Not that she will ever forget it. She would remember it clearly even if she were normal, but she’s not. Carrie never forgets anything. It’s her gift. She hasn’t forgotten anything since her first memory. (She was on the kitchen floor in the house where they lived before her father became chief of police, watching her mother, still a resident in surgical scrubs, putting groceries into the ugly avocado refrigerator. She said, “Mama,” and her mother picked her up and whirled her around, a huge smile on her face, and said, “Carrie! You said your first word!”) Everything she’s ever experienced, everything she’s ever learned, everything she’s ever seen, it’s all trapped in her head in a tangled pile, accessible with a little effort and concentration.

The symbol is a variant on an old hobo sign that means “Good Road to Follow.” It took her weeks of research to find it when she was a kid, using old books and the reference section in the back stacks of the Middleton Public Library. Now, of course, she could look it up in an instant on Google.

It’s the sign of the Followers.

It’s not possible, she thinks. We stopped them. We won.

But the symbol is there, drawn in blood.

Carrie takes out her phone and quickly snaps a picture. At the moment, she has no time to figure out what it means.

Carrie has to get back to the courthouse and tell everyone their case is dead in a closet.

It took months of patient work to get Lori Blanchard to testify against her boss, Governor Jeff Gannon.

Carrie and a half-dozen other FBI agents were brought in to investigate Gannon because local law enforcement is hopelessly compromised. Everyone from the county sheriff to the state attorney general owes the governor. He funnels cash to their campaigns, does favors for them, goes hunting and fishing with them, attends their kids’ birthday parties, provides drugs and hookers when they go to Vegas together.

It was that last one, along with seventeen other counts of bribery, perjury, witness intimidation, money laundering, conspiracy, and racketeering that finally brought the governor to court.

There were some politicians who, looking at mandatory minimums of 70 years in prison, might step down from office. Or cut a deal. Or at least make a public show of contrition.

Not Gannon. The whole thing was a witch hunt, he said. The feds were out to get him because he was fighting so hard for the good people of Arkansas. It was all a frame-up.

Carrie was the one who uncovered the key to the entire case: an LLC that served as the original shell company for every one of Gannon’s illegal transactions. The governor was smart enough to have someone else sign all the paperwork. That someone turned out to be Lori, his loyal administrative assistant and, unsurprisingly, part-time girlfriend.