4338.214 · August 2, 2018 AD
Every Kilometre Closer
Two detectives sit in an unmarked car beneath a eucalyptus canopy, and the silence between them is heavier than anything either will admit. Forty-eight hours ago, something happened at a house in Berriedale. Neither has reported it. Neither can forget it. When a radio dispatch sends them racing towards a colonial estate in Granton, the woman beside the wheel-gripping man understands that the most dangerous suspect on this case may be the one she's sleeping with.
The afternoon light barely penetrates, and the car smells of dust and old coffee and things they haven't said. Sarah Lahey traces patterns on Karl Jenkins' thigh with fingers still carrying stitches from a window she climbed through twice — once with reason, once without. He hasn't slept in two days. She hasn't told the truth in two days. The mathematics are different but the debt is the same.
Then the radio cracks their private darkness open: Luke Smith sighted at Jeffries Manor. The name that has consumed Karl for a week, the name that binds them both to a body beneath a staircase in Berriedale, now pulling them northwest along a highway that takes them past the very suburb they're trying not to think about.
Karl drives fast. He always drives fast when he's chasing something. Sarah watches the landscape thin from city to paddock to bush and tries to separate the detective she partnered with from the man whose hands did something two nights ago that she can't bring herself to fully examine. By the time sandstone columns and manicured hedges materialise through bare winter elms, she has failed.
