The Empty Chair

by Jeffery Deaver

  "Sure. Be happy to."

  Sachs gave him a wry look. But Rhyme knew the value of a flirt; Sachs would need cooperation--and a lot of it. Rhyme didn't think Lucy or Mason would be half as helpful as the already-infatuated Jesse Corn.

  Rhyme said, "I want Amelia to have a sidearm."

  "Jesse's our ordnance expert," Bell said. "He can rustle you up a nice Smith and Wesson."

  "You bet I can."

  "Let me have some cuffs too," Sachs said.

  "Sure thing."

  Bell noticed Mason, looking unhappy, staring at the map.

  "What is it?" the sheriff asked.

  "You really want my opinion?" the short man asked.

  "I asked, didn't I?"

  "You do what you think is best, Jim," Mason said in a taut voice, "but I don't think we have time for any more searches. There's a lot of territory out there. We've got to get after that boy and get after him fast."

  But it was Lincoln Rhyme who responded. Eyes on the map, at Location G-10, Blackwater Landing, the last place anyone had seen Lydia Johansson alive, he said, "We don't have enough time to move fast."

  ... chapter five

  "We wanted him," the man whispered cautiously, as if speaking too loudly would conjure a witch. He looked uneasily around the dusty front yard in which sat a wheelless pickup on concrete blocks. "We called family services and asked about Garrett specifically. 'Cause we'd heard about him and felt sorry. But, fact is, he was trouble from the start. Not like any of the other kids we had. We did our best but, I'll tell you, I'm thinking he doesn't see it that way. And we're scared. Scared bad."

  He stood on the weather-beaten front porch of his house north of Tanner's Corner, speaking to Amelia Sachs and Jesse Corn. Amelia was here, at Garrett's foster parents' house, solely to search his room but, despite the urgency, she was letting Hal Babbage ramble on in hopes that she might learn a bit more about Garrett Hanlon; Amelia Sachs didn't quite share Rhyme's view that evidence was the sole key to tracking down perps.

  But the only thing this conversation was revealing was that his foster parents were indeed, as Hal had said, terrified that Garrett would return to hurt them or the other children. His wife, who stood beside him on the porch, was a fat woman with curly rust-colored hair. She wore a stained country-western radio station giveaway T-shirt. MY BOOTS TAP TO WKRT. Like her husband's, Margaret Babbage's eyes often scanned the yard and surrounding forest, looking for Garrett's return, Sachs assumed.

  "It's not like we ever did anything to him," the man continued. "I never whipped him--the state won't let you do that anymore--but I'd be firm with him, make him toe the line. Like, we eat on a schedule. I insist on that. Only Garrett wouldn't show up on time. I lock the food up when it's not mealtime so he went hungry a lot. And sometimes I'd take him to father and son's Saturday Bible study and he hated that. He just sat there and didn't say a word. Embarrassed me, I'll tell you. And I'd nag him to clean that pigsty of a room." He hesitated, caught between anger and fear. "Those're just things you gotta make children do. But I know he hates me for 'em."

  The wife offered her own testimony: "We were mannerable to him. But he's not going to remember that. He's gonna remember the times we were strict." Her voice quivered. "And he's thinking of revenge."

  "I'll tell you, we'll protect ourselves," Garrett's foster father warned, speaking now to Jesse Corn. He nodded to a pile of nails and a rusty hammer sitting on the porch. "We're nailing the windows shut but if he tries to break in ... we'll protect ourselves. The children know what to do. They know where the shotgun is. I've taught 'em how to use it."

  He encouraged them to shoot Garrett? Sachs was shocked. She'd seen several other kids in the house, peering through the screens. They seemed to be no older than ten.

  "Hal," Jesse Corn said sternly, preempting Sachs, "don't go taking anything into your own hands. You see Garrett, call us. And don't let the little ones touch any firearms. Come on, you know better'n that."

  "We have drills," Hal said defensively. "Every Thursday night after supper. They know how to handle a gun." He squinted as he saw something in the yard. Tensing for a moment.

  "I'd like to see his room," Sachs said.

  He shrugged. "Help yourself. But you're on your own. I'm not going in there. You show 'em, Mags." He picked up the hammer and a handful of nails. Sachs noticed the butt of a pistol protruding from his waistband. He started to pound nails into a window frame.

  "Jesse," Sachs said, "go around to the back and check in his window, see if there're any traps rigged."

  "You won't be able to see," the mother explained. "He's got them painted black."

  Painted?

  Sachs continued. "Then just cover the approach to the window. I don't want any surprises. Keep an eye out for shooting vantages and don't present a clean target."

  "Sure. Shooting vantages. I'll go do that." And he nodded in an exaggerated way that told her that he'd had virtually no tactical experience. He disappeared into the side yard.

  The wife said to Sachs, "His room's this way."

  Sachs followed Garrett's foster mother down a dim, corridor filled with laundry and shoes and stacks of magazines. Family Circle, Christian Life, Guns & Ammo, Field and Stream, Reader's Digest.

  Her neck crawled as she passed each doorway, eyes flicking left and right, and her lengthy fingers stroked the oak checkerboard of the pistol grip. The door to the boy's room was closed.

  Garrett tossed a hornets' nest inside. Got herself stung 137 times...

  "You're really scared he'll come back?"

  After a pause the woman said, "Garrett's a troubled boy. People don't understand him and I got more feeling for him than Hal does. I don't know if he'll come back but if he does it'll be trouble. Garrett don't mind hurting people. Once at school some boys kept breaking into his locker and leaving notes and dirty underwear and things. Nothing terrible, just pranks. But Garrett made this cage that popped open if you didn't open the locker just right. Put a spider inside. Next time they broke in the spider bit one of the boys in the face. Nearly blinded him.... Yeah, I'm scared he'll come back."

  They paused outside a bedroom door. On the wood was a handmade sign. DANGER. DO NOT ENTER A badly done pen-and-ink drawing of a mean-looking wasp was taped to the door below it.

  There was no air-conditioning and Sachs found her palms sweating. She wiped them on her jeans.

  Sachs turned on the Motorola radio and pulled on the headset she'd borrowed from the Sheriff's Department Central Communications Office. She spent a moment finding the frequency Steve Farr had given her. The reception was lousy.

  "Rhyme?"

  "I'm here, Sachs. I've been waiting. Where've you been?"

  She didn't want to tell him that she'd spent a few minutes trying to learn more about the psychology of Garrett Hanlon. She said only, "Took us some time to get here."

  "Well, what've we got?" the criminalist asked.

  "I'm about to go in."

  She motioned Margaret back into the living room then kicked the door in and leapt back into the corridor, pressed flat against the wall. No sound from the dimly lit room.

  Got herself stung 137 times ...

  Okay. Pistol up. Go, go, go! She pushed inside.

  "Jesus." Sachs dropped into a low-profile combat stance. Several earnest pounds of pressure on the trigger, she held the gun steady as a mountain at the figure just inside.

  "Sachs?" Rhyme called. "What is it?"

  "Minute," she whispered, flicking the overhead light on. The gun sight rested on a poster of the creepy monster in the movie Alien.

  With her left hand she swung the closet door open. Empty.

  "It's secured, Rhyme. Have to say, though, I don't really care for the way he decorates."

  It was then that the stench hit her. Unwashed clothing, bodily scents. And something else....

  "Phew," she muttered.

  "Sachs? What is it?" Rhyme's voice was impatient.

  "Place stinks."

&n
bsp; "Good. You know my rule."

  "Always smell the crime scene first. Wish I hadn't."

  "I meant to clean it up." Mrs. Babbage had padded up behind Sachs. "I shoulda, before you got here. But I was too afraid to go in. Besides, skunk's hard to get out unless you wash in tomato juice. Which Hal thinks is a waste of money."

  That was it. Crowning the smell of dirty clothes was the burnt-rubber scent of skunk musk. Hands clasped desperately, looking like she was about to cry, Garrett's foster mother whispered, "He'll be mad you broke the door."

  Sachs said to her, "I'll need a little time alone here." She ushered the woman out and closed the door.

  "Time's wasting, Sachs," Rhyme snapped.

  "I'm on it," she responded. Looking around. Repulsed by the gray, stained sheets, the piles of dirty clothes, the dishes glued together with old food, the Cell-o bags filled with the dust of potato and corn chips. The whole place made her edgy. She found her fingers in her scalp, compulsively scratching. Stopped, then scratched some more. She wondered why she was so angry. Maybe because the slovenliness suggested that his foster parents didn't really give a damn about the boy and that this neglect had contributed to his becoming a killer and a kidnapper.

  Sachs scanned the room fast and noticed that there were dozens of smudges and finger-and footprints on the windowsill. It seemed he used the window more than the front door and she wondered if they locked the children down at night.

  She turned to the wall opposite the bed and squinted. Felt a chill slide through her. "We've got ourselves a collector here, Rhyme."

  She looked over the dozen large jars--terrariums filled with colonies of insects clustered together, surrounding pools of water in the bottom of each one. Labels in sloppy handwriting identified the species: Water Boatman ... Diving Bell Spider. A chipped magnifying glass sat on a nearby table, beside an old office chair that looked as if Garrett had retrieved it from a trash heap.

  "I know why they call him the Insect Boy," Sachs said, then told Rhyme about the jars. She shivered with revulsion as a horde of moist, tiny bugs moved en masse along the glass of one jar.

  "Ah, that's good for us."

  "Why?"

  "Because it's a rare hobby. If tennis or collecting coins turned him on, we'd have a harder time pinning him to specific locations. Now, get going on the scene." He was speaking softly in a voice that was almost cheerful. She knew he'd be imagining himself walking the grid--as he referred to the process of searching a crime scene--using her as his eyes and legs. As head of Investigation and Resources--the NYPD's forensics and crime scene unit--Lincoln Rhyme had often worked homicide crime scenes himself, usually logging more hours on the job than even junior officers. She knew that walking the grid was what he missed most about his life before the accident.

  "What's the crime scene kit like?" Rhyme asked. Jesse Corn had dug one up from the Sheriff's Department equipment room for her to use.

  Sachs opened the dusty metal attache case. It didn't contain a tenth of the equipment of her kit in New York but at least there were the basics: tweezers, a flashlight, probes, latex gloves and evidence bags. "Crime scene lite," she said.

  "We're fish out of water on this one, Sachs."

  "I'm with you there, Rhyme." She pulled on the gloves as she looked over the room. Garrett's bedroom was what's known as a secondary crime scene--not the place where the actual crime occurred but the location where it was planned, for instance, or to which the perps fled and hid out after a crime. Rhyme had long ago taught her that these were often more valuable than the primary scenes because perps tended to be more careless in places like this, shedding gloves and clothes and leaving behind weapons and other evidence.

  She now started her search, walking, a grid pattern--covering the floor in close parallel strips, the way you'd mow a lawn, foot by foot, then turning perpendicular and walking over the same territory again.

  "Talk to me, Sachs, talk to me."

  "It's a spooky place, Rhyme."

  "Spooky?" he groused. "What the hell is 'spooky'?"

  Lincoln Rhyme didn't like soft observations. He liked hard--specific--adjectives: cold, muddy, blue, green, sharp. Rhyme even complained when she commented that something was "large" or "small." ("Tell me inches or millimeters, Sachs, or don't tell me at all." Amelia Sachs searched crime scenes armed with a Glock 10, latex gloves and a Stanley contractor's tape measure.)

  She thought: Well, I feel damn spooked. Doesn't that count for anything? "He's got these posters up. From the Alien movies. And Starship Troopers--these big bugs attacking people. He's drawn some himself too. They're violent. The place is filthy. Junk food, a lot of books, clothes, the bugs in the jars. Not much else."

  "The clothes are dirty?"

  "Yep. Got a good one--a pair of pants, really stained. He's worn them a lot; they must have a ton of trace in them. And they all have cuffs. Lucky for us--most kids his age'd wear only blue jeans." She dropped them in a plastic evidence bag.

  "Shirts?"

  "T-shirts only," she said. "Nothing with pockets." Criminalists love cuffs and pockets; they trap all sorts of helpful clues. "I've got a couple of notebooks here, Rhyme. But Jim Bell and the other deputies must've looked through them."

  "Don't make any assumptions about our colleagues' crime scene work," Rhyme said wryly.

  "Got it."

  She began flipping through the pages. "There're no diaries. No maps. Nothing about kidnapping.... There're just drawings of insects ... pictures of the ones he's got here in the terrariums."

  "Any of girls, young women? Sado-sexual?"

  "No."

  "Bring them along. How about the books?"

  "Maybe a hundred or so. Schoolbooks, books about animals, insects ... Hold on--got something here--a Tanner's Corner High School yearbook. It's six years old."

  Rhyme asked a question to someone in the room. He came back on the line. "Jim says Lydia's twenty-six. She'd've been out of high school eight years. But check the McConnell girl's page."

  Sachs thumbed through the M's.

  "Yep. Mary Beth's picture's been cut out with a sharp blade of some kind. He sure fits the classic stalker profile."

  "We're not interested in profiles. We're interested in evidence. The other books--the ones on his shelf--which ones does he read the most?"

  "How do I--"

  "Dirt on the pages," he snapped impatiently. "Start on the ones nearest his bed. Bring back four or five of them."

  She picked the four with the most well-thumbed pages. The Entomologist's Handbook, The Field Guide to Insects of North Carolina, Water Insects of North America, The Miniature World.

  "I've got them, Rhyme. There're a lot of marked passages. Asterisks by some of them."

  "Good. Bring them back. But there's got to be something more specific in the room."

  "I can't find a thing."

  "Keep looking, Sachs. He's a sixteen-year-old. You know the juvenile cases we've worked. Teenagers' rooms are the centers of their universe. Start thinking like a sixteen-year-old. Where would you hide things?"

  She looked under the mattress, in and under the drawers of the desk, in the closet, beneath the grimy pillows. Then she shone the flashlight between the wall and the bed. She said, "Got something here, Rhyme...."

  "What?"

  She found a mass of wadded-up Kleenex, a bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care lotion. She examined one of the Kleenexes. It was stained with what appeared to be dried semen.

  "Dozens of tissues under the bed. He's been a busy boy with his right hand."

  "He's sixteen," Rhyme said. "It'd be unusual if he wasn't. Bag one. We might need some DNA."

  Sachs found more under the bed: a cheap picture frame on which he'd painted crude drawings of insects--ants and hornets and beetles. Inside was mounted the cut-out yearbook photo of Mary Beth McConnell. There was also an album of a dozen other snapshots of Mary Beth. They were candids. Most of them were of the young woman on what seemed to be a college campus or walking down
the street of a small town. Two were of her in her bikini at a lake. In both of these she was bending down and the picture focused on the girl's cleavage. She told Rhyme what she'd found.

  "His fantasy girl," Rhyme muttered. "Keep going."

  "I think we should bag this and get on to the primary scene."

  "In a minute or two, Sachs. Remember--this was your idea, being Good Samaritans, not mine."

  A shudder of anger at this. "What do you want?" she asked heatedly. "You want me to dust for prints? Vacuum for hairs?"

  "Of course not. We're not after trial-quality evidence for the D.A.; you know that. All we need is something that'll give us an idea where he might've taken the girls. He's not going to bring them back home. He's got a place he's made just for them. And he's been there earlier--to get it ready. He may be young and quirky but he still smells of an organized offender. Even if the girls're dead I'll bet he's picked out nice, cozy graves for them."

  Despite all the time they'd worked together Sachs still had trouble with Rhyme's callousness. She knew it was part of being a criminalist--the distancing one must do from the horror of crime--but it was hard for her. Perhaps because she recognized that she had the same capacity for this coldness within herself, that numbing detachment that the best crime scene searchers must turn on like a light switch, a detachment that Sachs sometimes feared would deaden her heart irreparably.

  Nice, cozy graves ...

  Lincoln Rhyme, whose voice was never more seductive than when he was imagining a crime scene, said to her, "Go on, Sachs, get into him. Become Garrett Hanlon. What are you thinking? What's your life like? What do you do minute by minute by minute in that little room? What are your most secret thoughts?"

  The best criminalists, Rhyme had told her, were like talented novelists, who imagined themselves as their characters--and could disappear into someone else's world.

  Eyes scanning the room once more. I'm sixteen. I'm a troubled boy, I'm an orphan, kids at school pick on me, I'm sixteen, I'm sixteen, I'm--

  A thought formed. She snagged it before it swam off.

  "Rhyme, you know what's weird?"

  "Talk to me, Sachs," he said softly, encouraging.

  "He's a teenager, right? Well, I remember Tommy Briscoe--I dated him when I was sixteen. You know what he had all over his walls in his room?"

  "In my day and age it was that damn Farrah Fawcett poster."