The Empty Chair

There’s no way out.”
    “How?” he asked. “How’d you find me?” His voice was childlike, younger than most sixteen-year-olds’.
    She didn’t share with him that how they’d found the ammonia trap and the mill had been Lincoln Rhyme, of course. Just as they’d started down the center path at the crossroads in the woods the criminalist had called her. He’d said, “One of the feed-and-grain clerks Jim Bell talked to said that you don’t see corn used as feed aroundhere. He said it probably came from a gristmill and Jim knew about an abandoned one that’d burned last year. That’d explain the scorch marks.”
    Bell got on the phone and told the search party how to get to the mill. Then Rhyme had come back on and added, “I’ve got a thought about the ammonia too.”
    Rhyme had been reading Garrett’s books and found an underlined passage about insects’ using smells to communicate warnings. He’d decided that since the ammonia wasn’t found in commercial explosives, like the kind used at the quarry, Garrett had possibly rigged some ammonia on a fishing-line trip wire. This was so that when the pursuers spilled it the boy could smell that they were close and could escape.
    After they found the trap it’d been Sachs’s idea to fill one of Ned’s water bottles with ammonia, quietly surround the mill and pour the chemical on the ground outside the mill—to flush the boy.
    And flush him it had.
    But he still wasn’t listening to her instructions. Garrett looked around and then studied her face, as if trying to decide if she really would shoot him.
    He scratched at a rash on his face and wiped sweat, then adjusted his grip on the knife, looking right and left, eyes filling with despair and panic.
    Afraid to startle him into running—or attacking her—Sachs tried to sound like a mother coercing her child to sleep. “Garrett, do what I’m asking. Everything’ll be fine. Just do what I’m asking. Please.”

    “You got a shot? Take it,” Mason Germain was whispering.
    A hundred yards away from where that bitchy redhead from New York was confronting the killer, Mason and Nathan Groomer were on the crest of a bald hill.
    Mason was standing. Nathan was prone on the hot ground. He’d sandbagged the Ruger on a low rise of helpful rocks and was concentrating on controlling his breathing, the way hunters of elks and geese and human beings are supposed to do before they shoot.
    “Go on,” Mason urged. “There’s no wind. You got a clear view. Take the shot!”
    “Mason, the boy’s not doing anything.”
    They saw Lucy Kerr and Jesse Corn walk into the clearing, joining the redhead, their guns also pointed at the boy. Nathan continued, “Everybody’s got him covered and it’s only a knife he’s got. A little pissant knife. It looks like he’s going to give up.”
    “He’s not going to give up,” spat out Mason Germain, who shifted his slight weight from one foot to the other in impatience. “I told you—he’s faking. He’s gonna kill one of ’em as soon as their guard’s down. It don’t mean anything to you that Ed Schaeffer’s dead?” Steve Farr had called with this sad news a half-hour ago.
    “Come on, Mason. I’m as tore up about that as anybody. That doesn’t have a thing to do with the rules of engagement. Besides, look, will you? Lucy and Jesse’re six feet away from him.”
    “You worried about hitting them ? Fuck, you could hit a dime at this range, Nathan. Nobody shoots better’n you. Take it. Take your shot.”
    “I—”
    Mason was watching the curious little play going on in the clearing. The redhead lowered her gun and took a step forward. Garrett was still holding the knife. Head swiveling back and forth.
    The woman took another step toward him.
    Oh, that’s helpful, bitch.
    “She in your line of fire?”
    “No. But, I mean,” Nathan said, “we’re not even supposed to be here.”
    “That’s not the issue,” Mason muttered. “We are here.I authorized backup to protect the search party and I’m ordering you to take a shot. Your safety off?”
    “Yeah, it’s off.”
    “Then shoot.”
    Peering through the ’scope.
    Mason watched the gun barrel of the Ruger freeze, as Nathan grew into his weapon. Mason had seen this before—when he hunted with friends who were far better sportsmen than he was. It was an eerie thing that he didn’t quite understand. Your weapon becomes part of you just before the gun fires, almost by itself.
    Mason waited for