The Empty Chair

Nothing more. Rhyme glanced hopelessly at the lone shoe.
    “Just set it over there.” Nodding toward a table. “Tell me about these other deaths Garrett was a suspect in.”
    Bell said, “All in and around Blackwater Landing. Two of the victims drowned in the canal. Evidence looked like they’d fallen and hit their heads. But the medical examiner said they could’ve been hit intentionally and pushed in. Garrett’d been seen around their houses not long before they died. Then last year somebody was stung to death. Wasps. Just like with Ed. We know Garrett did it.”
    Bell started to continue but Mason interrupted. He said in a low voice, “Girl in her early twenties—like Mary Beth. Real nice, good Christian. She was taking a nap on her back porch. Garrett tossed a hornets’ nest inside. Got herself stung a hundred thirty-seven times. Had a heart attack.”
    Lucy Kerr said, “I ran the call. It was a real bad sight, what happened to her. She died slow. Real painful.”
    “Oh, and that funeral we passed on the way here?” Bell asked. “That was Todd Wilkes. He was eight. Killed himself.”
    “Oh, no,” Sachs muttered. “Why?”
    “Well, he’d been pretty sick,” Jesse Corn explained. “He was at the hospital more than at home. Was real tore up about it. But there was more—Garrett was seen shouting at Todd a few weeks ago, really giving him hell. We were thinking that Garrett kept harassing and scaring him until he snapped.”
    “Motive?” Sachs asked.
    “He’s a psycho, that’s his motive,” Mason spat out. “People make fun of him and he’s out to get them. Simple as that.”
    “Schizophrenic?”
    Lucy said, “Not according to his counselors at school. Antisocial personality’s what they call it. He’s got a high IQ. He got mostly A’s on his report cards—before he started skipping school a couple of years ago.”
    “You have a picture of him?” Sachs asked.
    The sheriff opened a file. “Here’s the booking shot for the hornets’ nest assault.”
    The picture showed a thin, crew-cut boy with prominent, connected brows and sunken eyes. There was a rash on his cheek.
    “Here’s another.” Bell unfolded a newspaper clipping. It showed a family of four at a picnic table. The caption read, “The Hanlons at the Tanner’s Corner Annual Picnic, a week before a tragic auto accident on Route 112 took the lives of Stuart, 39, and Sandra, 37, and their daughter, Kaye, 10. Also pictured is Garrett, 11, who was not in the car at the time of the accident.”
    “Can I see the report of the scene yesterday?” Rhyme asked.
    Bell opened a folder. Thom took it. Rhyme had no page-turning frame so he relied on his aide to flip the pages.
    “Can’t you hold it steadier?”
    Thom sighed.
    But the criminalist was irritated. The crime scene had been very sloppily worked. There were Polaroid photos revealing a number of footprints but no rulers had been laid in the shot to indicate size. Also, none of the prints had numbered cards to indicate that they’d been made by different individuals.
    Sachs noticed this too and shook her head, commenting on it.
    Lucy, sounding defensive, said, “You always do that? Put cards down?”
    “Of course,” Sachs said. “It’s standard procedure.”
    Rhyme continued to examine the report. In it was only a cursory description of the location and pose of the boy’s body. Rhyme could see that the outlining had been done in spray paint, which is notorious for ruining trace and contaminating crime scenes.
    No dirt had been sampled for trace at the site of the body or where there’d been an obvious scuffle between Billy and Mary Beth and Garrett. And Rhyme could see cigarette butts on the ground—which might provide many clues—but none had been collected.
    “Next.”
    Thom flipped the page.
    The friction ridge—fingerprint—report was marginally better. The shovel had four full and seventeen partials, all positively identified as Garrett’s and Billy’s. Most of them were latents but a few were evident—easily visible without chemicals or alternative light source imaging—in a smear of mud on the handle. Still, Mason had been careless when he’d worked the scene—his latex glove prints on the shovel covered up many of the killer’s. Rhyme would have fired a tech for such careless handling of evidence but since there were so many other good prints it wouldn’t make any difference in this case.
    The equipment would be arriving soon. Rhyme said to