Still Wet

The Hobart bullpen had thinned out into the long quiet hour that came on a winter afternoon when most of the day shift had begun to gather their jackets. Karl Jenkins had begun gathering his when his desk phone rang.

The interstate number on the screen meant the call could only be one call. He sat back down without taking his hand off his jacket and answered it the way he had been answering everything since dawn, which was as a man whose room had been narrowing all day.

The voice on the other end of the line was Detective Dave Santos of the Adelaide CIB. Santos had been at his own desk in his own city for some hours by then, with a file in front of him whose contents he had spent the last of the afternoon working out how much of to share. The patrol Karl had dispatched in the morning had found Luke Smith's parents' house unlocked from the inside and unoccupied from end to end. Both family cars were still in the driveway. There was no sign of forced entry. A neighbour from across the street, an elderly woman with the long-watched memory of a long-watched street, had seen a young man matching Luke's description arrive at the house in a taxi before lunch and had not, in the hours since, seen him or anyone else come back out. The forensic team had spent the afternoon walking the perimeter of the property in slow concentric arcs and had returned to the back garden to find a single drop of fresh blood on the door of the garden shed. The drop had still been wet when the gloved hand of a junior officer had reached out to confirm it. The sample was now in a lab in Adelaide on priority testing, and the team would spend the next forty-eight hours combing the house and the garden for human remains, or for anything else.

What Santos did not put into the air over the phone line was the second weight he had been carrying since lunchtime. The whole Smith family was gone. Not only Luke. The parents as well. The entire household, vanished from inside a house that no one had broken into and no one had been seen leaving. And the drop of blood on the shed door was, to Santos's eye, too deliberate to be incidental. It sat where it sat with the small considered placement of a thing that had been left to be found. He kept that part of the file inside the folder on his desk and gave Karl only the facts he could prove.

Karl thanked him and ended the call without writing anything down.

The hand he replaced on the receiver did not move for a long time afterwards. Outside the window of the Hobart bullpen the last of the daylight had bled out of the sky and the streetlamps along the Derwent had come on in their pale unhelpful order, and the small island of silence that the room had been keeping around his desk for most of the day did not, even now, begin to thaw. The patrol he had encouraged dispatched had not gone to Luke Smith's parents' house and found a guilty man surrendering to the institution he had pointed it at. The patrol had gone to Luke Smith's parents' house and found the inside of one of those vanishings that he had been chasing the shape of for a week without ever having a name for, and the centre of the vanishing this time was the man he had been certain was the centre of the vanishings everywhere else.

Across the small distance of two desks, Sarah Lahey had stopped pretending to type some minutes earlier.

She had drifted to the edge of his workspace under the cover of professional curiosity and had stood there through the call with her body angled toward the conversation she could not quite hear. What Karl told her afterwards he told her in the careful low voice of a detective who was no longer sure what he was telling and no longer sure who he was telling it to. A house with no one in it. Both cars in the driveway. No forced entry. A young man arriving by taxi before lunch and not coming back out. A single drop of fresh blood on the door of a garden shed, still wet when found, now in a lab.

The word still wet sat down in the centre of her chest in a way that the rest of the call did not. It was the word for fresh evidence. It was the word for evidence that had not had time to dry. It was, though she did not yet have permission to think it consciously, the word for the kind of evidence that her own hand had been leaving on a dead man's jacket in a cupboard in Berriedale less than twenty-four hours earlier. Her own bandage had been still wet too.

What rose underneath the word, in the slow underwater way that thoughts rose in her when she had been holding too many of them under at once, was the quiet alignment of two things that had been sitting in different rooms of her head all day. Her grandmother in the Vaucluse nursing home, fierce and certain, had said Luke was innocent. Gladys Cramer, in the small frightened careful sentences she had given the interview room that morning, had said Luke knew nothing. Sarah had taken both as the loyal protection of women who had reason to want a young man kept clear of an investigation. She had not, until Santos's drop of blood arrived in the centre of her chest, considered that they might both have been telling the same true thing.

If Luke Smith was the innocent man both women had been insisting he was, then the man Karl had killed in his house the night before had not been killed by mistake in a scuffle with a stranger. The man Karl had killed had been killed in the home of a man who was being hunted by something. And the thing hunting Luke Smith was now, by the slow soft geometry of what Santos had just told them, in Adelaide. In the parents' house. In the empty rooms with both cars in the driveway. In the careful single drop of blood left on a shed door for someone to find.

Across the desk, Karl was watching her face for whatever was crossing it. She felt his eyes on her and turned hers carefully back to her own screen, and arranged her expression into the kind of professional concern that a partner was supposed to wear when a partner had just been told that an interstate lead was producing something strange, and she said the small ordinary words that the moment required of her, and she did not let her hand go to the pocket where the stolen device was still sitting against her ribs.