The Empty Chair

down a straightaway; the cemetery disappeared behind them.
    As Bell had promised, Tanner’s Corner was twenty miles from the medical center at Avery. The WELCOME TO sign assured visitors that the town was the home of 3,018 souls, which may have been true but only a tiny percentage of them were evident along Main Street on this hot August morning. The dusty place seemed to be a ghost town. One elderly couple sat on a bench, looking out over the empty street. Rhyme spotted two men who must’ve been the resident drunks—sickly looking and skinny. One sat on the curb, his scabby head in his hands, probably working off a hangover. The other sat against a tree, staring at the glossy van with sunken eyes that even from the distance seemed jaundiced. A scrawny woman lazily washed the drugstore window. Rhyme saw no one else.
    “Peaceful,” Thom observed.
    “That’s one way to put it,” said Sachs, who obviously shared Rhyme’s sense of unease at the emptiness.
    Main Street was a tired stretch of old buildings and two small strip malls. Rhyme noticed one supermarket, two drugstores, two bars, one diner, a women’s clothing boutique, an insurance company and a combination video shop/candy store/nail salon. The A-OK Car Dealership was sandwiched between a bank and a marine supplies operation. Everybody sold bait. One billboard was for McDonald’s, seven miles away along Route 17. Another showed a sun-bleached painting of the Monitor and Merrimack Civil War ships. “Visit the Ironclad Museum.” You had to drive twenty-two miles to see that attraction.
    As Rhyme took in all these details of small-town life he realized with dismay how out of his depth as a criminalist he was here. He could successfully analyze evidence in New York because he’d lived there for so many years—had pulled the city apart, walked its streets, studied its history and flora and fauna. But here, in Tanner’s Corner and environs, he knew nothing of the soil, the air,the water, nothing of the habits of the residents, the cars they liked, the houses they lived in, the industries that employed them, the lusts that drove them.
    Rhyme recalled working for a senior detective at the NYPD when he was a new recruit. The man had lectured his underlings, “Somebody tell me: what’s the expression ‘Fish out of water’ mean?”
    Young officer Rhyme had said, “It means: out of one’s element. Confused.”
    “Yeah, well, what happens when fish’re out of water?” the grizzled old cop had snapped at Rhyme. “They don’t get confused. They get fucking dead . The greatest single threat to an investigator is unfamiliarity with his environment. Remember that.”
    Thom parked the van and went through the ritual of lowering the wheelchair. Rhyme blew into the sip-and-puff controller of the Storm Arrow and rolled toward the County Building’s steep ramp, undoubtedly added to the building grudgingly after the Americans with Disabilities Act went into effect.
    Three men—in work clothes and with folding knife scabbards on their belts—pushed out of the side door of the sheriff’s office beside the ramp. They walked toward a burgundy Chevy Suburban.
    The skinniest of the three poked the biggest one, a huge man with a braided ponytail and a beard, and nodded toward Rhyme. Then their eyes—almost in unison—perused Sachs’s body. The big one took in Thom’s trim hair, slight build, impeccable clothes and golden earring. Expressionless, he whispered something to the third of the trio, a man who looked like a conservative Southern businessman. He shrugged. They lost interest in the visitors and climbed into the Chevy.
    Fish out of water . . .
    Bell, walking beside Rhyme’s chair, noticed his gaze.
    “That’s Rich Culbeau, the big one. And his buddies. Sean O’Sarian—the skinny feller—and Harris Tomel.Culbeau’s not half as much trouble as he looks. He likes playing redneck but he’s usually no bother.”
    O’Sarian glanced back at them from the passenger seat—though whether he was glancing at Thom or Sachs or himself, Rhyme didn’t know.
    The sheriff jogged ahead to the building. He had to fiddle with the door at the top of the handicapped ramp; it had been painted shut.
    “Not many crips here,” Thom observed. Then he asked Rhyme, “How’re you feeling?”
    “I’m fine.”
    “You don’t look fine. You look pale. I’m taking your blood pressure the minute we get inside.”
    They entered the building. It was dated circa 1950,