The house is dark and cold and quiet. She takes a deep breath. Carrie mostly works with numbers and screens these days. But when she was a trainee, she did a lot of field interviews, and sometimes she would find bodies. There were people who knew the law was closing in on them and did not want to learn what prison was like. There were people who were simply forgotten and abandoned, and who were left alone until Carrie pulled up to the house.

So she knows the rotting-pumpkin smell of a corpse. Of all the things Carrie wishes her perfect memory would let her forget, that odor is somewhere in the top ten. Maybe the top five.

She takes another deep whiff as she takes another step inside the house.

Inside Hailey’s home, it smells like pizza. That’s all.

There’s a new iPhone in a flowered case on the entryway floor. She picks it up. The screen shows a dead battery. She pockets it.

Carrie walks through the living room. The TV is on, flashing through the Blu-Ray screensaver of Frozen. There are plates with crusts on a Pottery Barn coffee table. Otherwise, everything is in perfect order. Carrie expected more glitzy crap, to be honest. She’s surprised to learn that Hailey had taste.

She goes into the kitchen. An empty pizza box. A can of soda. An open bottle of white wine.

She looks out through the dining area, which has a sliding glass door that opens onto a deck and a huge backyard.

There are deep scratches in the glass, extending down in five parallel lines.

Shit.

Carrie takes her gun out of her holster and heads upstairs.

Her foot is on the first step when someone kicks open the front door again and rushes through, shouting, “FREEZE!”

Carrie quickly holsters her gun and puts her hands up, even though he’s looking in the wrong direction. The last thing she needs is for Carl Stuckey to shoot her by accident.

“Carl,” she says.

He turns to her, then stops cold and points his gun in the air. “Carrie?”

He wears a chief’s stripes now, and has gained a few more pounds, but otherwise he’s got the same blank look on his face as always.

Carl was a rookie when she was in high school, a speed-trap cop with delusions of competence who lifted weights and wore tailored uniforms. He seemed to think police work was primarily about finding the right moment to leap across the hood of a squad car. Her father didn’t want to take him, but Carl was the mayor’s nephew, and little compromises were what paid for the new fleet of police cruisers at budget time.