Four Trajectories

The two vehicles tore past the verge with the kind of sound that arrives in the body before it reaches the ears — a doubled scream of engines pushed past anything the road in these conditions was supposed to permit, and a wall of muddy spray that hit the patrol car broadside hard enough to rock it on its springs. Karl Jenkins was already moving. The pivot from the dead goose at the dam to the driver's seat of CITY632 took less than a heartbeat, and the V8 answered him with a roar that pressed both detectives back into their seats as the patrol car launched off the verge and into a pursuit no sensible procedural review would have approved under the conditions and that was happening anyway.

Sarah Lahey braced her uninjured hand against the dashboard and reached for the radio with the other. Her bandage was already dark with the morning's blood and the afternoon's rain. Her head was pounding. She did not say any of this. What she said was CITY632, in pursuit, requesting backup, copy, and her voice came out clean and crisp and entirely steady, because the chase was the one place in her week where the things her body was carrying did not get to interrupt the work.

Beside her, Karl was grinning. He could not have stopped the grin if he had tried. The road and the rain and the two sets of taillights ahead had compressed his entire world down to the small set of decisions a pursuit driver was trained to make at speed, and the compression was the closest thing to relief he had felt since the bedroom at Berriedale. The patrol car responded to him like a thing that had been waiting all morning to be asked. They hit a rise on Collinsvale Road and the front wheels left the tarmac for half a second before slamming back down with force enough to rattle teeth, and Karl corrected the slide before Sarah had finished cursing him for it.

Three hundred metres above the chase, Senior Constable Mark Dunham was flying the Eurocopter at the edge of what Tasmania Police considered safe operation. He had dropped altitude to maintain visual contact through the squalls. Beside him, Constable Benjamin Matthews was calling vehicle movements down through the radio in the clinical cadence the job required, while quietly noting to himself that the front wiper was losing its battle with the rain and that the next heavy band of weather would force them to climb again or break off entirely. The flight log would later record the conditions as severe. The flight log would not record the way the cabin smelled of damp uniforms and old coffee and the particular tension of two men flying an aircraft they were not entirely sure they should still be in.

Inside the lead vehicle, Luke Smith was driving a Toyota Hilux that did not belong to him. The man whose Hilux it was sat in the passenger seat with blood drying along the side of his face from the moment Gladys Cramer had hit him with her car at the side of the Brooker Highway. His name was Adrian Pafistis. He was a master builder from Battery Point with a wife and two daughters and a company in Hobart whose name was on the side of half the boutique restorations in Sandy Bay, and he had driven out to the Owens' property that morning expecting a routine site consultation with a new client about a renovation in Collinsvale. He was now a hostage in his own vehicle, breathing hard, his hands braced against the dashboard, his thousand-yard stare fixed on a windscreen that the wipers were beating to no useful effect. He had not yet found the words for what was happening to him. Luke had not offered any, because the words would have required Luke to take his attention off the road, and the road did not currently permit attention to be diverted anywhere else

Behind them, Gladys Cramer drove her blue Corolla at speeds that had stopped feeling like driving and started feeling like a piece of weather she was inside of. Her left hand was on the wheel. Her right was holding her phone to her ear, where Luke's voice was coming through in fragments between bursts of static. The bottle of shiraz from the morning at the Berriedale house was rolling against the passenger footwell with every corner, a soft glass thud she could hear under the engine and the rain and the helicopter blades somewhere overhead. The afternoon had started with her behind a wine glass on a couch and was now this — and the gap between the two had become something she did not have time to measure. She just kept driving. Luke was telling her where to go. The where had become smaller and stranger with every passing minute.

The mobile data terminal between Karl and Sarah pinged.

Sarah looked down. Her face changed.

The plate on the trailing vehicle returned to Gladys May Cramer of Claremont. The same Gladys who had tended Sarah's wounds with butterfly bandages and a glass of shiraz at the Berriedale house only the previous afternoon. The same Gladys who had slipped on Luke Smith's name when she meant Jamie's. A blue Corolla driven by a witness from one open case was now running, in coordinated formation with an unidentified Hilux, on roads neither vehicle should have been on for any reason that fit the case file Karl had been working on for a week. The recognition landed in the cab between them with the weight of something that should not have been possible. They did not say it aloud. There was no time. Karl simply pressed his foot harder into the accelerator and Sarah keyed the radio and the chase compressed itself another notch tighter.

At Springdale Road, both vehicles ahead of them executed a sudden coordinated turn that bent back toward the way they had come. Karl improvised a reversal — handbrake, 180-degree pivot, intercept geometry calculated against geography he had never driven through before — and raced toward the junction where the suspects should, by his calculations, emerge.

They did not emerge.

The radio crackled. The chopper had lost visual contact at the entrance to Myrtle Forest Road. Above the trees, Matthews was already telling Dunham they had perhaps four more minutes of safe flight in the conditions, and Dunham was already nodding without taking his eyes off the windscreen, and the helicopter banked over the canopy in search of a vehicle it would not find again.

Karl floored the accelerator.

What followed was not strategy. It was velocity in the absence of strategy — a patrol car driven by frustration and a decade of pursuit training down a road that narrowed as it climbed, with rain coming down hard enough that the windscreen was fighting a losing battle and the suspension compressing through every pothole the storm had hidden under standing water. Sarah braced. Karl drove. Inside the Hilux, Luke gripped the wheel of someone else's vehicle and felt Adrian breathing hard beside him and saw, through the rain, the shape of a building at the end of the road. Behind him, Gladys drove with the shiraz rolling at her feet and the phone pressed to her ear and the small voice in the back of her head telling her that whatever happened next, none of it was going to be undoable.

The bitumen ran out without ceremony.

The road dissolved into a stretch of rough gravel that jolted hard enough to throw both detectives forward against their seatbelts. The patrol car shuddered. The rear end broke loose on loose stones. Karl corrected with opposite lock and brought the vehicle to a sliding halt in a half-flooded clearing at the end of a dead-end road in the foothills behind Hobart, with the rain hammering the roof and the chopper somewhere overhead and the two vehicles he had been chasing through the storm now invisible somewhere ahead of him in the trees.