“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 would lead 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.