The Empty Chair (Lincoln Rhyme 3)

This wasn't exactly the time or place for a picnic but, Sachs supposed, chicken salad and watermelon were as good a way as any to remember the dead.

Scotch too, of course. Sachs dug through several shopping bags and finally found the bottle of Macallan, eighteen years old. She pulled the cork stopper out with a faint pop.

"Ah, my favorite sound," Lincoln Rhyme said.

He was wheeling up beside her, driving carefully along the uneven grass. The hill down to the grave was too steep for the Storm Arrow and he'd had to wait up here in the lot. He'd watched from the hilltop as they buried the ashes of the bones that Mary Beth had found at Blackwater Landing--the remains of Garrett's family.

Sachs poured scotch into Rhyme's glass, equipped with a long straw, and some into hers. Everyone else was drinking beer.

He said, "Moonshine is truly vile, Sachs. Avoid it at all costs. This is much better."

Sachs looked around. "Where's the woman from the hospital? The caregiver?"

"Mrs. Ruiz?" Rhyme muttered. "Hopeless. She quit. Left me in the lurch."

"Quit?" Thom said. "You drove her nuts. You might as well have fired her."

"I was a saint," the criminalist snapped.

"How's your temperature?" Thom asked him.

"It's fine," he grumbled. "How's yours?"

"Probably a little high but I don't have a blood pressure problem."

"No, you've a bullet hole in you."

The aide persisted, "You should--"

"I said I'm fine."

"--move into the shade a little farther."

Rhyme groused and complained about the unsteady ground but he finally maneuvered himself into the shade a little farther.

Garrett was carefully setting out food and drink and napkins on a bench under the tree.

"How're you doing?" Sachs asked Rhyme in a whisper. "And before you grumble at me too--I'm not talking about the heat."

He shrugged--this, a silent grumble by which he meant: I'm fine.

But he wasn't fine. A phrenic-nerve stimulator pumped current into his body to help his lungs inhale and exhale. He hated the device--had weaned himself off it some years ago--but there was no question that he needed it now. Two days ago, on the operating table, Lydia Johansson had come very close to stopping his breathing forever.

In the waiting room at the hospital, after Lydia had said good-bye to Sachs and Lucy, Sachs had noticed that the nurse vanished through the doorway marked NEUROSURGERY. Sachs had asked, "Didn't you say that she works in oncology?"

"She does."

"Then what's she doing going in there?"

"Maybe saying hello to Lincoln," Lucy suggested.

But Sachs didn't think that nurses paid social calls to patients about to be operated on.

Then she thought: Lydia would know about new cancer diagnoses among residents from Tanrfer's Corner. She then recalled that somebody had given information to Bell about cancer patients--the three people in Blackwater Landing that Culbeau and his friends had killed. Who better than a nurse on the onco ward? This was far-fetched but Sachs mentioned it to Lucy, who pulled out her cell phone and made an emergency call to the phone company, whose security department did a down-and-dirty pen-register search of Jim Bell's phone calls. There were hundreds to and from Lydia.

"She's going to kill him!" Sachs had cried. And the two women, one with a weapon drawn, had burst into the operating room--a scene right out of a melodramatic episode of ER--just as Dr. Weaver was about to make the opening incision.

Lydia had panicked and, trying to escape, or trying to do what Bell had sent her for, ripped the oxygen tube from Rhyme's throat before the two women subdued her. From that trauma and because of the anesthetic Rhyme's lungs had failed. Dr. Weaver had revived him but, afterward, his breathing hadn't been up to par and he'd had to go back on the stimulator.