The Empty Chair

Bullseye matches?”
    “Right.”
    “That’s my sport too! Well, skeet and trap, course. But sidearms’re my specialty.”
    Hers too but she thought it best not to find too much in common with adoring Jesse Corn.
    “You reload your own ammo?” he asked.
    “Uh-huh. Well, the .38s and .45s. Not the rimfire, of course. Getting the bubbles out of slugs—that’s the big problem.”
    “Whoa, you’re not telling me you cast your own bullets?”
    “I do,” she admitted, recalling that when everyone else’s apartment in her building smelled of waffles and bacon on Sunday morning hers often was redolent of the unique aroma of molten lead.
    “I don’t do that,” he said apologetically. “I buy match rounds.”
    They walked for another few minutes in silence, all eyes on the ground, looking for more deadfall traps.
    “So,” Jesse Corn said, offering a coy grin, swiping his blond hair off his damp forehead. “I’ll show you mine. . . .” Sachs looked at him quizzically and he continued. “I mean, what’s your best score? On the Bullseye circuit?” When she hesitated he encouraged: “Come on, you can tell me. It’s only a sport. . . . And, hey, I’ve been competing for ten years. I got a little edge on you.”
    “Twenty-seven hundred,” Sachs said.
    Jesse nodded. “Right, that’s the match I mean—the three-pistol rotation, nine hundred points max for each gun. What’s your best?”
    “No, that’s my score,” she said, wincing as a jolt of arthritic pain coursed through her stiff legs. “Twenty-seven hundred.”
    Jesse turned to her, looking for signs of a joke. When she didn’t grin or guffaw, he exhaled a fast laugh. “But that’s a perfect score.”
    “Oh, I don’t shoot that every match. But you asked what my best was.”
    “But . . . ” His eyes were wide. “I’ve never even met anybody shot a twenty-seven hundred.”
    “You have now,” Ned said, laughing hard. “And don’t feel bad, Jess—it’s only a sport.”
    “Twenty-seven . . .” The young deputy shook his head.
    Sachs decided she should have lied. With this information about her ballistic prowess it seemed that Jesse Corn’s love for her was sealed.
    “Say, after this is over,” he said shyly, “you have some free time, maybe you and me could go out to the range, waste us some ammo.”
    And Sachs thought: Better a box of Winchester .38 specials than a cup of Starbucks accompanied by talk of how hard it is to meet women in Tanner’s Corner.
    “Let’s see how things go.”
    “It’s a date,” he said, using the word she’d hoped wouldn’t surface.
    “There,” Lucy said. “Look.” They stopped at the edge of the forest and saw the quarry in front of them.
    Sachs motioned them into a crouch. Damn, that hurts. She popped condroitin and glucosamine daily but this Carolina humidity and heat—it was hell on her poor joints. She gazed at the huge pit—two hundred yards across and easily a hundred feet deep. The walls were yellow, like old bone, and they dropped straight down into green, brackish water that smelled sour. The vegetation for twenty yards around the perimeter had died bad deaths.
    “Keep clear of the water,” Lucy warned in a whisper. “It’s bad. Kids used to swim here. Not long after they shut it down. My nephew did once—Ben’s younger brother. But I just showed him the coroner’s picture from when they fished Kevin Dobbs out after he’d drowned and been in the water for a week. Never went back.”
    “I think Dr. Spock recommends that approach,” Sachs said. Lucy laughed.
    Sachs, thinking about children again.
    Not now, not now. . . .
    Her phone vibrated. As they’d gotten closer to their prey she’d turned off the ringer. She answered. Rhyme’s voice crackled, “Sachs. Where are you?”
    “The rim of the quarry,” she whispered.
    “Any sign of him?”
    “We just got here. Nothing yet. We’re about to start searching. All the buildings’ve been torn down and I don’t see anywhere he could be hiding. But there’re a dozen places he could’ve left a trap.”
    “Sachs. . . .”
    “What is it, Rhyme?” His solemn tone chilled her.
    “There’s something I have to tell you. I just got the DNA and serologic results from the medical center. On that Kleenex you found at the scene this morning.”
    “And?”
    “It was Garrett’s semen all right. And the blood—it was Mary Beth’s.”
    “He raped her,” Sachs whispered.
    “Be careful, Sachs, but