Kids were grabby. She knew that from her last case, where she played Kate Towning, daycare-center worker. Peeling Gabriel off her body, his tiny, warm arms and legs locked around her torso, had reminded her of those flustered parents she’d greeted at the door every morning whose kid had decided that any alternative to being snuggled on the couch at home watching Paw Patrol in their pajamas was a fate worse than death. Only this child wasn’t braving the hellish no-man’s-land between the feet of his parents and the warm embrace of Andy in her former mask. He was being sat on the couch in Jake’s mother’s bare, dusty home, where he’d been held captive for weeks, returned to the terrifying loneliness that Jake had made him accustomed to, because Andy could see neighbors braving the porch and the bodies there, peering in the front windows, trying to see inside. She didn’t want to leave the sobbing boy. But she couldn’t be taken into custody now, questioned for hours about who shot whom on the porch, and why, and who the hell she even was to either of the men who had died. After kissing him hard on the forehead, and whispering loving and gentle lies, Andy retreated from the boy, out the back door of the little house, and into the yard. While she rinsed her hands under a garden tap, the raccoon she’d spotted earlier ambled around the next property, gunshots and screams and sirens meaning nothing to the beast on the prowl.