The Empty Chair (14 page)

His eyes focused on:
Insect Books.

Then glanced at Ben. "So. You're a student, are you?"

"That's right, sir."

"Read a lot, I'll bet."

"How I spend most of my time – if I'm not in the field."

Rhyme was gazing at the spines of the books that Amelia had brought from Garrett's room. He mused, "What do a person's favorite books say about them? Other than the obvious – that they're interested in the subject of the books, I mean."

"How's that?"

"Well, if a person has mostly self-help books, that says one thing about them. If he's got mostly novels, that says something else. These books of Garrett's are all nonfiction guidebooks. What do you make of that?"

"I wouldn't know, sir." The big man glanced once at Rhyme's legs – involuntarily, it seemed – then he turned his attention to the evidence chart. He mumbled, "I can't really figure out people. Animals make a lot more sense to me. They're a lot more social, more predictable, more consistent than people. Hell of a lot more clever too." Then he realized he was rambling and, with a ruddy blush, stopped talking.

Rhyme glanced again at the books. "Thom, could you get me the turning frame?" Rigged to an ECU – an environmental-control unit – that Rhyme could manipulate with his one working finger, the device used a rubber armature to turn pages of books. "It's in the van, isn't it?"

"I think so."

"I hope you packed it. I
told
you to pack it."

"I said I
think
it is," the aide said evenly. "I'll go see if it's there." He left the room.

Hell of a lot more clever too . . .

Thom returned a moment later with the turning frame.

"Ben," Rhyme called. "That book on top?"

"There?" the big man asked, staring at the books. It was the
Field Guide to Insects of North Carolina
.

"Put it in the frame." He stepped on his urgency. "If you would be so kind."

The aide showed Ben how to mount the book then plugged a different set of wires into the ECU underneath Rhyme's left hand.

He read the first page, found nothing helpful. Then his mind ordered his ring finger to move. An impulse shot from the brain, spiraled down through a tiny surviving axon in his spinal cord, past a million of its dead kin, then streaked along Rhyme's arm and into his hand.

The finger flicked a fraction of an inch.

The armature's own finger slid sideways. The page turned.

11

They followed the path through the forest, surrounded by the oily scent of pine and the sweet fragrance from one of the plants they passed. Lucy Kerr recognized it as a chicken grape.

As she stared at the path in front of them, looking for trip wires, she was suddenly aware that they hadn't seen any of Garrett's or Lydia's footprints for a long time. She swatted what she thought was a bug on her neck but it turned out to be just a rivulet of sweat, tickling as it ran down her skin. Lucy felt dirty today. Other times – evenings and days off – she loved to be outside, in her garden. As soon as she got home from her tour at the Sheriff's Department she would pull on her faded plaid shorts and T-shirt and navy-blue running shoes that trailed stitching and would go to work in one of the three cuts of property surrounding her pale green colonial home that Bud had eagerly signed over to heroutright as part of the divorce, laid low by a fever of guilt. There Lucy tended her long-spurred violets, yellow lady slippers, fringed orchids and orange bell lilies. She scooped dirt, led plants up trellises, watered them and whispered encouragements as if she were speaking to the children she'd been so certain she and Buddy would one day have.

Sometimes, after an assignment took her into the Carolina hinterland, serving a warrant or inquiring why the Honda or Toyota hidden in someone's garage happened to be owned by someone else, Lucy would notice a fledgling plant and, the police work disposed of, would uproot it and take it home with her like a foundling. She'd adopted her Solomon's seal this way. A tuckahoe plant too. And a beautiful indigo bush, which had grown six feet tall under her care.

Her eyes now slipped to what she was presently passing on this anxious pursuit of theirs: an elderberry, a mountain holly, plume grass. They passed a nice evening primrose, then some cattails and wild rice – taller than any of the search party and with leaves sharp as knives. And here was a squaw root, a parasitic herb. Which Lucy Kerr also knew by another name: cancer root. She glanced at that one once then looked back to the trail.

The path led to a steep hill – a series of rocks about twenty feet high. Lucy scaled the incline easily but at the top she stopped. Thinking,
No, something's wrong here.

Beside her, Amelia Sachs climbed up to the plateau, paused. A moment later Jesse and Ned appeared. Jesse was breathing hard but Ned, a swimmer and outdoorsman, was taking the hike in stride.

"What is it?" Amelia asked Lucy, assessing the frown.

"This doesn't make any sense. For Garrett to come this way."

"We've been following the path, like Mr. Rhyme told us," Jesse said. "It's the only stretch of pine we've come across. Garrett's prints were leading this way."

"They
were
. But we haven't seen them for a while."

"Why don't you think he'd come this way?" Amelia asked.

"Look what's growing here." She pointed. "More and more swamp plants. And now we're on this rise we can see the ground better – look how marshy it's getting. Come on, think about it, Jesse. Where's this going to get Garrett? We're headed right for the Great Dismal."

"What's that?" Amelia asked her. "The Great Dismal?"

"A huge swamp, one of the biggest on the East Coast," Ned explained.

Lucy continued, "There's no cover there, no houses, no roads. The best he could do would be to slog his way into Virginia but that'd take days."

Ned Spoto added, "And this time of year, they don't
make
enough insect repellent to keep you from getting eaten alive. Not to mention snakes."

"Anyplace around here they could hide in? Caves? Houses?" Sachs looked around.

Ned said, "No caverns. Maybe a few old buildings. But what's happened is the water table's changed. The swamp's coming this way and a lot of the old houses and cabins're submerged. Lucy's right. If Garrett came this way he's heading for a dead end."

Lucy said, "I think we ought to turn around."

She thought that Amelia'd throw a hissy fit at this suggestion but the woman simply pulled out her cell phone and made a call. She said into the phone, "We're in the pine forest, Rhyme. There's a path but we can't find any sign that Garrett came along here. Lucy says it doesn't make any sense for him to come this way. She says it's mostly swamp northeast of here. There's no place for him to go."

Lucy said, "I'm thinking he'd head west. Or south, back across the river."

"That way he could get to Millerton," Jesse suggested.

Lucy nodded. "Couple of big factories around there closed when the companies took their business to Mexico. Banks foreclosed on a lot of property. There're dozens of abandoned houses he could hide in."

"Or
southeast
," Jesse suggested. "That's where
I'd
go – follow Route 112 or the rail line. There's a slew of old houses and barns that way too."

Amelia repeated this to Rhyme.

As Lucy Kerr thought:
What a strange man he is, so terribly afflicted and yet so supremely confident.

The policewoman from New York listened then hung up. "Lincoln says to keep going. The evidence doesn't suggest he went in those directions."

"Not like there aren't any pine trees to the west and south," Lucy snapped.

But the redhead was shaking her head. "That might be logical but it's not what the evidence shows. We keep going."

Ned and Jesse were looking from one woman to the other. Lucy glanced at Jesse's face and saw the ridiculous crush; she obviously wasn't going to get any support from him. She dug in. "No. I think we should go back, see if we can find where they turned off the path."

Amelia lowered her head, stared right into Lucy's eyes. "I'll tell you what . . . We can call Jim Bell if you want."

A reminder that Jim had declared that that damn Lincoln Rhyme was running the operation and that
he'd
put Amelia in charge of the search party. This was crazy – a man and woman who'd probably never been in the Tar Heel State before this, two people who knew nothing of the people or the geography of the area, telling lifelong residents how to do their job.

But Lucy Kerr knew that she'd signed on to do a job where, like the army, you followed the chain of command. "All right," she muttered angrily. "But for the record I'm against going that way. It doesn't make any sense." She turned and started along the path, leaving the others behind. Her footsteps growing silent suddenly as she walked over a thick blanket of pine needles that covered the path.

Amelia's phone rang and she slowed as she took the call. Lucy strode quickly ahead of her, over the thick bed of needles, trying to control her anger. There was no way Garrett Hanlon would come this way. It was a waste of time. They should have dogs. They should call Elizabeth City and get the state police choppers out. They should –

Then the world became a blur and she was tumbling forward, giving a short scream – her hands outstretched to catch her fall. "Jesus!"

Lucy fell hard onto the path, the breath knocked out of her, pine needles digging into her palms.

"Don't move," Amelia Sachs said, climbing to her feet after tackling the deputy.

"What the hell d'you do that for?" Lucy gasped, her hands stinging from the impact with the ground.

"Don't
move!
Ned and Jesse, you either."

Ned and Jesse froze, hands on their weapons, looking around, not sure what was going on.

Amelia, wincing as she stood, stepped cautiously off the pine needles and found a long stick in the woods, picked it up. She moved forward slowly, slipping the branch into the ground.

Two feet in front of Lucy, where she'd been about to step, the stick disappeared through a pile of pine boughs. "It's a trap."

"But there's no trip wire," Lucy said. "I was looking."

Carefully Amelia lifted away the boughs and the needles. They rested on a network of fishing line and covered a pit about two feet deep.

"The fish line wasn't a trip wire," Ned said. "It was to make that – a deadfall pit. Lucy, you nearly stepped right in it."

"And inside? There a bomb?" Jesse asked.

Amelia said to him, "Let me have your flashlight." He handed it to her. She shined the beam into the hole then backed up quickly.

"What is it?" Lucy asked.

"No bomb," Amelia responded. "Hornets' nest."

Ned looked. "Christ, what a bastard . . ."

Amelia carefully lifted off the rest of the boughs, exposing the hole and the nest, which was about the size of a football.

"Man," Ned muttered, closing his eyes, undoubtedly considering what it would have been like to find a hundred stinging wasps clustered around your thighs and waist.

Lucy rubbed her hands together – they smarted from the fall. She rose to her feet. "How'd you know?"

"I didn't. That was Lincoln on the phone. He was reading through Garrett's books. There was an underlined passage about some insect called an ant lion. It digs a pit and stings its enemy to death when it falls in. Garrett had circled it and the ink was just a few days old. Rhyme remembered the cut pine needles and the fishing line. He figured that the boy might dig a trap and told me to look for a bed of pine boughs on the path."

"Let's burn the nest out," Jesse said.

"No," Amelia said.

"But it's dangerous."

Lucy agreed with the policewoman. "A fire'd give away our position and Garrett'd know where we are. Just leave it uncovered so people can see it. We'll come back afterward and take care of it. Hardly anybody comes along here anyway."

Amelia nodded. She made a call on her phone. "We found it, Rhyme. Nobody got hurt. There was no bomb – he put a hornets' nest inside . . . Okay. We'll be careful . . . Keep reading that book. Let us know if you find anything else."

They started down the path once more and covered a good quarter mile before Lucy found it in her to say, "Thanks. Y'all were right about him coming this way. I was wrong." She hesitated for another long moment then added, "Jim made a good choice – bringing you down from New York for this. I wasn't real crazy about it at first but I won't argue with results."

Amelia frowned. "Bringing us down? What do you mean?"

"To help out."

"Jim didn't do that."

"What?" Lucy asked.

"No, no, we were over at the medical center in Avery. Lincoln's having some surgery. Jim heard we were going to be here so he came by this morning to ask if we'd look at some evidence."

A long pause. Then Lucy gave a laugh as the relief flooded through her. "I thought he'd scrounged up county money to fly y'all down here after the kidnapping yesterday."

Amelia shook her head. "The surgery's not till day after tomorrow. We had some free time. That's all."

"That boy – Jim. He never said a word about it. He
can
be the quiet one sometimes."

"You were worried he didn't think you could handle the case?"

"I guess that's exactly what I thought."

"Jim's cousin works with us in New York. He told Jim we were coming down for a couple of weeks."

"Wait, you mean Roland?" Lucy asked. "Sure, I know him. Knew his wife too, before she passed. His boys're dears."

"Had them over for a barbecue not long ago," Amelia said.

Lucy laughed again. "I guess I was being paranoid here . . . So, you were over at Avery? The medical center?"

"That's right."

"That's where Lydia Johansson works. You know, she's a nurse there."

"I didn't."

A dozen memories flickered through Lucy Kerr's mind. Some she was warmly touched by, some she wanted to avoid like the swarm of wasps she'd nearly stirred up in Garrett's trap. She didn't know whether she wanted to tell any of this to Amelia Sachs or not. What she settled for was: "That's why I'm pretty eager to save her. I had some medical problems a few years ago and Lydia was one of my nurses. She's a good person. The best."