The Empty Chair

She’ll hesitate. I can get her first. He swung toward her.
    The pistol in her hands bucked and the last thing Tomel felt was an itchy tap on the side of his head.

    Lucy Kerr saw Mary Beth stagger onto the porch and call out that Culbeau was dead and that Rhyme and Garrett were all right.
    Amelia Sachs nodded then walked toward Sean O’Sarian’s body. Lucy turned her own attention to Harris Tomel’s. She bent down and closed her shaking hands around the Browning shotgun. She thought that while she should be horrified to be prying this elegant weapon from a dead man’s hands, in fact all she thought about was the gun itself. She wondered if it was still loaded.
    She answered that question by racking the gun—losing one shell, but making sure that another was chambered.
    Fifty feet away Sachs was bending down over O’Sarian’s body as she searched it, keeping her pistol pointed at the corpse. Lucy wondered why she was bothering then decided, wryly, that it must be standard procedure.
    She found her blouse and put it back on. It was torn apart by the shotgun pellets but she was self-consciousabout her body in the tight T-shirt. Lucy stood by the tree, breathing heavily in the heat and watching Sachs’s back.
    Simple fury—at the betrayals in her life. The betrayal by her body, by her husband, by God.
    And now by Amelia Sachs.
    She glanced behind her, where Harris Tomel lay. It was a straight line of sight from where he’d been standing to Amelia’s back. The scenario was plausible: Tomel had been hiding in the grass. He rose, shot Sachs in the back with his shotgun. Lucy then grabbed Sachs’s gun and killed Tomel. Nobody’d know different—except Lucy herself and, maybe, Jesse Corn’s spirit.
    Lucy lifted the shotgun, which felt weightless as a larkspur blossom in her hands. Pressing the smooth, fragrant stock against her cheek, reminding her of the way she’d pressed her face against the chrome guard of the hospital bed after her mastectomy. She sighted down the smooth barrel at the woman’s black T-shirt, resting the sight on the woman’s spine. She’d die painlessly. And fast.
    As fast as Jesse Corn had died.
    This was simply trading a guilty life for an innocent one.
    Dear Lord, give me one clear shot at my Judas. . . .
    Lucy looked around. No witnesses.
    Her finger curled around the trigger, tightened.
    Squinted, held the brass dot of the bead sight rock steady thanks to arms strengthened by years of gardening, years of managing a house—and a life—on her own. Aiming at the exact center of Amelia Sachs’s back.
    The hot breeze whistled through the grass around her. She thought about Buddy, about her surgeon, about her house and her garden.
    Lucy lowered the gun.
    She racked the weapon until it was empty and, padded butt resting on her hip, muzzle skyward, she carried it back to the van in front of the cabin. She set it on theground and found her cell phone then called the state police.
    The medevac chopper was the first to arrive and the medics quickly bundled Thom up and flew him off to the medical center. One stayed to look after Lincoln Rhyme, whose blood pressure was edging critical.
    When the troopers themselves showed up in a second helicopter a few minutes later it was Amelia Sachs they arrested first and left hog-tied, hands behind her, lying in the hot dirt outside the cabin, while they went inside to arrest Garrett Hanlon and read him his rights.

. . . chapter thirty-nine
    Thom would survive.
    The doctor in the Emergency Medicine Department of the University Medical Center in Avery had said laconically, “The bullet? It came and went. Missed the important stuff.” Though the aide would be off duty for a month or two.
    Ben Kerr had volunteered to cut class and stay around Tanner’s Corner for a few days to assist Rhyme. The big man had grumbled, “You don’t really deserve my help, Lincoln. I mean, hell, you never even pick up after yourself.”
    Still not quite comfortable with crip jokes he glanced quickly at Rhyme to see if this type of banter was within the rules. The criminalist’s sour grimace was a reverse affirmation that it was. But Rhyme added that, as much as he appreciated the offer, the care and feeding of a quad is a full-time, and tricky, job. Largely thankless too—if the patient is Lincoln Rhyme. And so Dr. Cheryl Weaver was arranging for a professional caregiver from the medical center to help Rhyme.
    “But hang around, Ben,” he said. “I still