4338.214 · August 2, 2018 AD
No Gun, Not Yet
Detective Karl Jenkins has been hunting the same suspect for a week takes a routine disturbance call out to a sandstone manor on a hillside north of the city. He knows the woman who lives there. He has known her for years. He tells his partner before they leave the car that this is not an afternoon for drawn weapons — he is going to walk up to his suspect with open palms and finish it properly. By the time the sun has finished its slant across the lawn, the shed is empty and his partner is the only one left in it.
Detective Karl Jenkins and Detective Sarah Lahey are behind the woolsheds at Macquarie Point, not talking, when the disturbance call comes over the radio. Jeffries Manor. A name the watch has been flagging for a week. The unmarked car turns north out of the pewter light along the Derwent and climbs the gravel drive to a sandstone house Karl has known for years. Louise Jeffries is outside the shed when they arrive, mascara cut in channels down her face, a kitchen knife shaking in her hands. Sarah takes the knife. Karl turns alone toward the shed and tells himself the way he tells himself every time: no gun, not yet. A professional can finish something like this without a drawn weapon.
Upstairs in a bedroom that smells of another century, Sarah finds a woman older than the house she is lying in. The old woman's eyes lift to Sarah's face and do not see Sarah. They see a name that belongs to a nursing home in Vaucluse, a name Sarah's grandmother has been trying to finish a conversation about for a week. Sarah does not have time to ask what the old woman meant. Outside the bedroom window, a motorbike engine catches and runs clean for a handful of seconds, and then leaves no trace in any direction the eye can search.
In the shed, the afternoon's careful arrest has already come apart. Karl is pinning a man he has been hunting for a week, and the man is saying two words into his ear that belong to a case file Karl has been carrying alone since the bedroom at Berriedale, and the concrete floor is about to stop being a floor.
