4338.216 · August 4, 2018 AD
Three Days Behind a Locked Door
Stout hasn't slept. There's still ash in his jacket from a house that burned six hours ago. Now he's standing on a colleague's front step with a warrant and a locksmith and a pile of newspapers nobody collected, and behind the deadbolt a German Shepherd is growling at the door because the man who feeds him on an exact schedule hasn't come home in three days. What the living room walls have to say about Karl Jenkins is one kind of disturbing. What the bedroom has to say is another kind entirely — and the two stories don't match.
Pillinger Street, South Hobart. Saturday morning. Six people standing on winter grass outside a colleague's house — a locksmith, a forensic scientist, a K9 handler, two search officers, and a detective sergeant running on fourteen hours without sleep. The deadbolt yields. The growl behind the door drops to a whine when Hartley speaks through the timber in the tonal authority that K9 training builds into every handler's voice. Two minutes later, a German Shepherd is eating from a stranger's hands on the floor of his handler's living room, and the sound of it — desperate, gulping — fills the house like something that shouldn't have been allowed to happen.
The living room walls tell one story. Maps, photographs, printed pages, handwritten notes — all connected by red string running between pins in a web that spreads across three walls. The sofa faces the wall, not the television. The case notebook lies open on the coffee table to a page dated the first of August. A name Stout doesn't recognise sits in the lower right corner, connected to everything else by a single red thread.
The bedroom tells a different story. And the two don't match. The bed is made with military precision. A bag sits on it, packed for a night or two away. And on the bedside table, arranged with a care that mimics Karl's own habits — objects that couldn't have walked through a locked front door by themselves.
