The Empty Chair

that took some serious driving.”
    That’s my Amelia, Rhyme thought. That woman can drive up walls. . . .
    Bell continued, “She’s going to ditch the car and get another one.”
    “How do you know?”
    “She’s on the phone with a car rental company in Hobeth Falls. Lucy and the others’re after her, silent pursuit. We’re talking to Davett’s people to see who’s missing a vehicle from the lot. But we don’t need a description if she just stays on the line a little longer. Another few minutes and the tech people’ll have the exact location.”
    Lincoln Rhyme stared at the map—though it was by now imprinted on his mind. After a moment he sighed then muttered, “Good luck.”
    But whether that wish was directed toward predator or toward prey, he couldn’t have said.

. . . chapter twenty-six
    Lucy Kerr nudged the Crown Victoria up to eighty.
    You drive fast, Amelia?
    Well, so do I.
    They were speeding along Route 112, the gumball machine on top of the car spinning madly with its red, white and blue lights. The siren was off. Jesse Corn was beside her, on the phone with Pete Gregg in the Elizabeth City state police office. In the squad car directly behind them were Trey Williams and Ned Spoto. Mason Germain and Frank Sturgis—a quiet man and a recent grandfather—were in the third car.
    “Where are they now?” Lucy asked.
    Jesse asked the state police this question and nodded as he received an answer. He said, “Only five miles away. They turned off the highway, heading south.”
    Please, Lucy offered yet another prayer, please, stay on the phone just a minute more.
    She nudged the accelerator closer to the floor.
    You drive fast, Amelia. I drive fast.
    You’re a good shot.
    But I’m a good shot too. I don’t make a show of it like you do, what with all that fancy quick-draw crap, but I’ve lived with guns all my life.
    Recalling that when Buddy left her she took every round of live ammo in the house and pitched them into the murky waters of Blackwater Canal. Worrying that she might wake up one night, glance at his empty side of the bed and then wrap her lips around the oily barrel of her service revolver and send herself to the place where her husband, and nature, seemed to want her to be.
    Lucy had gone around for three and a half months with an unloaded service pistol, collaring ’shiners and militiamen and big, snotty teens huffed to oblivion on butane. And she’d handled them all on bluff alone.
    Then she woke up one morning and, as if a fever had passed, had gone to Shakey’s Hardware on Maple Street and bought a box of Winchester .357 shells. (“Jeez, Lucy, the county’s in worser shape than I thought, making you buy your own ammo.”) She’d gone home and loaded her weapon and kept it that way ever since.
    It was a significant event for her. The reloaded gun was an emblem of survival.
    Amelia, I shared my darkest moments with you. I told you about the surgery—which is the black hole of my life. I told you about my shyness with men. About my love for children. I backed you up when Sean O’Sarian got your gun. I apologized when you were right and I was wrong.
    I trusted you. I—
    A hand touched her shoulder. She glanced at Jesse Corn. He was giving her one of his gentle smiles. “The highway curves up ahead,” he said. “I’d just as soon we made that curve too.”
    Lucy exhaled slowly and sat back in the seat, let her shoulders slump. She eased off on the speed.
    Still, when they made the curve Jesse’d mentioned, which was posted forty, she was doing sixty-five.

    “A hundred feet up the road,” Jesse Corn whispered.
    They were out of their cars, the deputies, and were clustered around Mason Germain and Lucy Kerr.
    The state police had finally lost the signal from Amelia’s cell phone but only after it’d been stationary for about five minutes at the location they were now looking at: a barn fifty feet from a house in the woods—a mile off Route 112. It was, Lucy noted, west of Tanner’s Corner. Just as Lincoln Rhyme had predicted.
    “You don’t think Mary Beth’s in there, do you?” asked Frank Sturgis, brushing at his yellow-stained moustache. “I mean, it’s all of seven miles from downtown. I’d feel pretty foolish, he’s been keeping the girl that close to town.”
    “Naw, they’re just waiting for us to go past,” Mason said. “Then they’re gonna go on to Hobeth Falls and pick up the rental car.”
    “Anyway,” Jesse said, “somebody