The Empty Chair

by Jeffery Deaver

  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 des--perately 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 any anybody 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 Doc

  ... chapter thirteen

  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.

  She found a rubber band in her backpack and tied her long brunette hair into a ponytail. Sweat trickled down her neck and she felt a fierce aching of thirst. She was breathless from the stifling heat in the closed rooms and thought about taking off her thick denim shirt--worried about snakes and spiders, she always wore long sleeves when she was on a dig around brush or tall grass. But despite the heat now she decided to leave the shirt on. She didn't know when her captor would return; she wore only a lacy pink bra underneath the shirt and Garrett Hanlon sure didn't need any encouragement in that department.

  With a last glance at the nest Mary Beth stepped away from the window. Then walked around the three-room shack once more, searching futilely for a breach in the place. It was a solid building, very old. Thick walls--a combination of hand-hewn logs and heavy boards nailed together. Outside the front window was a large field of tall grass that ended in a line of trees a hundred yards away. The cabin itself was in another stand of thick trees. Looking out the back window--the hornets' nest window--she could just see through the trunks to the glistening surface of the pond they'd skirted yesterday to get here.

  The rooms themselves were small but surprisingly clean. In the living room was a long brown-and-gold couch, several old chairs around a cheap dining room table, a second table on which were a dozen quart juice jars covered with mesh and filled with insects he'd collected. A second room contained a mattress and a d
resser. The third room was empty, except for several half-full cans of brown paint sitting in the corner; it seemed that Garrett had painted the exterior of the cabin recently. The color was dark and depressing and she couldn't understand why he'd picked it--until she realized it was the same shade as the bark of the trees that surrounded the cabin. Camouflage. And it occurred to her again what she'd thought yesterday--that the boy was much cagier, and more dangerous, than she'd thought.

  In the living room were stacks of food--junk food and rows of canned fruits and vegetables--Farmer John brand. From the label a stolid farmer smiled at her, the image as outdated as the 1950s Betty Crocker. She searched the cabin desperately for water or soda--anything to drink--but couldn't find a thing. The canned fruits and vegetables would be packed in juice but there was no opener or any sort of tool or utensil to open them. She had her backpack with her but had left her archaeological tools at Blackwater Landing. She tried banging a can on the side of the table to split it open but the metal didn't give.

  Downstairs was a root cellar that you reached via a door in the floor of the shack's main room. She glanced at it once and shivered with disgust, felt her skin crawl. Last night--after Garrett had been gone for some time--Mary Beth had worked up her courage and walked down the rickety stairs into the low-ceilinged basement, looking for a way out of the horrible cabin. But there'd been no exit--just dozens of old boxes and jars and bags.

  She hadn't heard Garrett return and suddenly, in a rush, he'd charged down the stairs toward her. She'd screamed and tried to flee but the next thing she remembered was lying on the dirt floor, blood spattered on her chest and clotted in her hair, and Garrett, smelling of unwashed adolescence, walking up slowly, wrapping his arms around her, his eyes fixed on her breasts. He'd lifted her and she'd felt his hard penis against her as he carried her slowly upstairs, deaf to her protests....

  No! she now told herself. Don't think about it.

  Or about the pain. Or the fear.

  And where was Garrett now?

  As frightened as she'd been with him padding around the cabin yesterday she was nearly as scared now that he'd forget about her. Or would get killed in an accident or shot by the deputies looking for her. And she'd die of thirst here. Mary Beth McConnell remembered a project she and her graduate adviser had been involved in: a North Carolina State Historical Society-sponsored disinterment of a nineteenth-century grave to run DNA tests on the body inside, to see if the corpse was that of a descendant of Sir Francis Drake, as a local legend claimed. To her horror, when the top of the coffin was lifted off, the arm bones of the cadaver were upraised and there were scratch marks on the inside of the lid. The man had been buried alive.

  This cabin would be her coffin. And no one--

  What was that? Looking out the front window, she thought she saw motion just inside the edge of the forest in the distance. Through the brush and leaves she believed it might be a man. Because his clothes and broad-brimmed hat seemed dark and there was something confident about his posture and gait she thought: He looks like a missionary in the wilderness.

  But wait .... Was someone really there? Or was it just the light on the trees? She couldn't tell.

  "Here!" she cried. But the window was nailed shut and even if it had been open she doubted he could hear her scream, feeble from her dry throat, from this distance.

  She grabbed her backpack, hoping she still had the whistle that her paranoid mother had bought her for protection. Mary Beth had laughed at the idea--a rape whistle in Tanner's Corner?--but she now searched desperately for it.

  But the whistle was gone. Maybe Garrett had found it and taken it when she'd been passed out on the bloody mattress. Well, she'd scream for help anyway--scream as loudly as she could, despite her parched throat. Mary Beth grabbed one of the insect jars, intending to smash it through the window. She drew it back like a pitcher about to let fly the last ball of a no-hitter. Then her hand lowered. No! The Missionary was gone. Where he'd been was just a dark willow trunk, grass and a bay tree, swaying in the hot wind.

  Maybe that was all she'd seen.

  Maybe he hadn't been there at all.

  To Mary Beth McConnell--hot, scared, racked with thirst--truth and fiction now blended together and all the legends she'd studied about this eerie North Carolina countryside seemed to become real. Maybe the Missionary was just another in the cast of imaginary characters, like the Lady of Drummond Lake.

  Like the other ghosts of the Great Dismal Swamp.

  Like the White Doe in the Indian legend--a tale that was becoming alarmingly like her own.

  Head throbbing, dizzy in the heat, Mary Beth lay on the musty couch and closed her eyes, watching the wasps hover close, then enter the gray nest, the flag of her captor's victory.

  Lydia felt the bottom of the stream beneath her feet and kicked to the surface.

  Choking, spitting water, she found herself in a swampy pool about fifty feet downstream from the mill. Hands still taped behind her back, she kicked hard to right herself, wincing in pain. She'd either sprained or broken her ankle on the wooden paddle of the waterwheel as she'd leapt into the sluice. But the water here was six or seven feet deep and if she didn't kick she'd drown.

  The pain in her ankle was astonishing but Lydia forced her way to the surface. She found that by filling her lungs and rolling on her back she could float and keep her face above water as she kicked with her good foot toward the shore.

  She'd gone five feet when she felt a cold slithering on the back of her neck, curling around her head and ear, heading for her face. Snake! she realized in panic. Flashing back to a case in the emergency room last month--a man brought in with a water moccasin bite, his arm swollen nearly double; he'd been hysterical with pain. She now spun around and the muscular snake slithered across her mouth. She screamed. But with empty lungs and no buoyancy she sank beneath the surface and began to choke. She lost sight of the snake. Where is it, where? she thought furiously. A bite on the face could blind her. On the jugular or the carotid, she'd die.

  Where? Was it above her? About to strike?

  Please, please, help me, she thought to the guardian angel.

  And maybe the angel heard. Because when she bobbed once again to the surface there was no sign of the creature. She finally touched the muck of the stream bottom with her stockinged feet--she'd lost her shoes in the dive. She paused, catching her breath, trying to calm down. Slowly she struggled toward the shore, up a steep incline of mud and slick sticks and decaying leaves that eased her back a foot for every two that she managed to stagger forward. Watch the Carolina clay, she reminded herself; it'll hold you like quicksand.

  Just as she staggered out of the water a gunshot, very close, split the air.

  Jesus, Garrett has a gun! He's shooting!

  She dropped back into the water and sank beneath the surface. She stayed for as long as she could but finally had to surface. Gasping for breath, she broke from the water just as the beaver slapped its tail once more, making a second loud crack. The animal vanished toward its dam--a big one, two hundred feet long. She felt a hysterical laugh rise up in her from the false alarm but managed to control the urge.

  Then Lydia stumbled into the sedge and mud and lay on her side, gasping, spitting water. After five minutes she'd caught her breath. She rolled into a sitting position and looked around her.

  No sign of Garrett. She struggled to her feet. Tried to pull her hands apart but the duct tape held tight, despite the soaking. She could see the burnt chimney of the mill from here. She oriented herself and decided which direction to go in to find the path that would take her back south of the Paquo, back home. She wasn't that far from it; her swim in the creek hadn't taken her downstream much from the mill.

  But Lydia couldn't will herself to move.

  She felt paralyzed from the fear, from the hopelessness.

  Then she thought of her favorite TV show--Touched by an Angel--and when she thought of the program she had another memory, of the last ti
me she'd watched the show. Just as it was over and a commercial came on, the door to her town house swung open and there was her boyfriend with a six-pack. He hardly ever dropped by for surprise visits and she'd been ecstatic. They'd spent a glorious two hours together. She decided that her angel had given her this memory just now as a sign that there was hope when you least expected it.

  Clutching this thought firmly in her mind, Lydia rolled awkwardly to her feet and started through the sedge and swamp grass. From nearby she heard a guttural sound. A faint growling. She knew there were bobcats here, north of the river. Bears too and wild boars. But even though she was limping painfully, Lydia moved as confidently toward the path as if she were making the rounds at work, dispensing pills and gossip and cheering up the patients under her care.

  Jesse Corn found a bag.

  "Here! Look here. I've got something. A crocus sack."

  Sachs started down a rocky incline along the edge of the quarry to where the deputy stood, pointing at something on a ledge of limestone that had been blasted flat. She could see the grooves from where the drills had tapped into the dull stone to pack with dynamite. No wonder Rhyme had found so much nitrate; this place was one big demolition field.

  She walked up to Jesse. He was standing in front of an old cloth bag. "Rhyme, can you hear me?" Sachs called into her phone.

  "Go ahead. There's a lot of static but I can just hear you."

  "We've got a bag here," she told him. Then asked Jesse, "What'd you call it?"

  "Crocus sack. What they call a burlap bag down here."

  She said to Rhyme, "It's an old burlap bag. Looks like there's something in it."

  Rhyme asked, "Garrett leave it?"

  She looked at the ground. Where the stone floor met the walls. "It's definitely Garrett's and Lydia's footprints. They lead up an incline to the rim of the quarry."

  "Let's get after them," Jesse said.

  "Not yet," Sachs said. "We need to examine the bag."

  "Describe it," the criminalist ordered.

  "Burlap. Old. About twenty-four by thirty-six inches. Not much inside. It's closed up. Not tied, just twisted."