The Empty Chair (45 page)

Two bullets snapped through the wood of the cellar door and disappeared through the ceiling.

But there were no more shots. Rhyme thought Culbeau would have fired more than twice.

But then he also thought the screams from the basement would last longer than they did.

• • •

Harris Tomel knew it was time to get the hell out, back to Tanner's Corner.

O'Sarian was dead – okay, no loss there – and Culbeau had gone down to the cabin to take care of the rest of them. So it was Tomel's job to find Lucy. But he didn't mind. He was still stung with shame that he'd clenched when he'd faced down Trey Williams and it had been that psycho little shit O'Sarian who'd saved his life.

Well, he wasn't going to freeze again.

Then, beside a tree some distance away, he saw a flash of tan. He looked. Yeah, there – through the crook of a tree – he could just make out Lucy Kerr's tan uniform blouse.

Holding the two-thousand-dollar shotgun, he moved a little closer. It wasn't a great shot – there wasn't much target presenting. Just part of her chest, visible through the crook of the tree. A hard shot with a rifle. But doable with the shotgun. He set the choke on the end of the muzzle so that the pellets would scatter wider and he'd have a better chance of hitting her.

He stood fast, dropped the bead sight right on the front of her blouse and squeezed the trigger.

A huge kick. Then he squinted to see if he'd hit his target.

Oh, Christ . . . Not again! The blouse was floating in the air – launched by the impact of the pellets. She'd hung it on the tree to lure him into giving away his position.

"Hold it right there, Harris," Lucy's voice called, behind him. "It's over with."

"That was good," he said. "You fooled me." He turned to face her, holding the Browning at waist level, hidden in the grass, the shotgun pointed in her direction. She was in a white T-shirt.

"Drop your gun," she ordered.

"I did already," he said.

He didn't move.

"Let me see your hands. In the air. Now, Harris. Last warning."

"Look, Lucy . . ."

The grass was four feet high. He'd drop down, fire to take out her knees. Then finish her off from close range. It'd be a risk, though. She could still get off a shot or two.

Then he noticed something: a look in her eyes. A look of uncertainty. And it seemed to him that she held her gun too threateningly.

She was bluffing.

"You're out of ammo," Tomel said, smiling.

There was a pause and the expression on her face confirmed it. He lifted the shotgun with both hands and aimed it at her. She gazed back hopelessly.

"But
I'm
not," came a voice nearby. The redhead! He looked her over, and his instinct told him:
She's a woman. She'll hesitate. I can get her first.
He swung toward her.

The pistol in her hands bucked and the last thing Tomel felt was an itchy tap on the side of his head.

• • •

Lucy Kerr saw Mary Beth stagger onto the porch and call out that Culbeau was dead and that Rhyme and Garrett were all right.

Amelia Sachs nodded then walked toward Sean O'Sarian's body. Lucy turned her own attention to Harris Tomel's. She bent down and closed her shaking hands around the Browning shotgun. She thought that while she should be horrified to be prying this elegant weapon from a dead man's hands, in fact all she thought about was the gun itself. She wondered if it was still loaded.

She answered that question by racking the gun – losing one shell, but making sure that another was chambered.

Fifty feet away Sachs was bending down over O'Sarian's body as she searched it, keeping her pistol pointed at the corpse. Lucy wondered why she was bothering then decided, wryly, that it must be standard procedure.

She found her blouse and put it back on. It was torn apart by the shotgun pellets but she was self-conscious about her body in the tight T-shirt. Lucy stood by the tree, breathing heavily in the heat and watching Sachs' back.

Simple fury – at the betrayals in her life. The betrayal by her body, by her husband, by God.

And now by Amelia Sachs.

She glanced behind her, where Harris Tomel lay. It was a straight line of sight from where he'd been standing to Amelia's back. The scenario was plausible: Tomel had been hiding in the grass. He rose, shot Sachs in the back with his shotgun. Lucy then grabbed Sachs' gun and killed Tomel. Nobody'd know different – except Lucy herself and, maybe, Jesse Corn's spirit.

Lucy lifted the shotgun, which felt weightless as a larkspur blossom in her hands. Pressing the smooth, fragrant stock against her cheek, reminding her of the way she'd pressed her face against the chrome guard of the hospital bed after her mastectomy. She sighted down the smooth barrel at the woman's black T-shirt, resting the sight on the woman's spine. She'd die painlessly. And fast.

As fast as Jesse Corn had died.

This was simply trading a guilty life for an innocent one.

Dear Lord, give me one clear shot at my Judas . . .

Lucy looked around. No witnesses.

Her finger curled around the trigger, tightened.

Squinted, held the brass dot of the bead sight rock-steady thanks to arms strengthened by years of gardening, years of managing a house – and a life – on her own. Aiming at the exact center of Amelia Sachs' back.

The hot breeze whistled through the grass around her. She thought about Buddy, about her surgeon, about her house and her garden.

Lucy lowered the gun.

She racked the weapon until it was empty and, padded butt resting on her hip, muzzle skyward, she carried it back to the van in front of the cabin. She set it on the ground and found her cell phone then called the state police.

• • •

The medevac chopper was the first to arrive and the medics quickly bundled Thom up and flew him off to the medical center. One stayed to look after Lincoln Rhyme, whose blood pressure was edging critical.

When the troopers themselves showed up in a second helicopter a few minutes later it was Amelia Sachs they arrested first and left hog-tied, hands behind her, lying in the hot dirt outside the cabin, while they went inside to arrest Garrett Hanlon and read him his rights.

39

Thom would survive. The doctor in the Emergency Medicine Department of the University Medical Center in Avery had said laconically, "The bullet? It came and went. Missed the important stuff." Though the aide would be off duty for a month or two.

Ben Kerr had volunteered to cut class and stay around Tanner's Corner for a few days to assist Rhyme. The big man had grumbled, "You don't really deserve my help, Lincoln. I mean, hell, you never even pick up after yourself."

Still not quite comfortable with crip jokes he glanced quickly at Rhyme to see if this type of banter was within the rules. The criminalist's sour grimace was a reverse affirmation that it was. But Rhyme added that, as much as he appreciated the offer, the care and feeding of a quad is a full-time, and tricky, job. Largely thankless too – if the patient is Lincoln Rhyme. And so Dr. Cheryl Weaver was arranging for a professional caregiver from the medical center to help Rhyme.

"But hang around, Ben," he said. "I still might need you. Most aides don't last more than a few days."

The case against Amelia Sachs was bad. Ballistics tests had proved that the bullet that killed Jesse Corn had come from her gun and, though Ned Spoto was dead, Lucy Kerr had given a statement describing what Ned had told her about the incident. Bryan McGuire had already announced that he was going for the death penalty. Good-natured Jesse Corn had been a popular figure around town and, since he'd died trying to arrest the Insect Boy, there was considerable outcry for making this a capital case.

Jim Bell and the state police had looked into why Culbeau and his friends would attack Rhyme and the deputies. An investigator from Raleigh had found tens of thousands of dollars in cash hidden in their houses. "More than moonshine money," the detective had said. Then echoed Mary Beth's thought: "That cabin must've been near a marijuana farm – those three were probably working it with the men who attacked Mary Beth. Garrett must've stumbled on their operation."

Now, a day after the terrible events at the 'shiners' cabin, Rhyme sat in the Storm Arrow – drivable despite the stigmata of a bullet hole – in the improvised lab, waiting for the new aide to arrive. Morose, he was brooding about Sachs' fate when a shadow appeared in the doorway.

He looked up and saw Mary Beth McConnell. She stepped into the room. "Mr. Rhyme."

He noted how pretty she was, what confident eyes she had, what a ready smile. He understood how Garrett could have become ensnared by her. "How's your head?" Nodding at the bandage on her temple.

"I'll have a pretty spectacular scar. Won't be wearing my hair pulled back too much, I don't think. But no serious damage."

Like everyone else, Rhyme had been relieved to learn that Garrett hadn't in fact raped Mary Beth. He'd been telling the truth about the bloody tissue: Garrett had startled her in the root cellar of the cabin and she'd stood quickly, hitting her head on a low beam. He'd been visibly aroused, true, but that was due only to a sixteen-year-old's hormones, and Garrett hadn't touched her other than to carry her carefully upstairs, clean the wound and bandage it. He'd apologized profusely that she'd been hurt.

The girl now said to Rhyme, "I just wanted to say thank you. I don't know what I would've done if it hadn't been for you. I'm sorry about your friend, that policewoman. But if it wasn't for her I'd be dead now. I'm sure of it. Those men were going to . . . well, you can figure that out. Thank her for me."

"I will," Rhyme told her. "Would you mind answering something?"

"What?"

"I know you gave a statement to Jim Bell but I only know what happened at Blackwater Landing from the evidence. And some of that wasn't clear. Could you tell me?"

"Sure . . . I was down by the river, dusting off some of the relics I'd found, and I looked up and there was Garrett. I was upset. I didn't want to be bothered. Whenever he saw me he just came right up and started talking like we were best friends."

"That morning he was agitated. He was saying things like 'You shouldn't've come here by yourself, it's dangerous, people die in Blackwater Landing.' That sort of thing. He was freaking me out. I told him to leave me alone. I had work to do. He grabbed my hand and tried to make me leave. Then Billy Stail comes out of the woods and he goes, 'You son of a bitch,' or something, and he starts to hit Garrett with a shovel but he got it away from Billy and killed
him.
Then he grabbed me again and made me get into this boat and brought me to the cabin."

"How long had Garrett been stalking you?"

Mary Beth laughed. "Stalking? No, no. You've been talking to my mother, I'll bet. I was downtown about six months ago and some of the kids from his school were picking on him. I scared them off. That made me his girlfriend, I guess. He followed me around a lot but that was all. Admired me from afar, that sort of thing. I was sure he was harmless." Her smile faded. "Until the other day." Mary Beth glanced at her watch. "I should go. But I wanted to ask you – the other reason I came by – if you don't need them anymore for evidence would it be okay if I took the rest of the bones?"

Rhyme, whose eyes were now gazing out his window as thoughts of Amelia Sachs slipped back into his mind, turned slowly to Mary Beth.

"What bones?" he asked.

"At Blackwater Landing? Where Garrett kidnapped me?"

Rhyme shook his head. "What do you mean?"

Mary Beth's face furrowed with concern. "The bones – those were the relics I found. I was digging up the rest of them when Garrett kidnapped me. They're very important . . . You don't mean they're missing?"

"Nobody recovered any bones at the crime scene," Rhyme said. "They weren't in the evidence report."

She shook her head. "No, no . . . They
can't
be gone!"

"What kind of bones?"

"I found the remains of some of the Lost Colonists of Roanoke. From the late fifteen hundreds."

Rhyme's knowledge of history was pretty much limited to New York City. "I'm not too familiar with that."

Though when she explained about the settlers on Roanoke Island and their disappearance he nodded. "I do remember something from school. Why do you think it was their remains?"

"The bones were really old and decayed and they weren't in an Algonquin burial site or a colonial graveyard. They were just dumped in the ground without any markings. That was typical of what the warriors did with the bodies of their enemies. Here . . ." She opened her backpack. "I'd already packed up a few of them before Garrett took me off." She lifted several of them out, wrapped in Saran Wrap, blackened and decomposed. Rhyme recognized a radius, a portion of a scapula, a hipbone and several inches of femur.

"There were a dozen more," she said. "This is one of the biggest finds in U.S. archaeological history. They're very valuable. I
have
to find them."

Rhyme stared at the radius – one of the two forearm bones. After a moment he looked up.

"Could you go up the hallway there to the Sheriff's Department? Ask for Lucy Kerr and have her come down here for a minute."

"Is this about the bones?" she asked.

"It might be."

• • •

It had been an expression of Amelia Sachs' father's: "When you move they can't getcha."

The expression meant many things. But most of all it was a statement of their shared philosophy, father and daughter. Both of them were admirers of fast cars, lovers of police work on the street, fearful of closed spaces and lives that were going nowhere.

But now they
had
got her.

Got her for good.

And her precious cars, her precious life as a policewoman, her life with Lincoln Rhyme, her future with children . . . all that was destroyed.

• • •

Sachs, in her cell in the lockup, had been ostracized. The deputies who brought her food and coffee said nothing to her, just stared coldly. Rhyme was having a lawyer flown down from New York but, like most police officers, Sachs knew as much about criminal law as most attorneys. She knew that, whatever horse-trading went on between the hired gun from Manhattan and the Paquenoke County D.A., her life as she'd lived it was over with. Her heart was as numb as Lincoln Rhyme's body.