The Empty Chair

“No, no . . . I’m scared. Make him stop!”
    Sachs said to Rhyme, “Ask Bell if Mason’s got a cell phone and have him call, tell him to stop the shooting.”
    “Okay, Sachs . . .”
    Rhyme hung up.
    If Garrett dies we’ll never find her . . .
    Amelia Sachs made a fast decision and tossed her gun on the ground behind her then stepped forward, facing Garrett, a foot from him, directly in between Mason’s gun and the boy. Thinking: In the time it took to do this Mason might’ve pulled the trigger, and the bullet, precedingthe sound wave of the gunshot, might be headed directly toward my back.
    She stopped breathing. Imagining she could feel the slug streaking at her.
    A moment passed. There was no shot.
    “Garrett, you’ve got to put the knife down.”
    “You tried to kill me! You tricked me!”
    She wondered if he’d stab her—in anger or panic. “No. We didn’t have anything to do with it. Look, I’m in front of you. I’m protecting you. He won’t shoot again.”
    Garrett studied her face carefully with his twitchy eyes.
    She wondered if Mason was waiting for her to move aside just enough so that he could sight on Garrett. He was obviously a bad shot and she imagined a bullet shattering her spine.
    Ah, Rhyme, she thought, you’re here for your operation to try to be more like me; maybe today I’ll become more like you. . . .
    Jesse Corn was sprinting through the brush up the hill, waving his arms and calling, “Mason, stop shooting! Stop shooting!”
    Garrett continued to examine Sachs closely. Then he tossed the knife aside and started compulsively clicking his fingernails over and over.
    As Lucy ran forward and cuffed Garrett, Sachs turned to the hill where Mason had been shooting from. She saw him stand, speaking on his phone. He glanced directly at her, it seemed, then shoved the phone into his pocket and started down the hill.

    “What the hell were you thinking of?” Sachs raged at Mason. She walked straight up to him. They stood only a foot apart and she was an inch taller than he was.
    “Saving your ass, lady,” Mason replied harshly. “Didn’t you happen to notice he had a weapon?”
    “Mason”—Jesse Corn tried to diffuse the situation—“she was trying to calm things down is all. She got him to give up.”
    But Amelia Sachs didn’t need any big brothers. She said, “I’ve been doing takedowns for years. He wasn’t going to move on me. The only threat was from you. You could’ve hit one of us. ”
    “Oh, bullshit.” Mason leaned close to her and she could smell the musky aftershave he seemed to have poured on.
    She eased away from the cloud of scent and said, “And if you’d killed Garrett, Mary Beth probably would’ve starved or suffocated to death.”
    “She’s dead,” Mason snapped. “That girl is lying in a grave somewhere and we’ll never find her body.”
    “Lincoln got a report on her blood,” Sachs responded. “She was alive as of last night.”
    This gave him a moment’s pause. He muttered, “Last night ain’t now.”
    “Come on, Mason,” Jesse said. “It worked out okay.”
    But he wasn’t calming. He lifted his arms and slapped his thighs. He looked into Sachs’s eyes, said, “I don’t know what the fuck we need you down here for anyway.”
    “Mason,” Lucy Kerr cut in, “it’s over with. We wouldn’t’ve found Lydia, it hadn’t been for Mr. Rhyme and Amelia here. We have them to thank. Let it go.”
    “ She’s the one not letting it go.”
    “When somebody puts me in the line of fire there better be a pretty good reason,” Sachs said evenly. “And it’s no reason at all that you’re gunning for that boy because you haven’t been able to make a case against him.”
    “You got no business talking about how I do my job. I—”
    “Okay, we got to wrap this up here,” Lucy said, “and get back to the office. We’re still working on the assumption that Mary Beth isn’t dead and we’ve got to find her.”
    “Hey,” Jesse Corn called. “There’s the chopper.”
    A helicopter from the medical center landed in a clearing near the mill and the medics brought Lydia out on a stretcher; she was suffering from minor heatstroke and had a badly sprained ankle. The woman had been hysterical at first—Garrett had come at her with a knife and even though it turned out he had used it just to cut a piece of duct tape to gag her she was still very shaken. She managed to calm down enough to tell them that Mary Beth