The Empty Chair

it’ll be you against your boss. Sometimes against their bosses. Could be you against your buddies too. You gonna be a cop, you got to be ready to go it alone. There’s no getting around it.”
    “I can handle it, Pop.”
    “That’s my girl. Let’s go for a drive, honey.”
    Sitting in this rickety boat, being piloted by a troubled young man, Sachs had never felt so alone in her life.
    Knuckle time . . . fist to fist.
    “Look there,” Garrett said quickly. Pointing to an insect of some kind. “It’s my favorite of all. The waterboatman. It flies under the water.” His face lit up with unbridled enthusiasm. “It really does! Hey, that’d be pretty neat, wouldn’t it? To fly underwater. I like water. It feels good on my skin.” The smile faded and he rubbed his arm. “This fucking poison oak . . . I get it all the time. It itches bad sometimes.”
    They began threading their way through small inlets, around islands, roots and gray trees, half-submerged, always returning to a westerly course, toward the lowering sun.
    A thought came to Sachs, an echo of something that had occurred to her earlier, in the boy’s cell just before she broke him out of jail: By hiding a boat filled with provisions, gassed up, Garrett had anticipated that he would somehow escape from jail. And that her role in this journey was part of an elaborate, premeditated plan.
    “Whatever you think about Garrett, don’t trust him. You think he’s innocent. But just accept that maybe he isn’t. You know how we approach crime scenes, Sachs.”
    “With an open mind. No preconceptions. Believing that anything’s possible.”
    But then she looked at the boy once again. His eyes bright and skipping happily from sight to sight as he guided the boat through the channels, looking nothing at all like an escaped criminal but for all the world like an enthusiastic teenager on a camping trip, content and excited about what he might find around the next bend in the river.

    “She’s good, Lincoln,” Ben said, referring to the cell phone trick.
    She is good, the criminalist thought. Adding, to himself: She’s as good as I am. Though he conceded grimly—and to himself alone—that she’d been better than he this time.
    Rhyme was furious with himself for not anticipating it. This isn’t a game, he thought, an exercise—like the way he’d challenge her sometimes when she was walking the grid or when they were analyzing evidence back in his lab in New York. Her life was in danger. She had perhaps only hours before Garrett assaulted or killed her. He couldn’t afford to slip up again.
    A deputy appeared in the doorway, carrying a paper Food Lion bag. It contained Garrett’s clothes from the lockup.
    “Good!” Rhyme said. “Do a chart, somebody. Thom, Ben . . . do a chart. ‘Found at the Secondary Crime Scene—the Mill.’ Ben, write, write!”
    “But we’ve got one,” Ben said, pointing to the chalkboard.
    “No, no, no,” Rhyme snapped. “Erase it. Those clues were fake. Garrett planted them to lead us off. Just like the limestone in the shoe he left behind when he snatched Lydia. If we can find some evidence in his clothes”—nodding at the bag—“that’ll tell us where Mary Beth really is.”
    “If we’re lucky,” Bell said.
    No, Rhyme thought, if we’re skillful. He said to Ben, “Cut a piece of the pants—near the cuff—and run it through the chromatograph.”
    Bell stepped out of the office to talk to Steve Farr about getting priority frequencies on the radios without tipping the state police about what was happening, which Rhyme had insisted he do.
    Now the criminalist and Ben waited for the results from the chromatograph. As they did, Rhyme asked, “What else do we have?” Nodding toward the clothes.
    “Brown paint stains on Garrett’s pants,” Ben reported as he examined them. “Dark brown. Looks recent.”
    “Brown,” Rhyme repeated, examining them. “What’s the color of Garrett’s parents’ house?”
    “I don’t know,” Ben began.
    “I didn’t expect you to be a storehouse of Tanner’s Corner trivia,” Rhyme grumbled. “I meant: Call them.”
    “Oh.” Ben found the number in the case file and called. He spoke to someone for a moment then hung up. “That’s one uncooperative son of a bitch. . . . Garrett’s foster dad. Anyway, their house is white and there’s nothing painted dark brown on the property.”
    “So, it’s probably the color of the place where he’s got