden shed, Luke and Charles Smith are pressed flat against the timber, watching the search through the gaps in the fence palings. Charles is photographing every officer with his phone and sending the images to a girl in Smithfield who has been waiting all morning for exactly this. Luke is bleeding from a small cut near his left elbow, and he does not know it yet, but Senior Constable Mia Chen is about to find that blood, and the assessment that would have held is about to become the assessment that did not.
