The Empty Chair

by Jeffery Deaver

"Open it carefully, remember the traps."

  Sachs eased a corner of the bag down, peered inside.

  "It's clear, Rhyme."

  Lucy and Ned came down the path and all four of them stood around the bag as if it were the body of a drowned man pulled from the quarry.

  "What's in it?"

  Sachs pulled on her latex gloves, which were very soft because of the sun. Immediately her hands began to sweat and tingle from the heat.

  "Empty water bottles. Deer Park. No store price or inventory stickers on them. Wrappers from two packages of Planters peanut butter and cheese crackers. No store stickers on them either. You want UPC codes to trace the shipments?"

  "If we had a week, maybe," Rhyme muttered. "No, don't bother. More details on the bag," he ordered.

  "There's a little printing on it. But it's too faded to read. Anybody make it out?" she asked the others.

  No one could read the lettering.

  "Any idea what was inside originally?" Rhyme asked.

  She picked up the bag and smelled it. "Musty. Been inside someplace for a long time. Can't tell what was in it." Sachs turned the bag inside out and hit it hard with the flat of her hand. A few old, shriveled corn kernels fell onto the ground.

  "Corn, Rhyme."

  "My namesake." Jesse laughed.

  Rhyme asked, "Farms around here?"

  Sachs relayed the question to the search party.

  "Dairy, not corn," Lucy said, looking at Ned and Jesse, who nodded.

  Jesse said, "But you'd feed corn to cows."

  "Sure," Ned said. "I'd guess it came from a feed-and-grain store someplace. Or a warehouse."

  "You hear that, Rhyme?"

  "Feed and grain. Right. I'll get Ben and Jim Bell on that. Anything else, Sachs?"

  She looked at her hands. They were blackened. She turned the bag over. "Looks like there's scorch on the bag, Rhyme. It wasn't burned itself but it was sitting in something that had."

  "Any idea what?"

  "Bits of charcoal, looks like. So I'd guess wood."

  "Okay," he said. "It's going on the list."

  She glanced at Garrett's and Lydia's footprints. "We're going after them again," she told Rhyme.

  "I'll call when I have some more answers."

  Sachs announced to the search party, "Back up to the top." Feeling the shooting pains in her knees she gazed up to the lip of the quarry, muttering, "Didn't seem that high when we got here."

  "Oh, hey, that's a rule--hills're always twice as tall going up as coming down," said Jesse Corn, the resident storehouse of aphorisms, as he politely let her precede him up the narrow path.

  ... chapter fourteen

  Lincoln Rhyme, ignoring a glistening black-and-green fly that strafed nearby, was gazing at the latest evidence chart.

  FOUND AT SECONDARY CRIME SCENE--QUARRY

  Old Burlap Bag--Unreadable Name on It

  Corn--Feed and Grain?

  Scorch Marks on Bag

  Deer Park Water

  Planters Cheese Crackers

  The most unusual evidence is the best evidence. Rhyme was never happier at a crime scene than when he found something completely unidentifiable. Because it meant that if he could identify it there'd be limited sources he could trace it back to.

  But these items--the evidence Sachs had found at the quarry--were common. If the printing on the bag had been legible then he might have traced that to a single source. But it wasn't. If the water and crackers had price stickers they might have been traced to the stores that sold them and to a clerk who recalled Garrett and might have some information about where to find him. But they didn't. And scorched wood? That led to every barbecue in Paquenoke County. Useless.

  The corn might be helpful--Jim Bell and Steve Farr were on phones right now, calling feed-and-grain outlets--but Rhyme doubted the clerks would have anything more to say than "Yeah. We sell corn. In old burlap bags. Like everybody does."

  Damn! He had no sense of this place at all. He needed weeks--months--to get a feel for the area.

  But, of course, they didn't have weeks or months.

  Eyes moving from chart to chart, fast as the fly.

  FOUND AT PRIMARY CRIME SCENE--

  BLACKWATER LANDING

  Kleenex with Blood

  Limestone Dust

  Nitrates

  Phosphate

  Ammonia

  Detergent

  Camphene

  Nothing more to be deduced from that one.

  Back to the insect books, he decided.

  "Ben, that book there--The Miniature World. I want to look at it."

  "Yessir," the young man said absently, eyes on the evidence chart. He picked it up and held it out to Rhyme.

  A moment passed as the book hovered in the air over the criminalist's chest. Rhyme cast a wry gaze at Ben, who glanced at him and, after a beat, gave a sudden jerk and reared back, realizing that he was offering something to a man who'd need divine intervention to take it.

  "Oh, my, Mr. Rhyme ... look," Ben blurted, his round face red. "I'm so sorry. I wasn't thinking, sir. Man, that was stupid. I really--"

  "Ben," Rhyme said evenly, "shut the fuck up."

  The huge man blinked in shock. Swallowed. The book, tiny in his massive hand, lowered. "It was an accident, sir. I said I was--"

  "Shut. Up."

  Ben did. His mouth closed. He looked around the room for help but there was no help on the horizon. Thom was standing against the wall, silent, arms crossed, not about to become a U.N. peacekeeper.

  Rhyme continued in a low growl, "You're walking on eggshells and I'm sick of it. Quit your goddamn cringing."

  "Cringing? I was just trying to be decent to somebody who's ... I mean--"

  "No, you weren't. You've been trying to figure out how to get the hell out of here without looking at me any more than you have to and without upsetting your own delicate little psyche."

  The massive shoulders stiffened. "Well, now, sir, I don't think that's completely fair."

  "Bullshit. It's about time I took the gloves off...." Rhyme laughed viciously. "How do you like that metaphor? Me, taking off gloves? Something I'm not going to be able to do very fast, am I now? ... How's that for a crip joke?"

  Ben was desperate to escape--to flee out the door--but his massive legs were rooted like oak trunks.

  "What I've got isn't contagious," Rhyme snapped. "You think it's going to rub off? Doesn't work that way. You're walking around here like you breathe the air and they're going to have to cart you off in a wheelchair. Hell, you're even afraid if you look my way you're going to end up like me!"

  "That's not true!

  "Isn't it? I think it is .... How come I scare the hell out of you?"

  "You don't!" Ben snarled. "No way!"

  Rhyme raged, "Oh, yes, I do. You're terrified to be in the same room with me. You're a fucking coward."

  The big man leaned forward, spittle flying from his lips, jaw trembling, as he shouted back, "Well, fuck you, Rhyme!" He was speechless with rage for a moment. Then continued, "I come over here as a favor to my aunt. It messes up all my plans and I'm not getting paid a penny! I listen to you boss people around like you're some kind of fucking prima donna. I mean, I don't know where the hell you get off, mister. ..." His voice faded and he squinted at Rhyme, who was laughing hard.

  "What?" Ben snapped. "What the hell're you laughing at?"

  "See how easy it is?" Rhyme asked, chuckling now. Thom too was having trouble suppressing a smile.

  Breathing heavily, straightening up, Ben wiped his mouth. Angry, wary. He shook his head. "What do you mean? What's easy?"

  "Looking me in the eye and telling me I'm a prick." Rhyme continued in a placid voice, "Ben, I'm just like anybody else. I don't like it when people treat me like a china doll. And I know they sure as hell don't like to worry that they're going to break me."

  "You suckered me. You said those things just to get my goat."

  "Let's say: just to get through to you." Rh
yme wasn't sure that Ben would ever become a Henry Davett--a man who cared only about the core, the spirit, of a human being and ignored the packaging. But Rhyme had at least managed to push the zoologist a few steps in the direction of enlightenment.

  "I oughta walk out that door and not come back."

  "A lot of people would, Ben. But I need you. You're good. You've got a flair for forensics. Now, come on. We broke the ice. Let's get back to work."

  Ben began to mount The Miniature World in the turning frame. As he did he glanced at Rhyme and asked, "So there's really a lot of people who look you in the eye and call you a son of a bitch?"

  Rhyme, staring at the cover of the book, deferred to Thom, who said, "Oh, sure. Of course that's only after they get to know him."

  Lydia was still only a hundred feet from the mill.

  She was moving as quickly as she could toward the path that would take her to freedom but her ankle throbbed in pain and hampered her progress significantly. Also, she had to move slowly--truly silent travel through brush requires the use of your hands. But, like some of the brain-lesion victims she'd worked with at the hospital, she had limited equilibrium and could only stumble from clearing to clearing, making far more noise than she wanted to.

  She circled wide around the front of the mill. Pausing. No sign of Garrett. No sound at all except for the flushing of the diverted stream water into the ruddy swamp.

  Five more feet, ten.

  Come on, angel, she thought. Stay with me a little longer. Help me get through this. Please ... Just a few minutes and we'll be home-free.

  Oh, man alive, that hurts. She wondered if a bone was broken. Her ankle was swollen and she knew that, if it was a fracture, walking unsupported like this could make it ten times worse. The color of the skin was darkening too--which meant broken vessels. Blood poisoning was a possibility. She thought of gangrene. Amputation. If that happened what would her boyfriend say? He'd leave her, she supposed. Their relationship was casual at best--at least on his part. Besides, she knew, from her job in oncology, how people disappeared from patients' lives once they started losing body parts.

  She paused and listened, looked around her. Had Garrett fled? Had he given up on her and gone to the Outer Banks to be with Mary Beth?

  Lydia kept moving toward the path that led back to the quarry. Once she found it she'd have to move even more carefully--because of the ammonia trap. She didn't remember exactly where he'd rigged it.

  Another thirty feet... and there it was--the path that led back home.

  She paused again, listening. Nothing. She noticed a dark-skinned, placid snake sunning itself on the stump of an old cedar. So long, she thought to it. I'm going home.

  Lydia started forward.

  And then the Insect Boy's hand lashed out from underneath a lush bay tree and snagged her good ankle. Unstable anyway, hands useless, Lydia could do nothing but try to twist to the side so that her solid rump took the force of the fall. The snake awoke at the sound of her scream and vanished.

  Garrett climbed on top of her, pinning her to the ground, face red with anger. He must've been lying there for fifteen minutes. Keeping silent, not moving an inch until she was within striking distance. Like a spider waiting for its next kill.

  "Please," Lydia muttered, breathless from the shock and horrified that she'd been betrayed by her angel. "Don't hurt--"

  "Quiet," he raged in a whisper, looking around. "I'm at the end of my row with you." He pulled her roughly to her feet. He could've taken her by the arm or rolled her onto her back and eased her up that way. But he didn't; he reached around her from behind, his hands over her breasts, and lifted her to her feet. She felt his taut body rub disgustingly against her back and butt. Finally, after what seemed like forever, he released her but wrapped his bony fingers around her arm and pulled her after him toward the mill, oblivious to her sobbing. He paused only once, to examine a long line of ants carrying tiny eggs across the path. "Don't hurt them," he muttered. And watched her feet carefully to make sure she didn't.

  With a sound that Rhyme had always thought was that of a butcher sharpening a knife, the turning frame swished another page of The Miniature World, which was, to judge from its battered condition, Garrett Hanlon's favorite book.

  Insects are astonishingly adept at survival. The birch moth, for example, is naturally white but in the areas surrounding industrial Manchester, England, the species' coloring changed to black to blend in with the soot on the white tree trunks and appear less obvious to its enemies.

  Rhyme flipped through more pages, his staunch left ring finger tapping the ECU controller and moving the pages, hiss, hiss, blade on steel. Reading the passages Garrett had marked. The paragraph about the antlion pit had saved the search party from falling into one of the boy's traps and Rhyme was trying to draw more conclusions from the book. As fish psychologist Ben Kerr had told him, animal behavior is often a good model for human--especially when it comes to matters of survival.

  Praying mantises rub their abdomens against their wings, producing an unearthly noise, which disorients pursuers. Mantises, by the way, will eat any living creature smaller than themselves, including birds and mammals....

  Dung beetles are credited with giving ancient man the idea for the wheel...

  A naturalist named Reaumur observed in the seventeen hundreds that wasps make paper nests from wood fiber and saliva. That gave him the idea to make paper from wood pulp, not cloth, as paper manufacturers had been doing up until then....

  But what among this was revealing to the case? Was there anything that could help Rhyme find two human beings on the run somewhere in a hundred square miles of forest and swampland?

  Insects make great use of the sense of smell. For them it is a multidimensional sense. They actually "feel" smells and use them for many things. For education, for intelligence, for communication. When an ant finds food it returns to the nest leaving a scented trail, sporadically touching the ground with its abdomen. When other ants come across the line they follow it back to the food. They know which direction to go in because the scent is "shaped"; the narrow end of the smell points toward the food like a directional arrow. Insects also use smells to warn of approaching enemies. Since an insect can detect a single molecule of scent miles away insects are rarely surprised by their enemies....

  Sheriff Jim Bell walked quickly into the room. On his beleaguered face was a smile. "Just heard from a nurse at the hospital. There's some news about Ed. Looks like he's coming out of that coma and said something. His doctor's gonna be calling in a few minutes. I'm hoping we'll find out what he meant by 'olive' and if he saw anything specific on that map in the blind."

  Despite his skepticism about human testimony Rhyme decided that he'd now be happy for a witness. The helplessness, the fish-on-dry-land disorientation, was wearing heavily on him.

  Bell paced slowly in the lab, glancing expectantly toward the doorway every time footsteps approached.

  Lincoln Rhyme stretched again, pressing his head back into the headrest of the chair. Eyes on the evidence chart, eyes on the map, eyes back to the book. And all the while the green-and-black nutshell of a fly zipped around the room with an unfocused desperation that seemed to match his own.

  An animal nearby darted across the path and vanished.

  "What was that?" Sachs asked, nodding at it. To her the creature had looked like a cross between a dog and a large alley cat.

  "Gray fox," Jesse said. "Don't see 'em too often. But then I don't usually go for walks north of the Paquo."

  They moved slowly as they tried to follow the frail indications of Garrett's passage. And all the while they kept their eyes out for more deadfall traps and ambush from the surrounding trees and brush.

  Once again Sachs felt the foreboding that had dogged her since they'd driven past the child's funeral that morning. They'd left the pines behind and were in a different type of forest. The trees were what you'd see in a tropical jungle. When she asked about them Lucy told her the
y were tupelo gum, old-growth bald cypress, cedar. They were bound together with webby moss and clinging vines that absorbed sound like thick fog and accentuated her sense of claustrophobia. There were mushrooms and mold and fungus everywhere and scummy marshes all around them. The aroma in the air was that of decay.

  Sachs looked at the trodden ground. She asked Jesse, "We're miles from town. Who makes these paths?"

  He shrugged. "Mostly bad pay."

  "What's that?" she asked, recalling that Rich Culbeau had used the phrase.

  "You know, somebody who doesn't pay his debts. Basically, it just means trash. Moonshiners, kids, swamp people, PCP cookers."

  Ned Spoto took a drink of water and said, "We get calls sometimes: there's been a shooting, somebody's screaming, calls for help, mysterious lights flashing signals. Stuff like that. Only by the time we get out here, there's nothing.... No body, no perp, no complaining witness. Sometimes we find a blood trail but it don't lead anywhere. We make the run--we have to--but nobody in the department ever comes out in these parts alone."

  Jesse said, "You feel different out here. You feel that--this sounds funny--but you feel that life's different, cheaper. I'd rather be arresting a couple of armed kids pumped up on angel dust at a mini-mart than come out here on a call. At least there, there're rules. You kinda know what to expect. Out here ..." He shrugged.

  Lucy nodded. "That's true. And normal rules don't apply to anybody north of the Paquo. Us or them. You can see yourself shooting before you read anybody their rights and that'd be perfectly all right. Hard to explain."

  Sachs didn't like the edgy talk. If the other deputies hadn't been so somber and unnerved themselves she would have thought they were putting on a show to scare the city girl.

  Finally they stopped at a place where the path branched out into three directions. They walked about fifty feet down each but could find no sign of which one Garrett and Lydia had chosen. They returned to the crossroads.

  She heard Rhyme's words echoing in her mind. Be careful, Sachs, but move fast. I don't think we have much time left.

  Move fast....

  But there was no hint of where they ought to be moving to and as Sachs looked down the choked paths it seemed impossible that anyone, even Lincoln Rhyme, could figure out where their prey had gone.

  Then her cell phone rang and both Lucy and Jesse Corn looked at her expectantly, hoping, as did Sachs, that Rhyme had come up with a new suggestion about which way to go.