The Empty Chair

  "That's it exactly. Garrett doesn't have a single pinup, a single Playboy or Penthouse poster. No Magic cards, no Pokemon, no toys. No Alanis or Celine. No rock-musician posters.... And--hey, get this: no VCR, TV, stereo, radio. No Nintendo. My God, he's sixteen and he doesn't even have a computer." Her goddaughter was twelve and the girl's room was virtually an electronics showroom.

  "Maybe it's a money thing--the foster parents."

  "Hell, Rhyme, if I were his age and wanted to listen to music I'd build a radio. Nothing stops teenagers. But those aren't the things that excite him."

  "Excellent, Sachs."

  Maybe, she reflected, but what did it mean? Recording observations is only half of the job of a forensic scientist; the other half, the far more important half, is drawing helpful conclusions from those observations.

  "Sachs--"

  "Shhhh."

  She struggled to put aside the person she really was: the cop from Brooklyn, the lover of taut General Motors vehicles, former fashion model for the Chantelle agency on Madison Avenue, champion pistol shot, the woman who wore her straight red hair long and her fingernails short lest the habit of digging into her scalp and skin mar her otherwise perfect flesh with yet more stigmata of the tension that drove her.

  Trying to turn that person into smoke and emerge as a troubled, scary sixteen-year-old boy. Someone who needed, or wanted, to take women by force. Who needed, or wanted, to kill.

  What do I feel?

  "I don't care about normal pleasures, music, TV, computers. I don't care about normal sex," she said, half to herself. "I don't care about normal relationships. People are like insects--things to be caged. In fact, all I care about are insects. They're my only source of comfort. My only amusement." She said this as she paced in front of the jars. Then she looked down at the floor at her feet. "The tracks of the chair!"

  "What?"

  "Garrett's chair ... it's on rollers. It's facing the insect jars. All he does is roll back and forth and stare at them and draw them. Hell, he probably talks to them too. His whole life is these bugs." But the tracks in the wood stopped before they got to the jar on the end of the row--the largest of them and one set slightly apart from the others. It contained yellow jackets. The tiny yellow-and-black crescents zipped about angrily as if they were aware of her intrusion.

  She walked to the jar, looked down at it carefully. She said to Rhyme, "There's a jar full of wasps. I think it's his safe."

  "Why?"

  "It's nowhere near the other jars. He never looks at it--I can tell by the tracks of the chair. And all the other jars have water in them--they're aquatic bugs. This's the only one with flying insects. It's a great idea, Rhyme--who'd reach inside something like that? And there's about a foot of shredded paper on the bottom. I'd think he's buried something in there."

  "Look inside and see."

  She opened the door and asked Mrs. Babbage for a pair of leather gloves. When she brought them she found Sachs looking into the wasp jar.

  "You're not going to touch that, are you?" she asked in a desperate whisper.

  "Yes."

  "Oh, Garrett'll have a fit. He yells at anyone who ever touches his wasp jar."

  "Mrs. Babbage, Garrett's a fleeing felon. Him yelling at anybody isn't really a concern here."

  "But if he sneaks back and sees you bothered it ... I mean ... It could push him over the edge." Again, tears threatened.

  "We'll find him before he comes back," Sachs said in a reassuring tone. "Don't worry."

  Sachs put on the gloves, and she wrapped a pillowcase around her bare arm. Slowly she eased the mesh lid off and reached inside. Two wasps landed on the glove but flew off a moment later. The rest just ignored the intrusion. She was careful not to disturb the nest.

  Stung 137 times ...

  She dug only a few inches before she found the plastic bag.

  "Gotcha." She pulled it out. One wasp escaped and disappeared into the house before she got the mesh lid back on.

  Pulling off the leather gloves and putting on the latex. She opened the bag and spilled the contents out on the bed. A spool of thin fishing line. Some money--about a hundred dollars in cash and four Eisenhower silver dollars. Another picture frame; this one held the photo from the newspaper of Garrett and his family, a week before the car accident that killed his parents and sister. On a short chain was an old, battered key--like a car key, though there was no logo on the head; only a short serial number. She told Rhyme about this.

  "Good, Sachs. Excellent. I don't know what it means yet but it's a start. Now get over to the primary scene. Blackwater Landing."

  Sachs paused and looked around the room. The wasp that had escaped had returned and was trying to get back into the jar. She wondered what kind of message it was sending to its fellow insects.

  "I can't keep up," Lydia told Garrett. "I can't go this fast," she gasped. Sweat streaming down her face. Her uniform was drenched.

  "Quiet," he scolded angrily. "I need to listen. Can't do it with you bitching all the time."

  Listen for what? she wondered.

  He consulted the map again and led her along another path. They were still deep in the pine woods but, even though they were out of the sun, she was dizzy and recognized the early symptoms of heatstroke.

  He glanced at her, eyes on her breasts again.

  The fingernails snapping.

  The immense heat.

  "Please," she whispered, crying. "I can't do this! Please!"

  "Quiet! I'm not going to tell you again."

  A cloud of gnats swarmed around her face. She inhaled one or two and spit in disgust to clear her mouth. God, how she hated it here--in the woods. Lydia Johansson hated to be out of doors. Most people loved the woods and swimming pools and backyards. But her happiness was a fragile contentment that occurred mostly inside: her job, chatting with her other single girlfriends over margaritas at T.G.I. Friday's, horror books and TV, trips to the outlet malls for a shopping spree, those occasional nights with her boyfriend.

  Indoor joys, all of them.

  Outside reminded her of the cookouts her married friends gave, reminded her of families sitting around pools while their children played with inflatable toys, of picnics, of trim women in Speedos and thongs.

  Outside reminded Lydia of a life she wanted but didn't have, of her loneliness.

  He led her down another path, out of the forest. Suddenly the trees vanished and a huge pit opened in front of them. It was an old quarry. Blue-green water filled the bottom. She remembered years ago kids used to swim here, before the swamp started to reclaim the land north of the Paquo and the area got more dangerous.

  "Let's go," Garrett said, nodding toward it.

  "No. I don't want to. It's scary."

  "Don't give a shit what you want," he snapped. "Come on!"

  He gripped her taped hands and led her down a steep path to a rocky ledge. Garrett stripped off his shirt and bent down, splashed water on his blotched skin. He scratched and picked at the welts, examined his fingernails. Disgusting. He looked up at Lydia. "You want to do this? It feels good. You can take your dress off, you want. Go for a swim."

  Horrified at the thought of being naked in front of him she shook her head adamantly. Then sat down near the edge and splashed water on her face and arms.

  "Just don't drink it. I've got this."

  He pulled a dusty burlap bag out from behind a rock, where he must've stashed it recently. He pulled out a bottle of water and some packets of cheese crackers with peanut butter. He ate a package of crackers and drank half of a bottle of water. He offered the rest to her.

  She shook her head, repulsed.

  "Fuck, I don't have AIDS or anything if that's what you're thinking. You gotta drink something."

  Ignoring the bottle, Lydia lowered her mouth to the water in the quarry and drank deep. It was salty and metallic. Disgusting. She choked, nearly vomited.

  "Jesus, I told you," Garrett snapped. He offered her the water again. "Ther
e's all kinds of crap in there. Quit being so fucking stupid." He tossed her the bottle. She caught it clumsily with her taped hands and drank it down.

  Drinking the water immediately refreshed her. She relaxed some and asked, "Where's Mary Beth? What've you done with her?"

  "She's in this place by the ocean. An old banker house."

  Lydia knew what he meant. "Banker" to a Carolinian meant somebody who lived on the Outer Banks, the barrier islands off the coast in the Atlantic. So that's where Mary Beth was. And she understood now why they'd been traveling east--toward swampland with no houses and very few other places to hide. He probably had a boat stashed to take them through the swamp to the Intracoastal Waterway then to Elizabeth City and through Albemarle Sound to the Banks.

  He continued. "I like it there. It's really neat. You like the ocean?" He asked her in a funny way--conversationally--and he seemed almost normal. For a moment her fear lessened. But then he froze again and listened to something, holding a finger to his lips to silence her, frowning angrily, as his dark side returned. Finally he shook his head as he decided that whatever he'd heard wasn't a threat. He rubbed the back of his hand over his face, scratching another welt. "Let's go." He nodded back up the steep path to the rim of the quarry. "It's not far."

  "The Outer Banks'll take us a day to get to. More."

  "Oh, hell, we're not gonna get there today." He laughed coldly as if she'd made another idiotic comment. "We'll hide near here and let the assholes searching for us get past. We'll spend the night." He was looking away from her when he said this.

  "Spend the night?" she whispered hopelessly.

  But Garrett said nothing more. He started prodding her up the steep incline to the lip of the quarry and the pine woods beyond.

  ... chapter six

  What's the attraction of the sites of death?

  As she'd walked the grid at dozens of crime scenes Amelia Sachs had often asked this question and she asked it again now as she stood on the shoulder of Route 112 in Blackwater Landing, overlooking the Paquenoke River.

  This was the place where young Billy Stail had died bloody, where two young women had been kidnapped, where a hardworking deputy's life had been changed forever--perhaps ended--by a hundred wasps. And even in the relentless sun the mood of Blackwater Landing was somber and edgy.

  She surveyed the place carefully. Here, at the crime scene, a steep hill, strewn with trash, led from the shoulder of Route 112 down to the muddy riverbank. Where the ground leveled off, there were willows and cypress and clusters of tall grass. An old, rotting pier extended about thirty feet into the river then dipped below the surface of the water.

  There were no homes in this immediate area though Sachs had noticed a number of large, new colonials not far from the river. The houses were obviously expensive but Sachs noticed that even this residential portion of Blackwater Landing, like the county seat itself, seemed ghostly and forlorn. It took her a moment to realize why--there were no children playing in the yards even though it was summer vacation. No inflatable pools, no bikes, no strollers. This reminded her of the funeral they'd passed a few hours ago--and the child's casket--and she forced her thoughts away from that sad memory and back to her task.

  Examining the scene. Yellow tape encircled two areas. The one nearest the water included a willow in front of which were several bouquets of flowers--where Garrett had kidnapped Lydia. The other was a dusty clearing surrounded by a grove of trees where, yesterday, the boy had killed Billy Stail and taken Mary Beth. In the middle of this scene were a number of shallow holes in the ground where she'd been digging for arrowheads and relics. Twenty feet from the center of the scene was the spray-painted outline representing where Billy's body had lain.

  Spray paint? she thought, chagrined. These deputies obviously weren't used to homicide investigations.

  A Sheriff's Department car pulled onto the shoulder and Lucy Kerr climbed out. Just what I need--more cooks. The deputy nodded coolly to Sachs. "Find anything helpful at the house?"

  "A few things." Sachs didn't explain further and nodded at the hillside.

  In her headset she heard Rhyme's voice. "Is the scene trampled as bad as in the photos?"

  "Like a herd of cattle walked through it. Must be two dozen footprints."

  "Shit," the criminalist muttered.

  Lucy had heard Sachs's comment but said nothing, just kept looking out over the dark junction where the canal met the river.

  Sachs asked, "That's the boat he got away in?" Looking toward a skiff beached on the muddy riverbank.

  "Over there, yeah," Jesse Corn said. "It's not his. He stole it from some folks up the river. You want to search it?"

  "Later. Now, which way wouldn't he have come to get here? Yesterday, I mean. When he killed Billy."

  "Wouldn't?" Jesse pointed to the east. "There's nothing that way. Swamp and reeds. Can't even land a boat. So either he came along Route 112 and down the embankment here. Or, 'cause of the boat, I guess he might've rowed over."

  She opened the crime scene suitcase. Said to Jesse, "I want a known of the dirt around here."

  "Known?"

  "Exemplars--samples, you know."

  "Just of the dirt here."

  "Right."

  "Sure," he said. Then asked, "Why?"

  "Because if we can find soil that doesn't match what's found here naturally it might be from the place Garrett's got those girls."

  "It could also," Lucy said, "be from Lydia's garden or Mary Beth's backyard or shoes of some kids fishing here a couple of days ago."

  "It could," Sachs said patiently. "But we need to do it anyway." She handed Jesse a plastic bag. He strode off, pleased to help. Sachs started down the hill. She paused, opened the crime scene case again. No rubber bands. She noticed that Lucy Kerr had some bands binding the end of her French braid. "Borrow those?" she asked. "The elastic bands?"

  After a brief pause the deputy pulled them off. Sachs stretched them around her shoes. Explained. "So I'll know which footprints're mine."

  As if it makes a difference in this mess, she thought.

  She stepped into the crime scene.

  "Sachs, what do you have?" Rhyme asked. The reception was even worse than earlier.

  "I can't see the scenario very clearly," she said, studying the ground. "Way too many footprints. Must've been eight, ten different people walking through here in the last twenty-four hours. But I have an idea what happened--Mary Beth was kneeling. A man's shoes approach from the west--from the direction of the canal. Garrett's. I remember the tread of the shoe Jesse found. I can see where Mary Beth stands and steps back. A second man's shoes approach from the south. Billy. He came down the embankment. He's moving fast--mostly on his toes. So he's sprinting. Garrett goes toward him. They scuffle. Billy backs up to a willow tree. Garrett comes toward him. More scuffling." Sachs studied the white outline of Billy's body. "The first time Garrett hits Billy with the shovel he gets him in the head. He falls. That didn't kill him. But then he hit him in the neck when he was down. That finished him off."

  Jesse gave a surprised laugh, staring at the same outline as if he were looking at something completely different from what she saw. "How'd you know that?"

  Absently she said, "The blood pattern. There're a few small drops here." She pointed to the ground. "Consistent with blood falling about six feet--that's from Billy's head. But that big spray pattern--which'd have to be from a severed carotid or jugular--starts when he was on the ground.... Okay, Rhyme, I'm going to start the search."

  Walking the grid. Foot by foot. Eyes on the dirt and grass, eyes on the knotty bark of the oaks and willows, eyes up to the overhanging branches ("A crime scene is three dimensional, Sachs," Rhyme often reminded).

  "Those cigarette butts still there?" Rhyme asked.

  "Got 'em." She turned to Lucy. "Those cigarette butts," she said, nodding at the ground. "Why weren't they picked up?"

  "Oh," Jesse answered for her, "those're just Nathan's."

 
"Who?"

  "Nathan Groomer. One of our deputies. He's been trying to quit but just can't quite manage to."

  Sachs sighed but managed to refrain from telling them that any cop who smoked at a crime scene ought to be suspended. She covered the ground carefully but the search was futile. Any visible fibers, scraps of paper or other physical evidence had been removed or blown away. She walked to the scene of this morning's kidnapping, stepped under the tape and started on the grid around the willow. Back and forth, fighting the dizziness from the heat. "Rhyme, there isn't much here ... but... wait. I've got something." She'd seen a flash of white, close to the water. She walked down and carefully picked up a wadded-up Kleenex. Her knees cried out--from the arthritis that had plagued her for years. Rather be running down a perp than doing deep knee bends, she thought. "Kleenex. Looks similar to the ones at his house, Rhyme. Only this one's got blood on it. Quite a bit."

  Lucy asked, "You think Garrett dropped it?"

  Sachs examined it. "I don't know. All I can say is that it didn't spend the night here. Moisture content's too low. Morning dew would have half disintegrated it."

  "Excellent, Sachs. Where'd you learn that? I don't recall ever mentioning it."

  "Yes, you did," she said absently. "Your textbook. Chapter twelve. Paper."

  Sachs walked down to the water, searched the small boat. She found nothing inside. Then she asked, "Jesse, can you row me over?"

  He was, of course, more than happy to. And she wondered how long it would be before he fired off the first invitation for a cup of coffee. Uninvited, Lucy climbed in the skiff too and they pushed off. The threesome rowed silently over the river, which was surprisingly choppy in the current.

  On the far shore Sachs found footprints in the mud: Lydia's shoes--the fine tread of nurse sneakers. And Garrett's prints--one barefoot, one in a running shoe with the tread that was already familiar to her. She followed them into the woods. They led to the hunting blind where Ed Schaeffer had been stung by the wasps. Sachs stopped, dismayed.

  What the hell had happened here?

  "God, Rhyme, it looks like the scene was swept."

  Criminals often use brooms or even leaf blowers to destroy or confuse the evidence at crime scenes.

  But Jesse Corn said, "Oh, that was from the chopper."

  "Helicopter?" Sachs asked, dumbfounded.