The Empty Chair

from him. She dug in. “No. I think we should go back, see if we can find where they turned off the path.”
    Amelia lowered her head, stared right into Lucy’s eyes. “I’ll tell you what. . . . We can call Jim Bell if you want.”
    A reminder that Jim had declared that that damn Lincoln Rhyme was running the operation and that he’d put Amelia in charge of the search party. This was crazy—a man and woman who’d probably never been in the Tar Heel State before this, two people who knew nothing of the people or the geography of the area, telling lifelong residents how to do their job.
    But Lucy Kerr knew that she’d signed on to do a job where, like the army, you followed the chain of command. “All right,” she muttered angrily. “But for the record I’m against going that way. It doesn’t make any sense.” She turned and started along the path, leaving the others behind. Her footsteps growing silent suddenly as she walked over a thick blanket of pine needles that covered the path.
    Amelia’s phone rang and she slowed as she took the call.
    Lucy strode quickly ahead of her, over the thick bed of needles, trying to control her anger. There was no way Garrett Hanlon would come this way. It was a waste of time. They should have dogs. They should call Elizabeth City and get the state police choppers out. They should—
    Then the world became a blur and she was tumbling forward, giving a short scream—her hands outstretched to catch her fall. “Jesus!”
    Lucy fell hard onto the path, the breath knocked out of her, pine needles digging into her palms.
    “Don’t move,” Amelia Sachs said, climbing to her feet after tackling the deputy.
    “What the hell d’you do that for?” Lucy gasped, her hands stinging from the impact with the ground.
    “Don’t move ! Ned and Jesse, you either.”
    Ned and Jesse froze, hands on their weapons, looking around, not sure what was going on.
    Amelia, wincing as she stood, stepped cautiously off the pine needles and found a long stick in the woods, picked it up. She moved forward slowly, slipping the branch into the ground.
    Two feet in front of Lucy, where she’d been about to step, the stick disappeared through a pile of pine boughs. “It’s a trap.”
    “But there’s no trip wire,” Lucy said. “I was looking.”
    Carefully Amelia lifted away the boughs and the needles. They rested on a network of fishing line and covered a pit about two feet deep.
    “The fish line wasn’t a trip wire,” Ned said. “It was to make that—a deadfall pit. Lucy, you nearly stepped right in it.”
    “And inside? There a bomb?” Jesse asked.
    Amelia said to him, “Let me have your flashlight.” He handed it to her. She shined the beam into the hole then backed up quickly.
    “What is it?” Lucy asked.
    “No bomb,” Amelia responded. “Hornets’ nest.”
    Ned looked. “Christ, what a bastard . . .”
    Amelia carefully lifted off the rest of the boughs, exposing the hole and the nest, which was about the size of a football.
    “Man,” Ned muttered, closing his eyes, undoubtedly considering what it would have been like to find a hundred stinging wasps clustered around your thighs and waist.
    Lucy rubbed her hands together—they smarted from the fall. She rose to her feet. “How’d you know?”
    “ I didn’t. That was Lincoln on the phone. He was reading through Garrett’s books. There was an underlined passage about some insect called an ant lion. It digs a pit and stings its enemy to death when it falls in. Garrett had circled it and the ink was just a few days old. Rhyme remembered the cut pine needles and the fishing line. He figured that the boy might dig a trap and told me to look for a bed of pine boughs on the path.”
    “Let’s burn the nest out,” Jesse said.
    “No,” Amelia said.
    “But it’s dangerous.”
    Lucy agreed with the policewoman. “A fire’d give away our position and Garrett’d know where we are. Just leave it uncovered so people can see it. We’ll come back afterward and take care of it. Hardly anybody comes along here anyway.”
    Amelia nodded. She made a call on her phone. “We found it, Rhyme. Nobody got hurt. There was no bomb—he put a hornets’ nest inside. . . . Okay. We’ll be careful. . . . Keep reading that book. Let us know if you find anything else.”
    They started down the path once more and covered a good quarter mile before Lucy found it in her to say, “Thanks. Y’all were right about him