The Empty Chair

father said he wasn’t going anywhere either. That was a week before the cancer shut him down.”
    “I’m too ornery to die.”
    But you’re not too ornery to get better, she thought, to meet someone else. To move on and leave me behind.
    The door to the interrogation room opened. Garrett stood in the doorway, Mason behind him. The boy’s hands, no longer in shackles, were cupped in front of him.
    “Hey,” Garrett said in greeting. “Check out what I found. It was in my cell.” He opened his fist and a small insect flew out. “It’s a sphinx moth. They like to forage in valerian flowers. You don’t see ’em much inside. Pretty cool.”
    She smiled faintly, taking pleasure in his enthusiastic eyes. “Garrett, there’s one thing I want you to know.”
    He walked closer, looked down at her.
    “You remember what you said in the trailer? When you were talking to your father in the empty chair?”
    He nodded uncertainly.
    “You were saying how bad you felt that he didn’t want you in the car that night.”
    “I remember.”
    “But you know why he didn’t want you. . . . He was trying to save your life. He knew there was poison in the car and that they were going to die. If you got in the car with them you’d die too. And he didn’t want that to happen.”
    “I guess I know that,” he said. His voice was uncertain and Amelia Sachs supposed that rewriting one’s history was a daunting task.
    “You keep remembering it.”
    “I will.”
    Sachs looked at the tiny, beige moth, flying around the interrogation room. “You leave anybody in the cell for me? For company?”
    “Yeah, I did. There’s a couple of ladybugs—their real name is ladybird beetles. And a leafhopper and syrphus fly. It’s cool the way they fly. You can watch ’em for hours.” He paused. “Like, I’m sorry I lied to you. The thing is, if I hadn’t I never would’ve got out and I couldn’t’ve saved Mary Beth.”
    “That’s all right, Garrett.”
    He looked at Mason. “I can go now?”
    “You can go.”
    He walked to the door, turned and said to Sachs, “I’ll come and, like, hang out. If that’s okay.”
    “I’d like that.”
    He stepped outside, and through the open door Sachs could see him walk up to a four-by-four. It was Lucy Kerr’s. Sachs saw her get out and hold the door open for him—like a mom picking up her son after soccer practice. The jail door closed and shut off this domestic scene.
    “Sachs,” Rhyme began. But she shook her head and started shuffling back toward the lockup. She wanted to be away from the criminalist, away from the Insect Boy,away from the town without children. She wanted to be in the darkness of solitude.
    And soon she was.

    Outside of Tanner’s Corner, on Route 112, where it’s still two-lane, there’s a bend in the road, near the Paquenoke River. Just off the shoulder is a thick growth of plume grass, sedge, indigo and tall columbines showing off their distinctive red flowers like flags.
    The vegetation creates a nook that’s a popular parking space for Paquenoke County deputies, who sip iced tea and listen to the radio as they wait for the display on their radar guns to register 54 mph or higher. Then they accelerate onto the highway in pursuit of the surprised speeder to add another hundred dollars or so to the county treasury.
    Today, Sunday, as a black Lexus SUV passed this jog in the road the radar gun on Lucy Kerr’s dashboard registered a legal 44. But she put the squad car in gear, flipped the switch starting the gumball machine atop the car and sped after the four-by-four.
    She eased close to the Lexus and studied the vehicle carefully. She’d learned long ago to check the rearview mirror of cars she was stopping. You look at the drivers’ eyes and you can pretty much get a feel for what other kinds of crimes they might be committing, if any, beyond speeding or a broken taillight. Drugs, stolen weapons, drinking. You get a feel for how dangerous the pullover will be. Now, she saw the man’s eyes flick into the mirror and glance at her without a hint of guilt or concern.
    Invulnerable eyes . . .
    Which made the anger in her all the hotter and she breathed hard to control it.
    The big car eased onto the dusty shoulder and Lucy pulled in behind it. Rules dictated that she call in for atag, tax and warrants check but Lucy didn’t bother with this. There was nothing that DMV could report that would be of any interest to her. With trembling hands she