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Back Reunion Save as PDF
Chapters (62)
  1. Cover
  2. Full Page Image
  3. Introduction
  4. Advance Praise for Reunion
  5. Dedication
  6. Map
  7. Quote
  8. Prologue
  9. All About Eric Weiss
  10. The Young Magician
  11. From the Wikipedia entry for Middleton:
  12. Where They Used to Live
  13. All About Carrie Keene
  14. The Girl Detective
  15. All About Alana Bright
  16. The Warrior Princess
  17. All About Daniel Sharp IV
  18. The Boy Genius
  19. I’ve Done My Part
  20. The Only Warrior Left
  21. The World Beneath the World
  22. Even Less Fun Now
  23. The Flawless Performance of Innumerable Lines of Code
  24. Like Time-Lapse Photography
  25. You Don’t Have to Go Home but You Can’t Stay Here
  26. This is Where She Gets It
  27. I Never Believed in Prophecies
  28. Normal People Stumble Along
  29. INTERLUDE: The Case of the Candy Cult
  30. That’s How Her Story Ought to Go
  31. Normal Is Whatever You Grow Up With
  32. Even Good Kids Have Their Limits
  33. INTERLUDE: The Menace of the Middleton Monster
  34. Alanis Morissette Irony or the Other Kind
  35. What You Want Is Not the Most Important Thing
  36. INTERLUDE: Trapped in the Goblin’s Lair
  37. The Slowest Person in the Room
  38. INTERLUDE: The Final Secret of Dr. Sax
  39. All Part of King Jeremy’s Land
  40. INTERLUDE: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
  41. You Breathed It In, All the Time
  42. INTERLUDE: What Happened
  43. Danny Sharp Doesn’t Believe in Ghosts
  44. Ice and Bottles of Zima
  45. You Were Right All Along
  46. A Lot of Sacrificing to Do Tonight
  47. You Walked Right into It
  48. How Magic Works
  49. Was This Your Master Plan
  50. This Time, I Swear, We Can Do It Right
  51. You’d Think He Would Know Better
  52. Fresh Blood on Its Hands
  53. Any One of a Thousand Different Men
  54. The End of the World over There
  55. These Are Not Ideal Conditions
  56. Lightning and Thunder, Demons and Angels
  57. Into the Jaws of the Dragon
  58. Unafraid at Sunset
  59. Epilogue
  60. Acknowledgments
  61. About the Author
  62. Other Works by Christopher Farnsworth

Clarice Starling.

6. What do you want to do when you grow up?

I am going to be a policeman woman officer like my dad.

3

The Girl Detective

Carrie Keene looks at the corpse in the closet. She’s seen worse, even before she was an FBI agent. She worked VICAP when she started, which meant digging through the autopsy reports and crime-scene photos of hundreds of victims.

But this is still pretty bad.

Lori Blanchard is on her knees. She didn’t have any rope, so she used the cord from her vacuum cleaner. One end is wrapped around a broken hanger bar and the other end is embedded deep in her neck. The rubber coating on the cord must have been frayed, because when Lori dropped off the stool and her weight hit, the wires cut into her throat instead of strangling her.

Like a blade, the cord sliced through her windpipe, her carotid arteries, and her jugular veins, practically halfway through her neck. Then the closet hanger bar broke too, and she went down.

Lori’s eyes are open. She looks surprised. She must have been shocked when she hit the floor and realized she was bleeding to death. There is blood all over: the doorframe, the walls, the carpet. There are handprints where it looks like Lori tried to crawl, as if she was having second thoughts.

A lot of suicides do. Usually when it’s too late.

Keith Kohler, another agent on the team, stands behind her in the condo’s bedroom. The apartment is sweltering. The door is open as cops move in and out, the A/C losing the battle against the sticky August heat.

“Son of a bitch,” he says.

“Yeah.” She waits. “Did you want something?”

He stops looking at the body. “Right. We found a note on the desk. She says it was all her fault. Takes the blame for everything. Said she hopes that Gannon can forgive her.”

Carrie closes her eyes, suddenly very tired. “Of course she did.”

Keith looks around the room. “You think she was forced?”

Carrie shrugs. “No idea.”

Keith walks away as the crime-scene techs move behind them.

Carrie is about to do the same, but something catches her eye. She takes another close look at the carpet.

There, in the blood, near Lori’s hand, is a symbol. To someone else, it might look like a random mark that Lori Blanchard made as she scrabbled in the carpet, writhing in pain.

But Carrie knows better.

Viewed one way, it is a circle with a slash through it. But viewed from Carrie’s perspective, it’s a warning. She has not seen this symbol for twenty years.