“And inside? There a bomb?” Jesse asked.

Amelia said to him, “Let me have your flashlight.” He handed it to her. She shined the beam into the hole then backed up quickly.

“What is it?” Lucy asked.

“No bomb,” Amelia responded. “Hornets’ nest.”

Ned looked. “Christ, what a bastard …”

Amelia carefully lifted off the rest of the boughs, exposing the hole and the nest, which was about the size of a football.

“Man,” Ned muttered, closing his eyes, undoubtedly considering what it would have been like to find a hundred stinging wasps clustered around your thighs and waist.

Lucy rubbed her hands together—they smarted from the fall. She rose to her feet. “How’d you know?”

“I didn’t. That was Lincoln on the phone. He was reading through Garrett’s books. There was an underlined passage about some insect called an ant lion. It digs a pit and stings its enemy to death when it falls in. Garrett had circled it and the ink was just a few days old. Rhyme remembered the cut pine needles and the fishing line. He figured that the boy might dig a trap and told me to look for a bed of pine boughs on the path.”

“Let’s burn the nest out,” Jesse said.

“No,” Amelia said.

“But it’s dangerous.”

Lucy agreed with the policewoman. “A fire’d give away our position and Garrett’d know where we are. Just leave it uncovered so people can see it. We’ll come back afterward and take care of it. Hardly anybody comes along here anyway.”

Amelia nodded. She made a call on her phone. “We found it, Rhyme. Nobody got hurt. There was no bomb—he put a hornets’ nest inside…. Okay. We’ll be careful…. Keep reading that book. Let us know if you find anything else.”

They started down the path once more and covered a good quarter mile before Lucy found it in her to say, “Thanks. Y’all were right about him coming this way. I was wrong.” She hesitated for another long moment then added, “Jim made a good choice—bringing you down from New York for this. I wasn’t real crazy about it at first but I won’t argue with results.”

Amelia frowned. “Bringing us down? What do you mean?”

“To help out.”

“Jim didn’t do that.”

“What?” Lucy asked.

“No, no, we were over at the medical center in Avery. Lincoln’s having some surgery. Jim heard we were going to be here so he came by this morning to ask if we’d look at some evidence.”

A long pause. Then Lucy gave a laugh as the relief flooded through her. “I thought he’d scrounged up county money to fly y’all down here after the kidnapping yesterday.”

Amelia shook her head. “The surgery’s not till day after tomorrow. We had some free time. That’s all.”