The Empty Chair (Lincoln Rhyme 3)

... chapter forty-two

Mason Germain and the sullen black man moved slowly through the alley next to the Tanner's County lockup.

The man was sweating and he slapped in irritation at a mosquito. He muttered something and wiped a long hand over his short kinky hair.

Mason felt an urge to needle him but resisted.

The man was tall and by stretching up on his toes he could look into the lockup window. Mason saw that he wore short black boots--shiny patent leather--which for some reason added to the deputy's contempt for the out-of-towner. He wondered how many men he'd shot.

"She's in there," the man said. "She's alone."

"We're keeping Garrett on the other side."

"You go in the front. Can somebody get out through the back?"

"I'm a deputy, remember? I got a key. I can unlock it." He said this in a snide tone, wondering again if this fellow was halfway bright.

He got snide in return. "I was only asking if there's a door in the back. Which I don't know, never having been in this swamp of a town before."

"Oh. Yeah, there's a door."

"Well, let's go then."

Mason noticed that the man's gun was in his hand and that he hadn't seen him draw it.

Sachs sat on the bench in her cell, hypnotized by the motion of a fly.

What kind was it? she wondered. Garrett would know in an instant. He was a warehouse of knowledge. A thought occurred to her: There'd be that moment when a child's knowledge of a subject surpasses his parents'. It must be a miraculou

s thing, exhilarating, to know that you'd produced this creation who'd outsoared you. Humbling too.

An experience that she now would never know.

She thought once again about her father. The man had diffused crime. Never fired his gun in all his years on duty. Proud as he was of his daughter, he'd worried about her fascination with firearms. "Shoot last," he'd often remind her.

Oh, Jesse.... What can I say to you?

Nothing, of course. I can't say a word. You're gone.

She thought she saw a shadow outside the lockup window. But she ignored it, and her thoughts slipped to Rhyme.

You and me, she was thinking. You and me.

Recalling the time a few months ago, lying together in his opulent Clinitron bed in his Manhattan town house, as they watched Baz Luhrmann's stylish Romeo and Juliet, an updated version set in Miami. With Rhyme, death always hovered close and, watching the final scenes of the movie, Amelia Sachs had realized that, like Shakespeare's characters, she and Rhyme were in a way star-crossed lovers too. And another thought had then flashed through her mind: that the two of them would also die together.

She hadn't dared share this thought with rationalist Lincoln Rhyme, who didn't have a sentimental cell in his brain. But once this notion had occurred to her it seated itself permanently in her psyche and for some reason gave her great comfort.

Yet now she couldn't even find solace in this odd thought. No, now--thanks to her--they'd live separately and die separately. They'd--

The door to the lockup swung open and a young deputy walked inside. She recognized him. It was Steve Farr, Jim Bell's brother-in-law.

"Hey there," he called.

Sachs nodded. Then she noticed two things about him. One was that he wore a Rolex watch, which must've cost half the annual salary of a typical cop in North Carolina.

The other was that he wore a sidearm and that the holster thong was unsnapped.

Despite the sign outside the door to the cells: PLACE ALL WEAPONS IN THE LOCKBOX BEFORE ENTERING THE CELL AREA.