The Empty Chair

I’ll have to get him back to bed. Has he had his medicine?
    Wait!
    She sat up, dizzy, head throbbing. She’d fallen asleep in the dining room chair.
    Thunk.
    Wait. It’s not my father. He’s dead. . . . It’s Jim Bell. . . .
    Thunk.
    “Mareeeeeeee Bayeth . . .”
    She jumped as the leering face looked in the window. It was Tom.
    Another slam on the door as the Missionary’s ax bit into the wood.
    Tom leaned inside, squinting into the gloom. “Where are you?”
    She stared at him, paralyzed.
    Tom continued, “Oh, hey, there you are. My, you’re prettier’n I remembered.” He held up his wrist, showed her thick bandages. “I lost a pint of blood, thanks to you. I think it’s only fair I get a little back.”
    Thunk.
    “I have to tell you, honey,” he said. “I fell asleep last night thinking about feeling up your titties yesterday. Thank you much for that sweet thought.”
    Thunk.
    With this blow the ax broke through the door. Tom disappeared from the window and joined his friend.
    “Keep going, boy,” he called encouragingly. “You’re on a roll.”
    Thunk.

. . . chapter thirty-five
    His worry now was that she’d hurt herself.
    Since he’d known Amelia Sachs, Lincoln Rhyme had watched her hands disappear into her scalp and return bloody. He’d watched her worry nails with teeth, and skin with nails. He’d seen her drive at a hundred fifty miles per hour. He didn’t know exactly what pushed her but he knew there was something within her that made Amelia Sachs live on the edge.
    Now that this had happened, now that she’d killed, the anxieties might push her over the line. After the accident that left Rhyme a broken man, Terry Dobyns, the NYPD psychologist, had explained to him that, yes, he would feel like killing himself. But it wasn’t depression that would motivate him to act. Depression depleted your energy; the main cause of suicide was a deadly fusion of hopelessness, anxiety and panic.
    Which would be exactly what Amelia Sachs—hunted, betrayed by her own nature—would be feeling right now.
    Find her! was his only thought. Find her fast.
    But where was she? The answer to that question still eluded him.
    He looked at the chart again. There was no evidence from the trailer. Lucy and the other deputies had searched it fast—too fast, of course. They were under the spell of hunt lust—even immobilized Rhyme often felt this—and the deputies were desperate to get on the trail of the enemy who’d killed their friend.
    The only clues he had to Mary Beth’s location—to where Garrett and Sachs were now headed—were right in front of him. But they were as enigmatic as any set of clues he’d ever analyzed.
    F OUND AT THE S ECONDARY C RIME S CENE —M ILL
    Brown Paint on Pants
    Sundew Plant
    Clay
    Peat Moss
    Fruit Juice
    Paper Fibers
    Stinkball Bait
    Sugar
    Camphene
    Alcohol
    Kerosene
    Yeast
    We need more evidence! he raged to himself.
    But we don’t have any more goddamn evidence.
    When Rhyme was mired smack in the denial stage of grief, after the accident, he had tried to summon superhuman willpower to make his body move. He had recalled the stories of the people who lifted cars off children or had run at impossible speeds to find help in emergencies.But he’d finally accepted that those types of strength were no longer available to him.
    But he did have one type of strength left—mental strength.
    Think! All you have is your mind and the evidence that’s in front of you. The evidence isn’t going to change.
    So change the way you’re thinking.
    All right, let’s start over. He went through the chart once more. The trailer key had been identified. The yeast would be from the mill. The sugar, from food or juice. The camphene, from an old lamp. The paint, from the building where she was being held. The kerosene, from the boat. The alcohol could be from anything. The dirt in the boy’s cuffs? It exhibited no particularly unique characteristics and was—
    Wait . . . the dirt.
    Rhyme recalled that he and Ben had run the density gradient test of the dirt sampled from in the shoes and car-floor mats of county workers yesterday morning. He’d ordered Thom to photograph each tube and note which employee it had come from on the back of the Polaroid.
    “Ben?”
    “What?”
    “Run the dirt you found in Garrett’s cuffs at the mill through the density gradient unit.”
    After the dirt had settled in the tube the young man said, “Got the results.”
    “Compare it