“I just wanted to go to Bennigan’s with you!” he said, sobbing. “That’s all. Like, just to have dinner, all of us. I just wanted to go with you. Why wouldn’t you let me in the car? You saw me coming and you locked the door. I wasn’t that late!” Then Garrett grew angry. “You locked me out! You were mad at me and it wasn’t fair. What I did, being late … it wasn’t that bad. I must’ve done something else to make you mad. What? Why didn’t you want me to go with you? Tell me what I did.” His voice was choked. “Come back and tell me. Come back! I want to know! What did I do? Tell me, tell me, tell me!”

Sobbing, he jumped up and kicked the empty chair hard. It sailed across the room and fell on its side. He grabbed the chair and, screaming in fury, smashed it into the floor of the trailer. Sachs pushed back, blinking in shock at the anger she’d unleashed. He slammed the chair down a dozen times until it was nothing but a shattered mass of wood and rattan. Finally Garrett collapsed on the floor, hugging himself. Sachs rose and put her arms around him as he sobbed and shook.

After five minutes the crying ended. He stood up, wiped his face on his sleeve.

“Garrett,” she began in a whisper.

But he shook his head. “I’m going outside,” he said. Then rose and pushed out the door.

She sat for a moment, wondering what to do. Sachs was utterly exhausted but she didn’t lie down on the mat he’d left for her and try to sleep. She shut the lantern off and pulled the cloth off the window then sat in the musty armchair. She leaned forward, smelling the pungent aroma of the citronella plant, and watched the hunched-over silhouette of the boy, sitting outside on an oak stump and gazing intently at the moving constellations of lightning bugs that filled the forest around him.

… chapter thirty-two

Lincoln Rhyme muttered, “I don’t believe it.”

He’d just spoken with a furious Lucy Kerr and had learned that Sachs had taken several shots at a deputy under the Hobeth Bridge.

“I don’t believe it,” he repeated in a whisper to Thom.

The aide was a master of dealing with broken bodies and spirits broken because of broken bodies. But this was a different matter, far worse, and the best he could do was offer, “It’s a mix-up. It has to be. Amelia wouldn’t do that.”