The Empty Chair (52 page)

He wanted to tell the woman to be quiet and just get on with it yet he supposed that you should be extremely civil to the people who're about to slice your neck open.

"Really?" he said when she paused. "That's interesting." Not having a clue what she'd just told him.

Then an orderly arrived and wheeled him from pre-op into the operating room itself.

Two nurses made the transfer from the gurney to the operating table. One went to the far end of the room and began removing instruments from the autoclave.

The operating room was more informal than he'd thought. The clichéd green tile, stainless-steel equipment, instruments, tubes. But also lots of cardboard boxes. And a boom box. He was going to ask what kind of music they'd be listening to but then he remembered he'd be out cold and wouldn't care about the sound track.

"It's pretty funny," he muttered drunkenly to a nurse who was standing next to him. She turned. He could see only her eyes over the face mask.

"What's that?" she asked.

"They're operating on the one place where I need anesthetic. If I had my appendix out they could cut without gas."

"That's pretty funny, Mr. Rhyme."

He laughed briefly, thinking:
So, she knows me.

He stared at the ceiling, in a hazy, reflective mood.

Lincoln Rhyme divided people into two categories: traveling people and arrival people. Some enjoyed the journey more than the destination. He, by his nature, was an arrival person – finding the answers to forensic questions was his goal and he enjoyed getting the solutions more than the process of seeking them. Yet now, lying on his back, staring into the chromium hood of the surgical lamp, he felt just the opposite. He preferred to exist in this state of hope – enjoying the buoyant sensation of anticipation.

The anesthesiologist, an Indian woman, came in and ran a needle into his arm, prepared an injection, fitted it into the tube connected to the needle. She had very skillful hands.

"You ready to take a nap?" she asked with a faint, lilting accent.

"As I'll ever be," he mumbled.

"When I inject this I'm going to ask you to count down from one hundred. You'll be out before you know it."

"What's the record?" Rhyme joked.

"Counting down? One man, he was much bigger than you, got to seventy-nine before he went under."

"I'll go for seventy-five."

"You'll get this operating suite named after you if you do that," she replied, deadpan.

He watched her slip a tube of clear liquid into the IV. She turned away to look at a monitor. Rhyme began counting. "One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven . . ."

The other nurse, the one who'd mentioned him by name, crouched down. In a low voice she said, "Hi, there."

An odd tone in the voice.

He glanced at her.

She continued, "I'm Lydia Johansson. Remember me?" Before he could say of course he did, she added in a dark whisper, "Jim Bell asked me to say good-bye."

"No!" he muttered.

The anesthesiologist, eyes on a monitor, said, "It' s okay. Just relax. Everything's fine."

Her mouth inches from his ear, Lydia whispered, "Didn't you wonder how Jim and Steve Farr found out about the cancer patients?"

"No! Stop!"

"I gave Jim their names so Culbeau could make sure they had accidents. Jim Bell's my boyfriend. We've been having an affair for years. He's the one sent me to Blackwater Landing after Mary Beth'd been kidnapped. That morning I went to put flowers down and just hang out in case Garrett showed up. I was going to talk to him and give Jesse and Ed Schaeffer a chance to get him – Ed was with us too. Then they were going to force him to tell us where Mary Beth was. But nobody thought he'd kidnap
me
."

Oh, yeah, this town's got itself a few hornets . . .

"Stop!" Rhyme cried. But his voice came out as a mumble.

The anesthesiologist said, "Been fifteen seconds. Maybe you're going to break that record after all. Are you counting? I don't hear you counting."

"I'll be right here," Lydia said, stroking Rhyme's forehead. "A lot can go wrong during surgery, you know. Kinks in the oxygen tube, administering the wrong drugs. Who knows? Might kill you, might put you in a coma. But you sure aren't going to be doing any testifying."

"Wait," Rhyme gasped, "wait!"

"Ha," the anesthesiologist said, laughing, her eyes still on the monitor. "Twenty seconds. I think you're going to win, Mr. Rhyme."

"No, I don't think you are," Lydia whispered and slowly stood as Rhyme saw the operating room go gray and then black.

46

This really
was
one of the prettiest places in the world, Amelia Sachs thought.

For a cemetery.

Tanner's Corner Memorial Gardens, on a crest of a rolling hill, overlooked the Paquenoke River, some miles away. It was even nicer here, in the graveyard itself, than viewed from the road where she'd first seen it on the drive from Avery.

Squinting against the sun, she noticed the glistening strip of Blackwater Canal joining the river. From here, even the dark, tainted water, which had brought so much sorrow to so many, looked benign and picturesque.

She was in a small cluster of people standing over an open grave. A crematory urn was being lowered by one of the men from the mortuary. Amelia Sachs was next to Lucy Kerr. Garrett Hanlon stood by them. On the other side of the grave were Mason Germain and Thom, with a cane, dressed in his immaculate slacks and shirt. He wore a bold tie with a wild red pattern, which seemed appropriate despite this somber moment.

Black-suited Fred Dellray was here too, standing by himself, off to the side, thoughtful – as if recalling a passage in one of the philosophy books he enjoyed reading. He would have resembled a Nation of Islam reverend if he'd been wearing a white shirt instead of the lime-green one with yellow polka dots on it.

There was no minister to officiate, even though this was Bible-waving country and there'd probably be a dozen clerics on call for funerals. The mortuary director now glanced at the people assembled and asked if anybody wanted to say something to the assembly. And as everyone looked around, wondering if there'd be any volunteers, Garrett dug into his baggy slacks and produced his battered book,
The Miniature World
.

In a halting voice the boy read, "'There are those who suggest that a divine force doesn't exist, but one's cynicism is truly put to the test when we look at the world of insects, which have been graced with so many amazing characteristics: wings so thin they seem hardly to be made of any living material, bodies without a single milligram of excess weight, wind-speed detectors accurate to a fraction of a mile per hour, a stride so efficient that mechanical engineers model robots after it, and, most important, insects' astonishing ability to survive in the face of overwhelming opposition by man, predators and the elements. In moments of despair, we can look to the ingenuity and persistence of these miraculous creatures and find solace and a restoration of lost faith.'"

Garrett looked up, closed the book. Clicked his fingernails nervously. He looked at Sachs and asked, "Do you, like, want to say anything?"

But she merely shook her head.

No one else spoke and after a few minutes everyone around the grave turned away and meandered back up the hill along a winding path. Before they crested the ridge that led to a small picnic area the cemetery crews had already begun filling in the grave with a backhoe. Sachs was breathing hard as they walked to the crest of the tree-covered hill near the parking lot.

She recalled Lincoln Rhyme's voice:
That's not a bad cemetery. Wouldn't mind being buried in a place like that . . .

She paused to wipe the sweat from her face and catch her breath; the North Carolina heat was still relentless. Garrett, though, didn't seem to notice the temperature. He ran past her and began pulling grocery bags from the back of Lucy's Bronco.

This wasn't exactly the time or place for a picnic but, Sachs supposed, chicken salad and watermelon were as good a way as any to remember the dead.

Scotch too, of course. Sachs dug through several shopping bags and finally found the bottle of Macallan, eighteen years old. She pulled the cork stopper out with a faint pop.

"Ah, my favorite sound," Lincoln Rhyme said.

He was wheeling up beside her, driving carefully along the uneven grass. The hill down to the grave was too steep for the Storm Arrow and he'd had to wait up here in the lot. He'd watched from the hilltop as they buried the ashes of the bones that Mary Beth had found at Blackwater Landing – the remains of Garrett's family.

Sachs poured scotch into Rhyme's glass, equipped with a long straw, and some into hers. Everyone else was drinking beer.

He said, "Moonshine is truly vile, Sachs. Avoid it at all costs. This is much better."

Sachs looked around. "Where's the woman from the hospital? The caregiver?"

"Mrs. Ruiz?" Rhyme muttered. "Hopeless. She quit. Left me in the lurch."

"Quit?" Thom said. "You drove her nuts. You might as well have fired her."

"I was a saint," the criminalist snapped.

"How's your temperature?" Thom asked him.

"It's fine," he grumbled. "How's
yours?
"

"Probably a little high but I don't have a blood pressure problem."

"No, you've a bullet hole in you."

The aide persisted, "You should –"

"I said I'm fine."

"– move into the shade a little farther."

Rhyme groused and complained about the unsteady ground but he finally maneuvered himself into the shade a little farther.

Garrett was carefully setting out food and drink and napkins on a bench under the tree.

"How're you doing?" Sachs asked Rhyme in a whisper."And before you grumble at me too – I'm not talking about the heat."

He shrugged – this, a
silent
grumble by which he meant:
I'm fine.

But he wasn't fine. A phrenic-nerve stimulator pumped current into his body to help his lungs inhale and exhale. He hated the device – had weaned himself off it some years ago – but there was no question that he needed it now. Two days ago, on the operating table, Lydia Johansson had come very close to stopping his breathing forever.

In the waiting room at the hospital, after Lydia had said good-bye to Sachs and Lucy, Sachs had noticed that the nurse vanished through the doorway marked NEUROSURGERY. Sachs had asked, "Didn't you say that she works in oncology?"

"She does."

"Then what's she doing going in there?"

"Maybe saying hello to Lincoln," Lucy suggested.

But Sachs didn't think that nurses paid social calls to patients about to be operated on.

Then she thought: Lydia would know about new cancer diagnoses among residents from Tanner's Corner. She then recalled that somebody had given information to Bell about cancer patients – the three people in Blackwater Landing that Culbeau and his friends had killed. Who better than a nurse on the onco ward? This was far-fetched but Sachs mentioned it to Lucy, who pulled out her cell phone and made an emergency call to the phone company, whose security department did a down-and-dirty pen-register search of Jim Bell's phone calls. There were hundreds to and from Lydia.

"She's going to kill him!" Sachs had cried. And the two women, one with a weapon drawn, had burst into the operating room – a scene right out of a melodramatic episode of
ER
– just as Dr. Weaver was about to make the opening incision.

Lydia had panicked and, trying to escape, or trying to do what Bell had sent her for, ripped the oxygen tube from Rhyme's throat before the two women subdued her. From that trauma and because of the anesthetic Rhyme's lungs had failed. Dr. Weaver had revived him but, afterward, his breathing hadn't been up to par and he'd had to go back on the stimulator.

Which was bad enough. But worse, to Rhyme's anger and disgust, Dr. Weaver refused to perform the operation for at least another six months – until his breathing functions were completely normalized. He'd tried to insist but the surgeon proved to be as mulish as he was.

Sachs sipped more scotch.

"You told Roland Bell about his cousin?" Rhyme asked.

She nodded. "He took it hard. Said Jim was the black sheep but never guessed he'd do anything like this. He's pretty shaken up by the news." She looked northeast. "Look," she said, "out there. Know what that is?"

Trying to follow her eyes, Rhyme asked, "What're you looking at? The horizon? A cloud? An airplane? Enlighten me, Sachs."

"The Great Dismal Swamp. That's where Lake Drummond is."

"Fascinating," he said sarcastically.

"It's full of ghosts," she added, like a tour guide.

Lucy came up and poured some scotch into a paper cup. Sipped it. Then made a face. "It's awful. Tastes like soap." She opened a Heineken.

Rhyme said, "It costs eighty dollars a bottle."

"Expensive soap, then."

Sachs watched Garrett as he shoveled corn chips into his mouth then ran into the grass. She asked Lucy, "Any word from the county?"

"On being his foster mom?" Lucy asked. Then shook her head. "Got rejected. The being single part isn't an issue. They have a problem with my job. Cop. Long hours."

"What do
they
know?" Rhyme scowled.

"Doesn't matter what they know," she said. "What they
do
is the thing that's important. Garrett's being set up with a family up in Hobeth. Good people. I checked them out pretty good."

Sachs didn't doubt that she had.

"But we're going on a hike next weekend."

Nearby Garrett eased through the grass, stalking a specimen.

When Sachs turned back she saw Rhyme had been watching her as she gazed at the boy.

"What?" she asked, frowning at his coy expression.

"If you were going to say something to an empty chair, Sachs, what would it be?"

She hesitated for a moment. "I think I'll keep that to myself for the time being, Rhyme."

Suddenly Garrett gave a loud laugh and started running through the grass. He was chasing an insect, which was oblivious to its pursuer, through the dusty air. The boy caught up with it and, with outstretched arms, made a grab for his prey then tumbled to the ground. A moment later he was up, staring into his cupped hands and walking slowly back to the picnic benches.