The Empty Chair

bushes—not Sean O’Sarian at all but Jesse Corn. A black dot appeared above the young deputy’s eye and, as his head jerked back, a horrible pink cloud puffed out behind him. Without a sound he dropped straight to the ground.
    Sachs gasped, staring at the body, which twitched once and then lay completely still. She was breathless. She dropped to her knees, the gun tumbling from her hand.
    “Oh, Jesus,” Ned muttered, also staring in shock at the body. Before the deputy could recover and draw his gun, Garrett rushed him. The boy snagged Sachs’s pistol from the ground and pointed it at Ned’s head, then took the deputy’s weapon and flung it into the bushes.
    “Lie down!” Garrett raged at him. “On your face!”
    “You killed him, you killed him,” Ned muttered.
    “Now!”
    Ned did as he was told, tears running down his tanned cheeks.
    “Jesse!” Lucy Kerr’s voice called from nearby. “Where are you? Who’s shooting?”
    “No, no, no . . .” Sachs moaned. Watching an astonishing amount of blood pour from the dead deputy’s shattered skull.
    Garrett Hanlon glanced at Jesse’s body. Then past it—toward the sound of approaching feet. He put his arm around Sachs. “We have to go.”
    When she didn’t answer, when she simply stared, completely numb, at the scene in front of her—the end of the deputy’s life, and the end of her own—Garrett helped her to her feet then took her hand and pulled her after him. They vanished into the woods.

IV
Hornets’ Nest

. . . chapter thirty-four
    What was happening now? a frantic Lincoln Rhyme wondered.
    An hour ago, at five-thirty A.M., he’d finally gotten a call from a very put-out drone in the Real Estate Division of the North Carolina Department of Taxation. The man had been awakened at one-thirty and given the assignment of tracking down delinquent taxes on any land on which a claimed residence was a McPherson trailer. Rhyme had first checked to see if Garrett’s parents had owned one and—when he learned they hadn’t—reasoned that if the boy was using the place as a hideout it was abandoned. And if it was abandoned the owner had defaulted on the taxes.
    The assistant director told him there’d been two such properties in the state. In one case, near the Blue Ridge, to the west, the land and trailer had been sold at a tax lien foreclosure to a couple who currently lived there. The other, on an acre in Paquenoke County, wasn’t worth the time or money to foreclose on. He’d given Rhyme the address, an RFD route about a half mile from the Paquenoke River. Location C-6 on the map.
    Rhyme had called Lucy and the others and sent them there. They were going to approach at first light and, if Garrett and Amelia were inside, surround them and talk them into surrendering.
    The last Rhyme had heard they’d spotted the trailer and were moving in slowly.
    Unhappy that his boss had gotten virtually no sleep, Thom sent Ben out of the room and went through the morning ritual carefully. The four B s: bladder, bowel, brushing teeth and blood pressure.
    “It’s high, Lincoln,” Thom muttered, putting away the sphygmomanometer. Excessive blood pressure in a quad could lead to an attack of dysreflexia, which in turn could result in a stroke. But Rhyme didn’t pay any attention. He was riding on pure energy. He wanted desperately to find Amelia. He wanted—
    Rhyme looked up. Jim Bell, an alarmed expression on his face, walked through the doorway. Ben Kerr, equally upset, entered behind him.
    “What happened?” Rhyme asked. “Is she all right? Is Amelia—”
    “She killed Jesse,” Bell said in a whisper. “Shot him in the head.”
    Thom froze. Glanced at Rhyme. The sheriff continued, “He was about to arrest Garrett. She shot him. They took off.”
    “No, it’s impossible,” Rhyme whispered. “There’s a mistake. Somebody else did it.”
    But Bell was shaking his head. “No. Ned Spoto was there. He saw the whole thing. . . . I’m not saying she did it on purpose—Ned went for her and her gun went off—but it’s still felony murder.”
    Oh, my God . . .
    Amelia . . . second-generation cop, the Portable’s Daughter. And now she’d killed one of her own. The worst crime a police officer could commit.
    “This’s way past us now, Lincoln. I’ve got to get the state involved.”
    “Wait, Jim,” Rhyme said urgently. “Please. . . . She’s desperate now, she’s scared. So’s Garrett. You call in troopers, a lot more