Ah, the eternal conflict, Rhyme reflected: trust evidence or trust witnesses? If he picked wrong, Lydia or Mary Beth might die. "They should stay where they are, north of the river."
"You sure?" Bell asked doubtfully.
"Yes."
"Okay," Bell said.
The phone rang and with a firm press of his left ring finger Rhyme answered it.
Sachs's voice clattered into his headset. "We're at a dead end, Rhyme. There're four or five paths here, going in different directions, and we don't have a clue which way Garrett went."
"I don't have anything more for you, Sachs. We're trying to identify more of the evidence."
"Nothing more in the books?"
"Nothing specific. But it's fascinating--they're pretty serious reading for a sixteen-year-old. He's smarter than I would have figured. Where are you exactly, Sachs?" Rhyme looked up. "Ben! Go to the map, please."
He aimed his massive frame at the wall and took up a position beside it.
Sachs consulted someone else in the search party. Then said, "About four miles northeast of where we forded Stone Creek, pretty much in a straight line."
Rhyme repeated this to Ben, who put his hand on a part of the map. Location J-7.
Near Ben's massive forefinger was an unidentified L-shaped formation. "Ben, you have any idea what that square is?"
"Think that's the old quarry."
"Oh, Jesus," Rhyme muttered, shaking his head in frustration.
"What?" Ben asked, alarmed that he'd done something wrong.
"Why the hell didn't anybody tell me there was a quarry near there?"
Ben's round face looked even more puffed up than it had been; he was taking the accusation personally. "I didn't really..."
But Rhyme wasn't even listening. There was no one to blame but himself for this lapse. Someone had told him about the quarry--Henry Davett, when he'd said that limestone was big business in the area at one time. How else do companies produce commercial limestone? Rhyme should've asked about a quarry as soon as he'd heard that. And the nitrates weren't from pipe bombs at all but from blasting out rock--that kind of residue would last for decades.
He said into the phone, "There's an abandoned quarry not far from you. To the southwest."
A pause. Faint words. She said, "Jesse knows about it."
"Garrett was there. I don't know if he still is. So be careful. And remember he may not be leaving bombs but he's rigging traps. Call me when you find something."
Now that Lydia was away from the Outside and wasn't as sick from heat and exhaustion, she realized that she had the Inside to contend with. And that was proving to be just as frightening.
Her captor would pace for a while, look out the window, then squat on his haunches, clicking his fingernails and muttering to himself, looking over her body, then go back to pacing. Once, Garrett glanced down at the floor of the mill and picked up something. He slipped it into his mouth, chewed hungrily. She wondered if it was an insect and the thought of this nearly made her vomit.
They were in what seemed to have been the office of the mill. From here she could look down a corridor, partly burnt in the fire, to another series of rooms--probably the grain storage and the grinding rooms. Brilliant afternoon light flowed through the burnt-out walls and ceiling of the hallway.
Something orange caught her eye. She squinted and saw bags of Doritos. Also Cape Cod potato chips. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. And more of those Planters peanut butter and cheese cracker packages he'd had at the quarry. Sodas and Deer Park water. She hadn't seen them when they first entered the mill.
Why all this food? How long would they be staying here? Garrett had said just for the night but there were enough provisions for a month's stay. Was he going to keep her here longer than he'd originally told her?
Lydia asked, "Is Mary Beth all right? Have you hurt her?"
"Oh, yeah, like I'm going to hurt her," he said sarcastically. "I don't think so." Lydia turned away and studied the shafts of light piercing the remains of the corridor. From beyond it came a squeaking sound--the revolving millstone, she guessed.
Garrett continued, offering: "The only reason I took her away is to make sure she's okay. She wanted to get out of Tanner's Corner. She likes it at the beach. I mean, fuck, who wouldn't? Better than shitty Tanner's Corner." Snapping his nails faster now, louder. He was agitated and nervous. With his huge hands he ripped open one of the bags of chips. He ate several handfuls, chewing them sloppily, bits falling from his mouth. He drank down an entire can of Coke at once. Ate more chips.
"This place burned down two years ago," he said. "I don't know who did it. You like that sound? The water-wheel? It's pretty cool. The wheel going round and round. Like, reminds me of this song my father used to sing around the house all the time. 'Big wheel keep on turning...'" He shoveled more food into his mouth and started speaking. She couldn't understand him for a moment. He swallowed. "--here a lot. You sit here at night, listen to the cicada and the bloodnouns--you know, the bullfrogs. If I'm going all the way to the ocean--like now--I spend the night here. You'll like it at night." He stopped talking and leaned toward her suddenly. Too scared to look directly at him, she kept her eyes downcast but sensed he was studying her closely. Then, in an instant, he leapt up and crouched close beside her.
Lydia winced as she smelled his body odor. She waited for his hands to crawl over her chest, between her legs.
But he wasn't interested in her, it seemed. Garrett moved aside a rock and lifted something out from underneath.
"A millipede." He smiled. The creature was long and yellow-green and the sight of it sickened her.
"They feel neat. I like them." He let it climb over his hand and wrist. "They're not insects," he lectured. "They're like cousins. They're dangerous if you try to hurt them. Their bite is really bad. The Indians around here used to grind them up and put the poison on arrowheads. When a millipede is scared it shits poison and then escapes. A predator crawls through the gas and dies. That's pretty wild, huh?"
Garrett grew silent and studied the millipede intently, the way Lydia herself would look at her niece and nephew--with affection, amusement, almost love.
Lydia felt the horror rising in her. She knew she should stay calm, knew she shouldn't antagonize Garrett, should just play along with him. But seeing that disgusting bug slither over his arm, hearing his fingernails click, watching his blotched skin and wet, red eyes, the flecks of food on his chin, she convulsed in panic.
As the disgust and the fear boiled up in her Lydia imagined she heard a faint voice, urging, "Yes, yes, yes!" A voice that could only belong to a guardian angel.
Yes, yes, yes!
She rolled onto her back. Garrett looked up, smiling from the sensation of the animal on his skin, curious about what she was doing. And Lydia lashed out as hard as she could with both feet. She had strong legs, used to carrying her big frame for eight-hour shifts at the hospital, and the kick sent him tumbling backward. He hit his head against the wall with a dull thud and rolled to the floor, stunned. Then he cried out, a raw scream, and grabbed his arm; the millipede must have bit him.
Yes! Lydia thought triumphantly as she rolled upright. She struggled to her feet and ran blindly toward the grinding room at the end of the corridor.
... chapter twelve
According to Jesse Corn's reckoning they were almost to the quarry.
"About five minutes ahead," he told Sachs. Then he glanced at her twice and after some tacit debate said, "You know, I was going to ask you.... When you drew your weapon, when that turkey came outa the brush. Well, and at Blackwater Landing too when Rich Culbeau surprised us.... That was ... well, that was something. You know how to drive a nail, looks like."
She knew, from Roland Bell, the Southern expression meant "to shoot."
"One of my hobbies," she said.
"No foolin'!"
"Easier than running," she said. "Cheaper than joining a health club."
"You in competition?"
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Sachs nodded. "North Shore Pistol Club on Long Island."
"How 'bout that," he said with a daunting enthusiasm. "NRA Bullseye matches?"
"Right."
"That's my sport too! Well, skeet and trap, course. But sidearms're my specialty."
Hers too but she thought it best not to find too much in common with adoring Jesse Corn.
"You reload your own ammo?" he asked.
"Uh-huh. Well, the .38s and .45s. Not the rimfire, of course. Getting the bubbles out of slugs--that's the big problem."
"Whoa, you're not telling me you cast your own bullets?"
"I do," she admitted, recalling that when everyone else's apartment in her building smelled of waffles and bacon on Sunday morning hers often was redolent of the unique aroma of molten lead.
"I don't do that," he said apologetically. "I buy match rounds."
They walked for another few minutes in silence, all eyes on the ground, looking for more deadfall traps.
"So," Jesse Corn said, offering a coy grin, swiping his blond hair off his damp forehead. "I'll show you mine...." Sachs looked at him quizzically and he continued. "I mean, what's your best score? On the Bullseye circuit?" When she hesitated he encouraged: "Come on, you can tell me. It's only a sport.... And, hey, I've been competing for ten years. I got a little edge on you."
"Twenty-seven hundred," Sachs said.
Jesse nodded. "Right, that's the match I mean--the three-pistol rotation, nine hundred points max for each gun. What's your best?"
"No, that's my score," she said, wincing as a jolt of arthritic pain coursed through her stiff legs. "Twenty-seven hundred."
Jesse turned to her, looking for signs of a joke. When she didn't grin or guffaw, he exhaled a fast laugh. "But that's a perfect score."
"Oh, I don't shoot that every match. But you asked what my best was."
"But ..." His eyes were wide. "I've never even met anybody shot a twenty-seven hundred."
"You have now," Ned said, laughing hard. "And don't feel bad, Jess--it's only a sport."
"Twenty-seven ..." The young deputy shook his head.
Sachs decided she should have lied. With this information about her ballistic prowess it seemed that Jesse Corn's love for her was sealed.
"Say, after this is over," he said shyly, "you have some free time, maybe you and me could go out to the range, waste us some ammo."
And Sachs thought: Better a box of Winchester :38 specials than a cup of Starbucks accompanied by talk of how hard it is to meet women in Tanner's Corner.
"Let's see how things go."
"It's a date," he said, using the word she'd hoped wouldn't surface.
"There," Lucy said. "Look." They stopped at the edge of the forest and saw the quarry in front of them.
Sachs motioned them into a crouch. Damn, that hurts. She popped condroitin and glucosamine daily but this Carolina humidity and heat--it was hell on her poor joints. She gazed at the huge pit--two hundred yards across and easily a hundred feet deep. The walls were yellow, like old bone, and they dropped straight down into green, brackish water that smelled sour. The vegetation for twenty yards around the perimeter had died bad deaths.
"Keep clear of the water," Lucy warned in a whisper. "It's bad. Kids used to swim here. Not long after they shut it down. My nephew did once--Ben's younger brother. But I just showed him the coroner's picture from when they fished Kevin Dobbs out after he'd drowned and been in the water for a week. Never went back."
"I think Dr. Spock recommends that approach," Sachs said. Lucy laughed.
Sachs, thinking about children again.
Not now, not now....
Her phone vibrated. As they'd gotten closer to their prey she'd turned off the ringer. She answered. Rhyme's voice crackled, "Sachs. Where are you?"
"The rim of the quarry," she whispered.
"Any sign of him?"
"We just got here. Nothing yet. We're about to start searching. All the buildings've been torn down and I don't see anywhere he could be hiding. But there're a dozen places he could've left a trap."
"Sachs...."
"What is it, Rhyme?" His solemn tone chilled her.
"There's something I have to tell you. I just got the DNA and serologic results from the medical center. On that Kleenex you found at the scene this morning."
"And?"
"It was Garrett's semen all right. And the blood--it was Mary Beth's."
"He raped her," Sachs whispered.
"Be careful, Sachs, but move fast. I don't think Lydia has much time left."
She was hiding in a dark, filthy bin that had been used to store grain long ago.
Hands behind her, still dizzy from the heat and dehydration, Lydia Johansson had stumbled down the bright corridor away from where Garrett lay writhing and had found this hiding space on the floor below the grinding room. When she slipped inside and closed the door a dozen mice had skittered over her feet and it took every ounce of willpower within her to keep from screaming.
Now listening for Garrett's footsteps over the low-gear sound of the grinding wheel nearby.
Panic was filling her and she was starting to regret her defiant escape. But there was no going back, she decided. She'd hurt Garrett and now he was going to hurt her back if he found her. Maybe do worse. There was nothing to do but try to escape.
No, she decided, that wasn't the right way to think. One of her angel books said there was no such thing as "trying to." You either did or you didn't. She wasn't going to try to get away. She was going to escape. She just had to have faith.
Lydia looked through a crack in the bin door, listened carefully. She heard him in one of the rooms nearby, muttering to himself and ripping open bins and closet doors. She'd hoped that he'd think she'd run outside through the collapsed wall in the burnt-out corridor but it was obvious from his methodical search that he knew she was still here. She couldn't stay in the storage closet any longer. He'd find her. She glanced out through a crack in the door and, not seeing him, she slipped out of the bin and ran into an adjoining room, moving silently on her white sneakers. The only exit from this room was a stairway leading up to the second floor. She staggered up it, gasping for breath and, not having her hands for balance, bounding off the walls and the wrought-iron railing.
She heard his voice echoing in the corridor. "You made him bite me!" he cried. "It hurts, it hurts."
Wish it had stung you in the eye or crotch, she thought and struggled up the stairs. Fuck you fuck you fuck you!
She heard him ripping open closet doors in the room below. Heard his guttural moaning. Imagined she could hear the snick, snick of his nails.
That shiver of panic again. Nausea swelling.
The room at the top of the stairs was large and had a number of windows facing the burnt portion of the mill. There was one door, which was unlocked, and she pushed it open, stepped into the grinding area itself--two large millstones sat in the center. The wooden mechanism was rotted; the sound she'd heard wasn't the stones but the waterwheel, powered by the diverted stream. It still turned slowly. Rust-colored water cascaded off it into a deep, narrow pit, like a well. Lydia couldn't see the bottom. The water must've drained back into the stream somewhere below the surface.
"Stop!" Garrett cried.
She jumped in shock at the angry sound. He stood in the doorway. His eyes were red and wide and he was cradling his arm, on which was a huge black-and-yellow bruise. "You made it sting me," he muttered, staring at her with hatred. "It's dead. You made me kill it! I didn't want to but you made me! Now get your ass downstairs. I've gotta tape your legs up now."
He started forward.
She looked at his bony face, brows knit together, his huge hands, his angry eyes. Into her thoughts came a burst of images: a cancer patient of hers, slowly wasting to death. Mary Beth McConnell locked away somewhere. The boy madly chewing his chips. The scuttling millipede. The fingernails snapping. The Outside. Her long nights alone, waiting--desperately--for a brief pho
ne call from her boyfriend. Taking the flowers to Blackwater Landing, even though she didn't really want to ...
It was all too much for her.
"Wait," Lydia said placidly.
He blinked. Stopped walking.
She smiled at him--the way she'd smile at a terminal patient--and, sending a good-bye prayer to her boyfriend, Lydia, hands still bound behind her, plunged headfirst into the narrow pit of dark water.
The crosshairs of the Hitech telescopic sight rested on the redheaded cop's shoulders.
That was some hair, Mason Germain thought.
He and Nathan Groomer were on a rise overlooking the old Anderson Rock Products quarry. About a hundred yards away from the search party.
Nathan finally stated the conclusion he must've come to a half hour ago. "This don't have anything to do with Rich Culbeau."
"No, it doesn't. Not exactly."
"What's that mean? 'Not exactly'?"
"Culbeau's out here someplace. With Sean O'Sarian--"
"That boy's scarier than two Culbeaus."
"No argument there," Mason said. "And Harris Tomel too. But that's not what we're doing."
Nathan looked back at the deputies and the redhead. "Guess not. Why're you sighting down on Lucy Kerr with my gun?"
After a moment Mason handed back the Ruger M77 and said, "'Cause I didn't bring my fucking binoculars. And it wasn't Lucy I was looking at."
They started along the ridge. Mason was thinking about the redhead. Thinking about pretty Mary Beth McConnell. And Lydia. Thinking too how sometimes life just doesn't go the way you want it to. Mason Germain knew, for instance, that he should've advanced further than senior deputy by now. He knew he should've handled his request for promotion different. Just like he should've handled things different when Kelley left him for that trucker five years ago and, for that matter, handled his whole marriage different before she left him.
And should've handled the first Garrett Hanlon case a lot different too. The case where Meg Blanchard woke from her nap and found the hornets clustered on her chest and face and arms.... One hundred thirty-seven stings and a terrible slow death.
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