The Empty Chair

out we were coming this way?” he whispered. “ How? ”
    Because they’ve got Lincoln Rhyme, Sachs answered silently.

    “They don’t see anything yet, Lincoln,” Jim Bell told him.
    “Amelia and Garrett aren’t going to be walking down the middle of Canal Road,” Rhyme said testily. “They’ll be in the bushes. Keeping a low profile.”
    “There’s a roadblock set up and they’re searching every car,” Jim Bell said. “Even if they know the drivers.”
    Rhyme looked again at the map on the wall. “There’s no other way for them to go west from Tanner’s Corner?”
    “From the lockup the only way through the marshes is Canal Road to Route 112.” But Bell sounded doubtful. “I gotta say, though, this’s a big risk, Lincoln—committing everybody to Blackwater Landing. If they really are headed east to the Outer Banks they’re gonna get past us now and we’ll never find them. This idea of yours, well, it’s a little far-fetched.”
    But Rhyme believed it was right. As he’d stared at the map twenty minutes before, tracing the route the boy had taken with Lydia—which led toward the Great Dismal Swamp and very little else—he had started wondering about Lydia’s abduction. He had remembered what Sachs had told him when they were in the field pursuing Garrett this morning.
    Lucy says it doesn’t make any sense for him to come this way.
    And that had made him ask a question that no one had yet answered satisfactorily. Why exactly did Garrett kidnap Lydia Johansson? To kill her as a substitute victim was Dr. Penny’s answer. But, as it turned out, he hadn’t killed her even though he’d had plenty of time to. Or raped her. Nor was there any other motive for abducting her. They were strangers, she’d never taunted him, he didn’t seem to have an obsession with her, she wasn’t a witness to Billy’s murder. What could his point have been?
    Then he had recalled how Garrett had willingly told Lydia that Mary Beth was being held on the Outer Banks—and how she was happy, how she didn’t need to be rescued. Why would he volunteer that information? And the evidence at the mill—the ocean sand, the map of the Outer Banks . . . Lucy had found it easily, according to Sachs. Too easily. The scene, he had decided, had been staged, as forensic scientists call evidence planted to lead investigators off.
    Rhyme had shouted bitterly, “We’ve been set up!”
    “What do you mean, Lincoln?” Ben had asked.
    “He tricked us,” the criminalist had said. A sixteen-year-old boy had fooled them all. From the beginning. Rhyme had explained that Garrett had intentionally kicked off one shoe at the scene when he kidnapped Lydia. He’d filled it with limestone dust, which wouldlead anyone with knowledge of the area—Davett, for instance—to think of the quarry, where he’d planted the other evidence, the scorched bag and corn—that in turn led to the mill.
    The searchers were supposed to find Lydia, along with the rest of the planted evidence—to convince them that Mary Beth was being held in a house on the Outer Banks.
    Which meant of course that she was being held in the opposite direction—west of Tanner’s Corner.
    Garrett’s plan was brilliant but he had made one mistake—assuming that it would take the search party several days to find Lydia (which is why he’d left all the food for her). By then he’d have been with Mary Beth in the real hiding place and the searchers would be combing the Outer Banks.
    And so Rhyme had asked Bell what was the best route west from Tanner’s Corner. “Blackwater Landing,” the sheriff had answered. “Route 112.” And Rhyme had ordered Lucy and the other deputies there as fast as possible.
    There was a chance that Garrett and Sachs had been through the intersection already and were on their way west. But Rhyme had calculated distances and didn’t think that on foot—and keeping under cover—they could have gotten that far in so little time.
    Lucy now called in from the roadblock. Thom put the call on the speakerphone. The policewoman, undoubtedly still suspicious and wondering whose side Rhyme was really on, said skeptically, “I don’t see any sign of them here and we’ve checked every car that’s come by. Are you sure about this?”
    “Yes,” he announced. “I’m sure.”
    And whatever she chose to think of this arrogant response she said nothing other than “Let’s hope you’re right. There’s a chance for some real sorrow