The Empty Chair

pocket. “Where’re we going?” she asked.
    “Shut up. Okay?”
    Ten minutes later he made her take her shoes off and they forded a shallow, polluted stream. When they’d crossed he eased her into a sitting position. Garrett sat in front of her and, as he watched her legs and cleavage, he slowly dried her feet with a wad of Kleenex he had pulled from his pocket. She felt the same repulsion at his touch that had flooded through her the first time she had to take a tissue sample from a corpse in the morgue at the hospital. He put her white shoes back on, laced them tight, holding her calf for longer than he needed to. Then he consulted the map and led her back into the woods.
    Clicking his nails, scratching his cheek . . .
    Little by little the marshes grew more tangled and the water darker and deeper. She supposed they were headed toward the Great Dismal Swamp though she couldn’t imagine why. Just when it seemed they could go no farther because of the choked bogs, Garrett steered them into a large pine forest, which, to Lydia’s relief, was far cooler than the exposed swampland.
    He found another path. He led her along it until they came to a steep hill. A series of rocks led to the top.
    “I can’t climb that,” she said, struggling to sound defiant. “Not with my hands taped. I’ll slip.”
    “Bullshit,” he muttered angrily, as if she were an idiot. “You got those nurse shoes on. They’ll hold you fine. Look at me. I’m, like, barefoot and I can climb it. Lookit my feet, look!” He held up the bottoms. They were callused and yellow. “Now get your ass up there. Only, when you get to the top don’t go any farther. You hear me? Hey, you listening?” Another hiss; a fleck of spittle touched her cheek and seemed to burn her skin like battery acid.
    God, I hate you, she thought.
    Lydia started to climb. She paused halfway, lookedback. Garrett was watching her closely, snapping his fingernails. Staring at her legs, encased in white stockings, his tongue teasing his front teeth. Then looking up higher, under her skirt.
    Lydia continued to climb. Heard his hissing breath as he started up behind her.
    At the top of the hill was a clearing and from it a single path led into a thick grove of pine trees. She started along the path, into the shade.
    “Hey!” Garrett shouted. “Didn’t you hear me? I told you not to move!”
    “I’m not trying to get away!” she cried. “It’s hot. I’m trying to get out of the sun.”
    He pointed to the ground, twenty feet away. There was a thick blanket of pine boughs in the middle of the path. “You could’ve fallen in,” his voice rasped. “You could’ve ruined it.”
    Lydia looked closely. The pine needles covered a wide pit.
    “What’s under there?”
    “It’s a deadfall trap.”
    “What’s inside?”
    “You know—a surprise for anybody coming after us.” He said this proudly, smirking, as if he’d been very clever to think of it.
    “But anybody could fall in there!”
    “Shit,” he muttered. “This is north of the Paquo. Only ones who’d come this way’d be the people after us. And they deserve whatever happens to them. Let’s get going.” Hissing again. He took her by the wrist and led her around the pit.
    “You don’t have to hold me so hard!” she protested.
    Garrett glanced at her then relaxed his grip somewhat—though his gentler touch proved to be a lot more troubling; he took to stroking her wrist with his middle finger, which reminded her of a fat blood tick looking for a spot to burrow into her skin.

. . . chapter four
    The Rollx van passed a cemetery, Tanner’s Corner Memorial Gardens. A funeral was in progress and Rhyme, Sachs and Thom glanced at the somber procession.
    “Look at the casket,” Sachs said.
    It was small, a child’s. The mourners, all adults, were few. Twenty or so people. Rhyme wondered why attendance was so sparse. His eyes rose above the ceremony and examined the graveyard’s rolling hills and, beyond, the miles of hazy forest and marshland that vanished in the blue distance. He said, “That’s not a bad cemetery. Wouldn’t mind being buried in a place like that.”
    Sachs, who’d been gazing at the funeral with a troubled expression, shifted cool eyes toward him—apparently because with surgery on the agenda she didn’t like any talk about mortality.
    Then Thom eased the van around a sharp curve and, following Jim Bell’s Paquenoke County Sheriff’s Department cruiser, accelerated