She moved to go around him, but Wade blocked her path. He stepped forward, scowling. Angry. Almost boiling over.

“You know,” he said, his jaw and fists clenched, “you always ruin everything.”

She didn’t get it. Was he really upset that he wasn’t going to be kidnapped and tortured?

He took another step, and looked as if he intended to hit her. Carrie assembled everything her father and every other cop had ever taught her about fighting. She was reasonably sure she could take him.

Then they heard the sirens. She and Wade both turned and saw the first Middleton squad cars come screaming down the off-ramp and into the parking lot. Better late than never.

Wade moved back. His anger seemed to vanish as quickly as it came. When he looked at her again, his usual smart-ass smirk was in place. “Thank God you’re here,” he said to Carrie. “You saved us.”

A moment later, the parking lot was swarming with cops. Carrie put the shotgun down and watched. She’d never seen the entire department mobilized like this before. Officers were wearing SWAT gear that had never been out of the box before. They used battering rams to break open doors and pulled everyone out of the locked motel rooms. Paramedics were checking the kids. Even Carl Stuckey was there, running around the scene, gun in hand, a look of triumph and panic on his face. “I heard the call, Chief,” he kept saying to Carrie’s dad. “I got here right away, I was covering the back, nobody got past me, I was on the case.” And so on. Babbling idiot.

Carrie saw her father. She pointed at the room at the end of the row. “That’s Goodson’s,” she shouted. Her dad nodded at her, gave a signal, and two cops wearing bulletproof vests broke open the door. Her father ran in before anyone else.

She took a few steps to get a better look. She could see inside the room at her angle, but she couldn’t see what was happening.

She couldn’t figure out why there was chocolate all over the walls. Big smears of it. Like someone had eaten a whole bunch of those stupid candy bars and wiped their hands on every surface. She could see the prints.

On one wall, she saw that same symbol, the one Goodson had tattooed on his wrist: the circle with a slash, drawn in chocolate.

Her father came running back out of the room.

He saw her looking, and sprinted over to her. He bellowed at his officers to secure the scene. Fred Larson ran to the door, took a look inside, and turned away and vomited.