The Empty Chair

He walked closer, looked down at her.

"You remember what you said in the trailer? When you were talking to your father in the empty chair?"

He nodded uncertainly.

"You were saying how bad you felt that he didn't want you in the car that night."

"I remember."

"But you know why he didn't want you… He was trying to save your life. He knew there was poison in the car and that they were going to die. If you got in the car with them you'd die too. And he didn't want that to happen."

"I guess I know that," he said. His voice was uncertain and Amelia Sachs supposed that rewriting one's history was a daunting task.

"You keep remembering it."

"I will."

Sachs looked at the tiny, beige moth, flying around the interrogation room. "You leave anybody in the cell for me? For company?"

"Yeah, I did. There's a couple of ladybugs – their real name is ladybird beetles. And a leafhopper and syrphus fly. It's cool the way they fly. You can watch 'em for hours." He paused. "Like, I'm sorry I lied to you. The thing is, if I hadn't I never would've got out and I couldn't've saved Mary Beth."

"That's all right, Garrett."

He looked at Mason. "I can go now?"

"You can go."

He walked to the door, turned and said to Sachs, "I'll come and, like, hang out. If that's okay."

"I'd like that."

He stepped outside, and through the open door Sachs could see him walk up to a four-by-four. It was Lucy Kerr's. Sachs saw her get out and hold the door open for him – like a mom picking up her son after soccer practice. The jail door closed and shut off this domestic scene.

"Sachs," Rhyme began. But she shook her head and started shuffling back toward the lockup. She wanted to be away from the criminalist, away from the Insect Boy, away from the town without children. She wanted to be in the darkness of solitude. And soon she was.

Outside of Ta

The vegetation creates a nook that's a popular parking space for Paquenoke County deputies, who sip iced tea and listen to the radio as they wait for the display on their radar guns to register 54 mph or higher. Then they accelerate onto the highway in pursuit of the surprised speeder to add another hundred dollars or so to the county treasury.

Today, Sunday, as a black Lexus SUV passed this jog in the road the radar gun on Lucy Kerr's dashboard registered a legal 44. But she put the squad car in gear, flipped the switch starting the gumball machine atop the car and sped after the four-by-four.

She eased close to the Lexus and studied the vehicle carefully. She'd learned long ago to check the rearview mirror of cars she was stopping. You look at the drivers' eyes and you can pretty much get a feel for what other kinds of crimes they might be committing, if any, beyond speeding or a broken taillight. Drugs, stolen weapons, drinking. You get a feel for how dangerous the pull-over will be. Now, she saw the man's eyes flick into the mirror and glance at her without a hint of guilt or concern.

Invulnerable eyes…

Which made the anger in her all the hotter and she breathed hard to control it.

The big car eased onto the dusty shoulder and Lucy pulled in behind it. Rules dictated that she call in for a tag, tax and warrants check but Lucy didn't bother with this. There was nothing that DMV could report that would be of any interest to her. With trembling hands she opened the door and climbed out.

The driver's eyes now shifted to the side-view mirror and continued to examine her clinically. They registered some surprise, noticing, she supposed, that she wasn't in her uniform – just jeans and a work shirt – though she was wearing her weapon on her hip. What would an off-duty cop be doing pulling over a driver who hadn't been speeding?

Henry Davett rolled down his window.

Lucy Kerr looked inside, past Davett. In the front passenger seat was a woman in her early fifties, with a dryness to her sprayed blond hair that suggested frequent beauty parlor shampoos. She wore diamonds on wrist, ears and chest. A teenage girl sat in the back, flipping through boxes of CDs, mentally enjoying the music that her father wouldn't let her listen to on the Sabbath.

"Officer Kerr," Davett said, "what's the problem?"

But she could see in his eyes, now no longer in reflection, that he knew exactly what the problem was.

And still they remained as guilt-free and in control as when he'd noticed the gyrations of the flashing lights on her Crown Victoria.

Her anger tugged at its restraints and she snapped, "Get out of the car, Davett."

"Honey, what did you do?"

"Officer, what's the point of this?" Davett asked, sighing.

"Out. Now." Lucy reached inside and popped the door locks.

"Can she do that, honey? Can she -"

"Shut up, Edna."

"All right. I'm sorry."

Lucy swung the door open. Davett unsnapped his seat belt and stepped out onto the dusty shoulder.

A semi sped past and wrapped its wake around them. Davett looked distastefully at the gray Carolina clay settling on his blue blazer. "My family and I are late for church and I don't think -"

She took him by the arm and pulled him off the shoulder, into the shade of wild rice and cattails; a small stream, a feeder to the Paquenoke, ran beside the road.

He repeated with exasperation, "What is the point?"

"I know everything."

"Do you, Officer Kerr? Do you know everything! Which would be?"

"The poison, the murders, the canal…"

Davett said smoothly, "I never had a bit of direct contact with Jim Bell or anybody else in Ta

Unfazed by his suave response she growled, "You're going down with Bell and his brother-in-law."

"Of course I'm not. Nothing links me to a single crime. There're no witnesses. No accounts, no money transfers, no evidence of any wrongdoing. I'm a manufacturer of petrochemical-based products – certain cleaners, asphalt and some pesticides."

"Illegal pesticides."

"Wrong," he snapped. "The EPA still allows toxaphene to be used in some cases in the U.S. And it's not illegal at all in most Third World countries. Do some reading, Deputy, without pesticides malaria and encephalitis and famine'd kill hundreds of thousands of people every year and -"

"- and give the people who're exposed to it cancer and birth defects and liver damage and -"

Davett shrugged. "Show me the studies, Deputy Kerr. Show me the research that proves that."

"If it's so fucking harmless then why did you stop shipping it by truck? Why did you start using barges?"

"I couldn't get it to port any other way – because some knee-jerk counties and towns've ba

"Well, I'll bet the EPA'd be interested in what you're doing here."

"Oh, please," he scoffed. "The EPA? Send them out. I'll give you their phone number. If they ever get around to visiting the factory they'll find permissible levels of toxaphene everywhere around Ta

"Maybe what's in the water alone is at a permissible level, maybe what's in the air alone, maybe the local produce alone… But what about the combination of them? What about a child who drinks a glass of water from his parents' well then plays in the grass then eats an apple from a local orchard then -"