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Just children.
    A shout rose up from the crowd. Sandy and Mary turned toward the school doors just in time to see Walt and Emery come racing out with a stretcher.
    “Move, move, move,” Walt was shouting.
    The Cabot County officer yelled at people to clear the street. A car was in the way. No one seemed to know who owned it. The officer opened the door and popped the car into neutral. Two young men ran over to help push the vehicle out of the way. People cheered the small victory. Walt was already firing the ambulance to life.
    Then Sandy saw Chuckie Cunningham running across the parking lot with a towheaded little girl wrapped tight in his arms.
    Becky.
    Sandy leapt forward before Mary Johnson could stop her. She raced across the parking lot and opened her arms just as Becky saw her and cried, “Mommy!”
    And then her little girl was in her arms. Sandy was holding her close, inhaling the sweet scent of apple shampoo. She was squeezing her tight, tight, tight, and Becky was holding her neck so hard it hurt.
    “My baby, my baby, my baby.”
    “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.”
    “My baby.”
    She raised tear-filled eyes to Chuckie, who she now realized was half naked and streaked with blood.
    “Danny?” she asked hoarsely.
    “I don’t know, ma’am.”
    “Shep?”
    “I’m sorry.”
    Sandy sank to her knees. She had one child with her, one child safe. But it wasn’t enough. The foreboding was grabbing hold of her again. Something cold and dark flowed through her veins. She raised her head pleadingly to the sky.
    “Where is my son? Oh God,
where is Danny
?”
             
    ALONE IN THE SCHOOL, Rainie gripped her Glock .40 with moist palms. Her breath came in shallow gasps. She could feel her heart pounding unnaturally in her chest. She did her best to ignore the sensations as she walked to the far left side of the school—the end farthest from the bodies—and prepared to conduct a methodical search of classrooms she was already sure weren’t empty.
    She turned her mind to dim memories of lessons learned in police courses taken years ago. Some kind of acronym thing. ACCESS . . . AGILE . . . ADAPT. That was it. ADAPT.

    A
: Arrest the perpetrator, if still at the scene.
    (Was the perpetrator still at the scene? The reports of a man in black. All these closed doors.)
    D:
Detain and identify witnesses and suspects.
    (The herd of students who’d already raced out of the building. Bradley Brown, still fighting for his life. Witnesses maybe, but other people’s responsibilities now.)
    A:
Assess the crime scene.
    (The clean halls and untouched front office. The dented lockers farther in, the spent shells on the floor. Don’t overlook the obvious, that’s what they said in class. What was obvious in a school shooting? The dead on the floor?)
    P:
Protect the scene.
    (Rainie winced. The EMTs, the battered closet, the shells Cunningham had kicked across the floor. The parents who’d taken over the parking lot. The state Crime Scene Unit was going to arrive, and her career would be over.)
    T:
Take notes.
    (Rainie stared at her gun. She thought of the spiral notepad in her breast pocket. She wondered how she was supposed to hold that and the gun.)
             
    FORGET TAKING NOTES. She had to focus on step one, arresting the perpetrator if possible. God knew what it meant that she was doing things out of order. At least she was doing them and trying the best she could.
    Her mind moved forward. She was searching a particularly large and complex crime scene for a suspect. She had a vague recollection of a lecturer explaining how to work a grid at a large site. Start in, spiral out, slowly expanding the area searched. She couldn’t remember much more beyond the theory and decided she would have to approach this scene as a horizontal strip. She would work left to right. Quiet, calm, prepared.
    Rainie put her back to the wall, tucked her chin against her chest to make herself a smaller target, and led with her