The Empty Chair

this is going to work, Amelia and I are going to be in charge of the pursuit. One hundred percent in charge. Now, you tell me up front—is that going to be a problem for anybody?”
    “I’ll make sure it isn’t,” Bell said.
    “Good. Now you better get going on that equipment. We need to move. ”
    And Sheriff Bell stood for a moment, nodding, hat in one hand, Sachs’s list in the other, before he headed for the door. Rhyme believed that Cousin Roland, a man of many Southernisms, had an expression that fit the look on the sheriff’s face. Rhyme wasn’t exactly sure how the phrase went but it had something to do with catching a bear by the tail.
    “Oh, one thing?” Sachs asked, stopping Bell as he passed through the doorway. He paused and turned. “The perp? What’s his name?”
    “Garrett Hanlon. But in Tanner’s Corner they call him the Insect Boy.”

    Paquenoke is a small county in northeastern North Carolina. Tanner’s Corner, roughly in the center of the county, is the biggest town and is surrounded by smaller unincorporated clusters of residential or commercial pockets, such as Blackwater Landing, which huddles against the Paquenoke River—called the Paquo by most locals—a few miles to the north of the county seat.
    South of the river is where most of the county’s residential and shopping areas are located. The land there is dotted with gentle marshes, forests, fields and ponds. Nearly all of the residents live in this half. North of the Paquo, on the other hand, the land is treacherous. The Great Dismal Swamp has encroached and swallowed up trailer parks and houses and the few mills and factories on that side of the river. Snaky bogs have replaced the ponds and fields, and the forests, largely old-growth, are impenetrable unless you’re lucky enough to find a path. No one lives on that side of the river except ’shiners and drug cookers and a few crazy swamp people. Even hunters tend to avoid the area after that incident two years ago when wild boars came after Tal Harper and even shooting half of them didn’t stop the rest from devouring him before help arrived.
    Like most people in the county Lydia Johansson rarely went north of the Paquo, and never very far from civilization when she did. She now realized, with an overwhelming sense of despair, that by crossing the river she’d stepped over some boundary into a place from which she might never return—a boundary that was not merely geographic but was spiritual too.
    She was terrified being dragged along behind this creature, of course—terrified at the way he looked over her body, terrified of his touch, terrified that she’d die from heat- or sunstroke or snakebite—but what scared her the most was realizing what she’d left behind on the south side of the river: her fragile, comfortable life, small though it was: her few friends and fellow nurses on the hospital ward, the doctors she flirted futilely with, the pizza parties, the Seinfeld reruns, her horror books, ice cream, her sister’s children. She even looked back longingly at the troubled parts of her life—the struggle with her weight, the fight to quit smoking, the nights alone, the long absence of phone calls from the man she occasionally saw (she called him her “boyfriend,” though she knew that was merely wishful thinking) . . . even these now seemed fiercely poignant simply because of their familiarity.
    But there wasn’t a sliver of comfort where she was now.
    She remembered the terrible sight at the hunter’s blind—deputy Ed Schaeffer lying unconscious on the ground, arms and face swollen grotesquely from the wasp stings. Garrett had muttered, “He shouldn’t’ve hurt ’em. Yellow jackets only attack when their nest’s in danger. It was his fault.” He’d walked inside slowly, the insects ignoring him, to collect some things. He’d taped her hands in front of her and then led her into the woods through which they’d been traveling now for several miles.
    The boy moved in an awkward way, jerking her in one direction, then another. He talked to himself. He scratched at the red blotches on his face. Once, he stopped at a pool of water and stared at it. He waited until some bug or spider danced away over the surface then pressed his face into the water, soaking the troubled skin. He looked down at his feet then took off his remaining shoe and flung it away. They pushed on through the hot morning.
    She glanced at the map sticking out of his