The Empty Chair

with the pictures of the samples you did yesterday morning.”
    “Good, good.” The young zoologist nodded, impressed with the idea. He flipped through the Polaroids, paused. “I’ve got a match!” he said. “One’s almost identical.”
    The zoologist was no longer hesitant to give opinions, Rhyme was pleased to note. And he wasn’t hedging either.
    “Whose shoes was it from?”
    Ben looked at the notation on the back of the Polaroid. “Frank Heller. He works in the Department of Public Works.”
    “Is he in yet?”
    “I’ll find out.” Ben vanished. He returned a few minutes later, accompanied by a heavyset man in a white short-sleeved shirt. He eyed Rhyme uncertainly. “You’re the fellow from yesterday. Making us clean off our shoes.” He laughed but the sound was uneasy.
    “Frank, we need your help again,” Rhyme explained. “Some of the dirt on your shoes matches dirt we found on the suspect’s clothes.”
    “The boy who kidnapped those girls?” Frank muttered, red-faced and looking completely guilty.
    “That’s right. Which means he might—this is pretty far-fetched but he might —have the girl maybe two or three miles from where you live. Could you point out on the map exactly where that is?”
    He said, “It’s not like I’m a suspect or anything, am I?”
    “No, Frank. Not at all.”
    “ ’Cause I got people’ll vouch for me. I’m with the wife every night. We watch TV. Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. Like clockwork. Then WWF. Sometimes her brother comes over. I mean, he owes me money but he’d back me up even if he didn’t.”
    “That’s okay,” Ben reassured him. “We just need to know where you live. On that map there.”
    “That’d be here.” He stepped to the wall and touched a spot. Location D-3. It was north of the Paquenoke—north of the trailer where Jesse had been killed. There were a number of small roads in the area but no towns marked.
    “What’s the area like around you?”
    “Forests and fields mostly.”
    “You know anywhere that somebody might hide a kidnap victim?”
    Frank seemed to be considering this question earnestly. “I don’t, no.”
    Rhyme: “Can I ask you a question?”
    “On top of the ones you already asked?”
    “That’s right.”
    “I suppose you can.”
    “You know about Carolina bays?”
    “Sure. Everybody does. Meteors made ’em. Long time ago. When the dinosaurs got themselves killed.”
    “Are there any near you?”
    “Oh, you bet there are.”
    Which was something that Rhyme was hoping the man would say.
    Frank continued. “Must be close to a hundred of ’em.”
    Which was something he was hoping he wouldn’t.

    Head back, eyes closed, reviewing the evidence charts in his mind.
    Jim Bell and Mason Germain were back in the evidence room, along with Thom and Ben, but Lincoln Rhyme was paying them no mind. He was in his own world, an orderly place of science and evidence and logic, a place where he needed no mobility, a place where his feelings for Amelia and what she’d done were mercifully forbidden entry. He could see the evidence in his mind as clearly as if he were staring at the notations on the chalkboard. In fact, he was able to see them better with his eyes shut.
    Paint sugar yeast dirt camphene paint dirt sugar . . . yeast . . . yeast . . .
    A thought slipped into his mind, fished away. Come back, come back, come back. . . .
    Yes! He snagged it.
    Rhyme’s eyes snapped open. He looked into the empty corner of the room. Bell followed his eyes.
    “What is it, Lincoln?”
    “You have a coffee machine here?”
    “Coffee?” Thom asked, not pleased. “No caffeine. Not with your blood pressure the way—”
    “No, I don’t want a goddamn cup of coffee! I want a coffee filter .”
    “Filter? I’ll dig one up.” Bell disappeared and returned a moment later.
    “Give it to Ben,” Rhyme ordered. Then said to the zoologist, “See if the paper fibers from the filter match the ones we found on Garrett’s clothes at the mill.”
    Ben rubbed some fibers off the filter onto a slide. He gazed through the eyepieces of the comparison microscope, adjusted the focus and then moved the stages so the samples were next to each other in the split-screen viewfinder.
    “The colors’re a little different, Lincoln, but the structure and size of the fibers’re pretty much the same.”
    “Good,” Rhyme said, his eyes now on the T-shirt with the stain on it.
    He said to Ben, “The juice, the fruit