The Empty Chair (16 page)

"Keep clear of the water," Lucy warned in a whisper. "It's bad. Kids used to swim here. Not long after they shut it down. My nephew did once – Ben's younger brother. But I just showed him the coroner's picture from when they fished Kevin Dobbs out after he'd drowned and been in the water for a week. Never went back."

"I think Dr. Spock recommends that approach," Sachs said. Lucy laughed.

Sachs, thinking about children again.

Not now, not now . . .

Her phone vibrated. As they'd gotten closer to their prey she'd turned off the ringer. She answered. Rhyme's voice crackled, "Sachs. Where are you?"

"The rim of the quarry," she whispered.

"Any sign of him?"

"We just got here. Nothing yet. We're about to start searching. All the buildings've been torn down and I don't see anywhere he could be hiding. But there're a dozen places he could've left a trap."

"Sachs . . ."

"What is it, Rhyme?" His solemn tone chilled her.

"There's something I have to tell you. I just got the DNA and serologic results from the medical center. On that Kleenex you found at the scene this morning."

"And?"

"It was Garrett's semen all right. And the blood – it was Mary Beth's."

"He raped her," Sachs whispered.

"Be careful, Sachs, but move fast. I don't think Lydia has much time left."

• • •

She was hiding in a dark, filthy bin that had been used to store grain long ago.

Hands behind her, still dizzy from the heat and dehydration, Lydia Johansson had stumbled down the bright corridor away from where Garrett lay writhing and had found this hiding space on the floor below the grinding room. When she slipped inside and closed the door a dozen mice had skittered over her feet and it took every ounce of willpower within her to keep from screaming.

Now listening for Garrett's footsteps over the low-gear sound of the grinding wheel nearby.

Panic was filling her and she was starting to regret her defiant escape. But there was no going back, she decided. She'd hurt Garrett and now he was going to hurt her back if he found her. Maybe do worse. There was nothing to do but try to escape.

No, she decided, that wasn't the right way to think. One of her angel books said there was no such thing as "trying to." You either did or you didn't. She wasn't going to
try
to get away. She was
going
to escape. She just had to have faith.

Lydia looked through a crack in the bin door, listened carefully. She heard him in one of the rooms nearby, muttering to himself and ripping open bins and closet doors. She'd hoped that he'd think she'd run outside through the collapsed wall in the burnt-out corridor but it was obvious from his methodical search that he knew she was still here. She couldn't stay in the storage closet any longer. He'd find her. She glanced out through a crack in the door and, not seeing him, she slipped out of the bin and ran into an adjoining room, moving silently on her white sneakers. The only exit from this room was a stairway leading up to the second floor. She staggered up it, gasping for breath and, not having her hands for balance, bounding off the walls and the wrought-iron railing.

She heard his voice echoing in the corridor. "You made him bite me!" he cried. "It hurts, it hurts."

Wish it had stung you in the eye or crotch
, she thought and struggled up the stairs.
Fuck you fuck you fuck you!

She heard him ripping open closet doors in the room below. Heard his guttural moaning. Imagined she could hear the snick, snick of his nails.

That shiver of panic again. Nausea swelling.

The room at the top of the stairs was large and had a number of windows facing the burnt portion of the mill. There was one door, which was unlocked, and she pushed it open, stepped into the grinding area itself – two large millstones sat in the center. The wooden mechanism was rotted; the sound she'd heard wasn't the stones but the waterwheel, powered by the diverted stream. It still turned slowly. Rust-colored water cascaded off it into a deep, narrow pit, like a well. Lydia couldn't see the bottom. The water must've drained back into the stream somewhere below the surface.

"Stop!" Garrett cried.

She jumped in shock at the angry sound. He stood in the doorway. His eyes were red and wide and he was cradling his arm, on which was a huge black-and-yellow bruise. "You made it sting me," he muttered, staring at her with hatred. "It's dead. You made me kill it! I didn't
want
to but you made me! Now get your ass downstairs. I've gotta tape your legs up now."

He started forward.

She looked at his bony face, brows knit together, his huge hands, his angry eyes. Into her thoughts came a burst of images: a cancer patient of hers, slowly wasting to death. Mary Beth McConnell locked away somewhere. The boy madly chewing his chips. The scuttling millipede. The fingernails snapping. The Outside. Her long nights alone, waiting – desperately – for a brief phone call from her boyfriend. Taking the flowers to Blackwater Landing, even though she didn't really want to . . .

It was all too much for her.

"Wait," Lydia said placidly.

He blinked. Stopped walking.

She smiled at him – the way she'd smile at a terminal patient – and, sending a good-bye prayer to her boyfriend,Lydia, hands still bound behind her, plunged headfirst into the narrow pit of dark water.

• • •

The crosshairs of the Hitech telescopic sight rested on the redheaded cop's shoulders.

That was
some
hair, Mason Germain thought.

He and Nathan Groomer were on a rise overlooking the old Anderson Rock Products quarry. About a hundred yards away from the search party.

Nathan finally stated the conclusion he must've come to a half hour ago. "This don't have anything to do with Rich Culbeau."

"No, it doesn't. Not exactly."

"What's that mean? 'Not exactly'?"

"Culbeau's out here someplace. With Sean O'Sarian –"

"
That
boy's scarier than two Culbeaus."

"No argument there," Mason said. "And Harris Tomel too. But that's not what we're doing."

Nathan looked back at the deputies and the redhead. "Guess not. Why're you sighting down on Lucy Kerr with
my
gun?"

After a moment Mason handed back the Ruger M77 and said, "'Cause I didn't bring my fucking binoculars. And it wasn't Lucy I was looking at."

They started along the ridge. Mason was thinking about the redhead. Thinking about pretty Mary Beth McConnell. And Lydia. Thinking too how sometimes life just doesn't go the way you want it to. Mason Germain knew, for instance, that he should've advanced further than senior deputy by now. He knew he should've handled his request for promotion different. Just like he should've handled things different when Kelley left him for that trucker five years ago and, for that matter, handled his whole marriage different
before
she left him.

And should've handled the first Garrett Hanlon case a lot different too. The case where Meg Blanchard woke from her nap and found the hornets clustered on her chest and face and arms . . . One hundred thirty-seven stings and a terrible slow death.

Now he was paying for those bad choices. His life was just a series of still days, worrying, sitting on his porch and drinking too much, not even finding the energy to put his boat in the Paquo and go after bass. Trying desperately to figure out how to fix what maybe couldn't be fixed. He –

"So you gonna tell me what we're doing?" Nathan asked.

"We're looking for Culbeau."

"But you just said . . ." Nathan's voice faded. When Mason said nothing else the deputy sighed loudly. "Culbeau's house, where we're s'posed to be, is six or seven miles away and here we are north of the Paquo, me with my deer gun and you with that zipped mouth of yours."

"I'm saying if Jim
asks
, we were out here looking for Culbeau," Mason said.

"And what we're really doing is . . . ?"

Nathan Groomer could prune trees at five hundred yards with this Ruger of his. He could charm a point-five-oh DUI out of his car in three minutes. He could carve decoys that'd sell for five hundred bucks each to collectors if he ever bothered to try to sell any. But his talents and smarts didn't go much beyond that.

"We're going to get that boy," Mason said.

"Garrett."

"Yeah, Garrett. Who else?
They're
going to flush him for us." Nodding toward the redhead and the deputies. "And
we're
going to get him."

"Whatta you mean by 'get'?"

"You're going to shoot him, Nathan. And kill him dead as a stick."

"Shoot him?"

"Yessir," Mason said.

"Hold on there. You're not ramshagging
my
career 'cause you're hot to get that boy."

"You don't have a career," Mason snapped. "You got a
job
. And if you want to keep it you'll do what I'm telling you. Listen here – I've talked to him. Garrett. During those other investigations, when he killed those people."

"Yeah. Did you? I guess you would, sure."

"And know what he told me?"

"No. What?"

Mason was trying to think if this was credible. Then recalling Nathan's dog-eyed concentration as he spent hour after hour sanding the back of a pinewood duck, lost in happy oblivion, the senior deputy continued, "Garrett said if he was standing in need to he'd kill any law tried to stop him."

"He said that? That boy?"

"Yep. Looked me right in the eye and said so. And said he was looking forward to it too. Hoped I was in the lead but he'd take anybody that happened to be handy."

"That son of a bitch. You tell Jim?"

"Course I did. You think I wouldn't? But he didn't pay it a lick of mind. I like Jim Bell. You know I do. But the truth is he's more concerned about
keeping
his cushy job than he is with
doing
it."

The deputy was nodding and a portion of Mason was astonished that Nathan had bought this so easily and never even guessed that there might be another reason he was so
hot to get that boy.

The sharpshooter thought for a moment. "Has Garrett got a gun?"

"I don't know, Nathan. But tell me: 'Bout how hard is it to get a firearm in North Carolina? The phrase 'fallin' off a log' come to mind?"

"That's true."

"See, Lucy and Jesse – even Jim – they don't appreciate that kid like I do."

"Appreciate?"

"Appreciate the
danger's
what I mean," Mason said.

"Oh."

"He's killed three people so far, probably Todd Wilkes too, strung that little boy up by his neck. Or at least scared him into killing himself. Which is murder all the same. And that girl got stung – Meg? You see those pictures of her face after the wasps were through with her? Then think about Ed Schaeffer. You and me were out drinking with him just last week. Now he's in the hospital and he might never wake up."

"It's not like I'm a sniper or nothing, Mase."

But Mason Germain wasn't going to give an inch. "You
know
what the courts're going to do. He's sixteen. They're gonna say, 'Poor boy. Parents're dead. Let's put him in some halfway house.' Then he's going to get out in six months or a year and do it all over again. Kill some other football player headed for Chapel Hill, some other girl in town never hurt a soul."

"But –"

"Don't
worry
, Nathan. You're doing Tanner's Corner a favor."

"That ain't what I was going to say. The thing is, we kill him, we lose any chance of finding Mary Beth. He's the only one knows where she is."

Mason gave a sour laugh. "Mary Beth? You think she's alive? No way. Garrett raped and killed her, and buried her in a shallow grave someplace. We can stop worrying about her. It's our job now to make sure that don't happen to anybody else. You with me?"

Nathan didn't say anything but the snapping sound of the deputy pressing the long copper-jacketed shells into his rifle's magazine was answer enough.

II

THE WHITE DOE

13

Outside the window was a large hornets' nest. Resting her head against the greasy glass of her prison, an exhausted Mary Beth McConnell stared at it.

More than anything else about this terrible place, the nest – gray and moist and disgusting – gave her a sense of hopelessness.

More than the bars that Garrett had so carefully bolted outside of the windows. More than the thick oak door, secured with three huge locks. More than the memory of the terrible trek from Blackwater Landing in the company of the Insect Boy.

The wasps' nest was in the shape of a cone, the point facing toward the earth. It rested on a forked branch that Garrett had propped up near the window. The nest must've been home to hundreds of the glossy black-and-yellow insects that oozed in and out of the hole in the bottom.

Garrett had been gone when she'd wakened this morning and after lying in bed for an hour – groggy and nauseated from the vicious blow to her head last night – Mary Beth had climbed unsteadily to her feet and looked out the window. The first thing that she'd noticed was the nest outside the back window, near the bedroom.

The wasps hadn't made the nest here; Garrett had placed it outside the window himself. At first, she couldn't figure out why. But then, with a feeling of despair, she understood: her captor had left it as a flag of victory.

Mary Beth McConnell knew her history. She knew about warfare, knew about armies conquering other armies. The reason for flags and standards wasn't only to identify your side; it was to remind the vanquished who now controlled them.

And Garrett had won.

Well, he'd won the
battle
; the outcome of the war had yet to be decided.

Mary Beth pressed the gash on her head. It had been a terrible blow to her temple, and had peeled away some skin. She wondered if it would become infected.