The Parable of the Mustard Seed Read online

  His vision swam, and burning bile rose in his throat. He swallowed it back down with difficulty, his guts churning.

  “My partner drove him to the vet,” the copper said. “There’s still four of us here though.” She added the last part hastily, as though she thought she might get in trouble for admitting one of them had left the scene.

  “Her,” John said, his voice rasping.

  The copper looked at him.

  “It’s a her,” John said. “The dog. Her name’s Cricket.”

  It seemed somehow important to say that, and John had no idea why.

  Liz put a hand on his chest. “Stay out here.”

  John could have argued, he supposed, but he didn’t have it in him. He trusted Liz to do the job right. And what was she going to find that the general duties coppers hadn’t? Caleb was gone, and that was all that mattered.

  John sat on the front steps heavily.

  One copper on the front door and one on the back after their search of the house. Which left… John picked them out across the street: two blue uniforms knocking on doors and questioning neighbours.

  John pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialled Caleb’s number again.

  Heard it ringing distantly from somewhere in the house.

  He sucked in a breath and held it. He felt like passing out. When his phone rang suddenly, John almost dropped it in surprise. And then, with black dread curling in his gut and threatening to choke his heart, he stared at the name on the screen for a moment before answering.

  “Darren, you need to come home. They’ve taken Caleb.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “He spends all his time in his room,” Darren said, chopping vegetables for a stir fry because, as he said to John, he’d been living on fast food for the past eight years and stir fry was about the only bloody thing he could make. “He doesn’t come out until I ask him to. Jesus, I have to think about getting back to work at some point. What am I supposed to do with him?”

  John hummed.

  Darren shook his head and waved the knife around. “Like stuff like this. The psychologist at the hospital said I have to lock up everything that he could harm himself with. Medication, knives, even my bloody tackle box. I don’t know if I’m cut out for this.”

  “Nobody would blame you if you aren’t.”

  “Bullshit,” Darren said. “And it’s not like I’m going to give my son to some foster family to raise. It’s just…” He trailed off with a shake of his head.

  “It’s just?”

  Darren squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “I knew I wasn’t getting Jason back. I knew he’d be different, because it’s been so long. But this kid doesn’t feel like mine. I can’t even hug him, John. How am I supposed to deal with a kid who won’t talk to me, and who won’t even let me touch him?”

  John stepped over the bloodstains on the polished floorboards of the veranda and walked through to the back of the house. He was careful not to touch anything, even though his fingerprints were already all over the place. On the dishes in the drainer by the sink, on the taps in the bathroom, on the walls in the spare room and in Caleb’s bedroom. There wasn’t a corner of this house that John hadn’t been at home in, and hadn’t left some trace behind.

  He glanced into Caleb’s bedroom as he passed and saw Aaron, gloves on, opening and closing Caleb’s dresser drawers.

  There was a half-eaten sandwich on a plate at the kitchen table. Caleb’s phone was resting beside the plate. A glass as well, though it was empty. It appeared as though he’d just walked away for a moment, and he’d be back any second now.

  Liz was on the back deck, brows tugged together as she made a phone call. Lockland was with her, and when he saw John he beckoned him through.

  John forced himself past Caleb’s half-eaten lunch and out onto the back deck.

  “You last heard from him at eleven, is that right?” Lockland asked.

  John pulled his phone out and showed him the picture of Caleb and Cricket, and the timestamp: 11.08. Caleb’s smile was blinding, and John couldn’t look at it without his eyes stinging.

  Fuck.

  He couldn’t lose it. Not now. Not when there was still work to do.

  Lockland’s expression was curious, but he didn’t ask. He was either too professional for that, or he really didn’t want John going to pieces on him.

  “So the neighbours from number twelve said they heard a car speeding off at around 11.30, and saw a white van leaving the street. No rego, but Leon Harrison has a white van.” Lockland flipped through his notebook. “And it was a white van spotted in Milton when Naomi was killed.”

  “Lotta white vans out there,” John said dully.

  Lockland’s brow creased. “Listen. Naomi. It’s a homicide obviously, but I don’t think they were intending to kill her. It looks more like an abduction gone wrong. Someone tried to pull her into the van, but she struggled and fell, and that’s what killed her.”

  John’s mouth curled into a bitter smile. “Bullshit. I get what you’re trying to do, but bullshit. They might not have intended to kill her at the side of the road, but come on, you really think they were just going to have a little chat with her and then let her go? You think that’s what they’re doing with Caleb?” He clamped his mouth shut before his voice cracked, and shook his head.

  He wanted to kick and scream and punch walls. Wanted to put his fist through glass and feel the sudden sharp sting of it. He couldn’t feel the ground underneath his feet right now, and he felt like he was falling through space. Was this how Caleb felt when the storm in his head got too loud and swept him up?

  John’s vision blurred with tears and he turned away from Lockland.

  God.

  Caleb must be terrified.

  If he’s even still alive.

  Shut up. Shut the fuck up.

  John swallowed down the pained noise that tried to rise in his throat.

  Clare moved closer and gave his wrist a surreptitious squeeze. She opened her mouth as if she was going to say something, and then a commotion at the front door caught her attention.

  “Let me in! Let me in, I live here!”

  Darren.

  Clare hurried back into the house. John heard the low, urgent exchange of words, and a moment later Darren was stepping onto the back deck, dazed and shaking.

  “John,” he said. “John, where’s my boy?”

  “I…” His voice cracked on that simple word, and sudden tears blurred his vision.

  The expression of heartbreak and horror on Darren’s face would haunt him forever, but it was the hope that cut the deepest.

  “John,” he said, reaching out to grab John’s shirt, tugging on the fabric. “John, tell me he’s okay. Tell me.”

  John didn’t have the breath in him to push that lie out. He opened his mouth, but no other words came either.

  “Mr. Fletcher,” Clare said, taking his arm and drawing him away from John. “I’m Clare Dowling. Take a seat over here with me, and I’ll tell you what we know so far.”

  John stared after him, a thousand useless apologies dying before they even reached his lips.

  He’d failed, and Caleb was—

  Caleb was gone.

  John’s hands were shaking and he couldn’t stop them.

  Liz finished her phone call, and crossed the deck to John. She didn’t comment on his shaking hands. Didn’t give him any sugar-coated bullshit either. Just levelled him with a stare and gave it to him straight.

  “Quartermain’s out of the equation,” she said. “I just heard back from the guys at his address. They tried to raise him, and got no answer. When they looked in the back window, they saw him sitting in his armchair. He’d cut his wrists and bled out. They think it happened sometime overnight.”

  John tried to feel the tiniest bit of satisfaction over that, or anger, or something—anything—but he was too frantic with worry for Caleb to give the smallest fuck about Ben Quartermain.

  “Leon Harrison’s
not home,” Liz said. “And his white van’s gone too.”

  John nodded. There was nothing surprising in that. Leon had been the one to kill Simon. He was the one with the most to lose if Simon’s murder ever made it to a courtroom. It didn’t help get Caleb back though, did it? Knowing that it was Leon Harrison who’d taken him meant nothing to John unless they could get him back. John didn’t care about arrests and court dates and future prison sentences. None of those things could keep Caleb from harm.

  God. What if he was already dead?

  How could John live with himself if Caleb was already dead?

  Panic threatened to choke him, and he held his breath to try to keep a lid on it.

  “And we might have something,” Liz said. Her tone was cautious. “The guys sitting off Ethan Gray’s address were going to go and raise him like I asked, but then they saw him leaving his place and getting in his car. They’re following him now, and he’s heading east on the Warrego Highway.”

  “Coming this way,” John said slowly.

  “Maybe.” Liz exhaled heavily. “They’re keeping an eye on him from a few cars back, and we’re getting the chopper headed out that way just in case they lose sight of him.”

  It wasn’t much of a lead, John knew, but it was all they had right now.

  Liz’s expression tightened. “John, I want you to stay here with Darren and—”

  “No.” John shook his head.

  “John.”

  “No,” he repeated. “Don’t you make me sit this one out, Liz. Not Caleb. Not when you know what he means to me.”

  “Knowing what he means to you is exactly why I’m telling you to wait here,” Liz said. “You fucking know that!”

  Lockland moved away from them.

  “I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have a personal stake in this,” John said. “I’m not going to pretend I don’t love him. But you know I can still do my job, Liz. You know I can.”

  Liz pressed her mouth into a thin, tense line, and then shook her head. “Okay. Don’t make me regret this, John. You remember where the line is, and you don’t fucking step over it, you hear me?”

  “I hear you.” It was more than she had to do for him, and John knew it. “I know where the line is.”

  Whatever Liz was going to say in response was curtailed by the ringing of her phone. “Grant.” She paused to listen. “Where? What’s the exact address?” She clicked her fingers and mimed writing in the air. John grabbed a pen and passed it to her, and Lockland shoved his folder toward her. She scrawled an address on the folder. “Okay. Got it. Yep, tell them we’re on our way.”

  “What have we got?” Lockland asked.

  “Our two junior constables from Toowoomba are sitting off a property in Hatton Vale,” Liz said. “Ethan Gray just arrived, and there’s already a white van parked there.”

  “Let’s go,” Lockland said.

  “Clare, stay here,” Liz said. “Scenes of Crime are on their way.”

  Darren began to push himself out of his chair.

  “No, Darren,” Liz said. “Wait here for us, okay? Wait here.”

  Darren’s blank gaze sought John out. “John?”

  “Stay here,” John said. “We’re going to do everything we can to bring him home, okay?”

  Darren nodded, tears sliding down his weathered face. “Please, John. Bring my boy home again.”

  “We’ll do everything we can,” John said, because as much as he wanted to promise Darren that he’d bring Caleb safely home, he was too afraid that if he said it, the universe would prove him a liar.

  The constable from Toowoomba sounded like a teenager, or maybe John was just getting old. His name was Raj, and he drew a rough mud map of the property at Hatton Vale, took a picture of it, and sent it to John as a text. An old house, with at least four out-buildings, and two X’s on the map where Ethan Gray and Leon Harrison currently stood out the front of the place talking.

  The constables had pulled over at the side of the highway, popped the bonnet of their unmarked car like it had broken down, and gone in on foot. They were keeping out of sight now, hidden behind a clump of eucalypts, hunkered down in the dry grass watching. They were a few hundred metres away from the house, and hadn’t seen any sign of Caleb.

  John couldn’t shake the idea that there was a body in the back of Leon Harrison’s white van.

  “We’re about twenty minutes out,” John told Raj. “We’ll cut our lights and sirens before we get there. Are you guys vested up?”

  “Yeah. No sign of any weapons, but yeah.”

  “I’m going to keep you on the line,” John said. “Let us know if you see movement.”

  Lockland leaned forward from the back seat. “We’ve got uniform backup coming from Laidley and Marburg.”

  “Keep them back until we get there,” Liz said. “We don’t want the marked cars tipping them off.”

  “What’s the address again?” Aaron said. “Heise Road? Looks like there’s a servo on the highway before the turnoff. How about we all meet there and vest up before going in?”

  “That’ll work,” Liz said, blasting the horn at a car that was too slow to move over to the left lane and get out of their way.

  John tried to tamp down his urge to yell that no, they didn’t have time for this, they needed to go straight in. He knew better. He knew officer safety came first. Leon Harrison was a killer. What were the chances he’d go quietly when the police turned up? They needed to have a plan before they went in.

  “I’ll get the ambos on standby too,” Aaron said.

  John had been involved in the planning of many ops before, but none in the front seat of a car as it hurtled down the highway. None this precarious, where every second weighed so much. And none where his swirling emotions threatened to rise in his throat and choke him.

  His phone dinged with a text message, and he looked at his screen. It was from David: We on for Saturday for fixing Ma’s roof?

  The message was so innocuous, so innocent, that John could barely parse it. His entire world was falling apart right now, and David was thinking of fixing Ma’s roof? John wanted to laugh, it was so absurd. He swallowed down his irrational burst of anger toward his brother—David didn’t know, he couldn’t know—and swiped on the message to remove it from the screen. How was the world still turning for other people when for John it was collapsing all around him? It made no sense. Nothing made sense anymore. All John could do was think of Caleb, and of his need to hold him in his arms again.

  Their last kiss, only a night before, after Caleb’s bedtime routine. His mouth wet from the water he’d swallowed his pill down with, his eyes dark and full of love.

  “I love you too,” John had told him, so at least there was that.

  It wasn’t enough, but at least there was that.

  John closed his stinging eyes for a moment as the car sped down the highway.

  Seven of them met at the service station in Hatton Vale. Seven of them, plus the ambulance. Three of them from Logan CPIU, one from Roma St CIB, two uniforms from Laidley, and another uniform from Marburg. Seven of them to go in and arrest Leon Harrison and Ethan Gray. Nine, once they met with the constables from Toowoomba who were still skulking in the bush outside the property.

  Those were good odds for arrests, John thought, but he didn’t know if they were good odds for Caleb. He didn’t know if Caleb was even still alive.

  Liz ran everyone through it quickly, passing around John’s phone with the picture of the mud map on it. And then they vested up and drove in, a rapid convoy of flashing lights with a dust plume rising into the sky behind them.

  Ethan Gray bolted like a rabbit when he saw the cars hurtling toward him, darting away from the buildings and across a scrubby field. Raj’s partner from Toowoomba went after him, and so did Aaron, who put on a burst of speed at the last second to bring him crashing down a couple of hundred metres from the old house.

  So that training of his really was paying off.

 
John barely saw any of that, because Leon Harrison had a firearm. An old rusted piece of shit rifle by the look of it. He pulled it out of the back of the van, yelling and screaming, and fired a shot toward them.

  Liz and John hunkered down behind their vehicle.

  Beside them, the coppers from Laidley drove off in a burst of dust, doing a wide arc as they cut toward the house. It was enough to divide Harrison’s attention. Enough for Lockland to get a shot off. If he shot first and then yelled at Harrison to put his rifle down, John wasn’t going to remember it that way, and he doubted anyone else would either.

  Harrison wasn’t hit, but he was rattled. He returned a few pot shots from the cover of his van, and then made a sudden retreat for the house. And nobody here wanted this to turn into a siege, because the Laidley coppers were seconds behind him as he crashed through the front door, and they weren’t the only ones.

  They had him on the floor by the time John got to them, knees in his back and his face mashed into the grimy old carpet. John hardly spared them a glance as he swept through the house, his heart pounding with more than the sudden rush of adrenaline from being shot at.

  “Caleb?” he yelled. “Caleb!”

  Rooms empty of nothing but mouldering furniture and dust.

  No.

  He had to be here.

  He had to.

  Because John wasn’t ready to face the alternative yet, even though he knew that moment might be creeping closer and closer. That moment when John’s universe collapsed in on itself, and pulled him into a black hole he’d never be able to climb out of again. Not alone. Not without Caleb at his side.

  What had he told Caleb? That love wasn’t a cure, or an answer, or the part that came at the end of the story. He’d told him that love was a promise. He’d told him that he wouldn’t ever have to be alone when the rain came.

  A promise, and he’d broken it.

  What if today had been the end of Caleb’s story? What if Caleb’s story had ended with John’s broken promise? And what if John had nothing ahead of him now but empty pages?