The Empty Chair

"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 attaché 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 pla

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 Ta

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 McCo

Sachs thumbed through the Ms.

"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 McCo

"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 sca

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."