The Empty Chair

“What is it?”
    “Minute,” she whispered, flicking the overhead light on. The gun sight rested on a poster of the creepy monster in the movie Alien.
    With her left hand she swung the closet door open. Empty.
    “It’s secured, Rhyme. Have to say, though, I don’t really care for the way he decorates.”
    It was then that the stench hit her. Unwashed clothing, bodily scents. And something else. . . .
    “Phew,” she muttered.
    “Sachs? What is it?” Rhyme’s voice was impatient.
    “Place stinks.”
    “Good. You know my rule.”
    “Always smell the crime scene first. Wish I hadn’t.”
    “I meant to clean it up.” Mrs. Babbage had padded up behind Sachs. “I shoulda, before you got here. But I was too afraid to go in. Besides, skunk’s hard to get out unless you wash in tomato juice. Which Hal thinks is a waste of money.”
    That was it. Crowning the smell of dirty clothes was the burnt-rubber scent of skunk musk. Hands clasped desperately, looking like she was about to cry, Garrett’s foster mother whispered, “He’ll be mad you broke the door.”
    Sachs said to her, “I’ll need a little time alone here.” She ushered the woman out and closed the door.
    “Time’s wasting, Sachs,” Rhyme snapped.
    “I’m on it,” she responded. Looking around. Repulsed by the gray, stained sheets, the piles of dirty clothes, the dishes glued together with old food, the Cell-o bags filled with the dust of potato and corn chips. The whole place made her edgy. She found her fingers in her scalp, compulsively scratching. Stopped, then scratched some more. She wondered why she was so angry. Maybe because the slovenliness suggested that his foster parents didn’t really give a damn about the boy and that this neglect had contributed to his becoming a killer and a kidnapper.
    Sachs scanned the room fast and noticed that there were dozens of smudges and finger- and footprints on the windowsill. It seemed he used the window more than the front door and she wondered if they locked the children down at night.
    She turned to the wall opposite the bed and squinted. Felt a chill slide through her. “We’ve got ourselves a collector here, Rhyme.”
    She looked over the dozen large jars—terrariums filled with colonies of insects clustered together, surrounding pools of water in the bottom of each one. Labels in sloppy handwriting identified the species: Water Boatman . . . Diving Bell Spider. A chipped magnifying glass sat on a nearby table, beside an old office chair that looked as if Garrett had retrieved it from a trash heap.
    “I know why they call him the Insect Boy,” Sachs said, then told Rhyme about the jars. She shivered with revulsion as a horde of moist, tiny bugs moved en masse along the glass of one jar.
    “Ah, that’s good for us.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s a rare hobby. If tennis or collecting coins turned him on, we’d have a harder time pinning him to specific locations. Now, get going on the scene.” He was speaking softly in a voice that was almost cheerful. She knew he’d be imagining himself walking the grid—as he referred to the process of searching a crime scene—using her as his eyes and legs. As head of Investigation and Resources—the NYPD’s forensics and crime scene unit—Lincoln Rhyme had often worked homicide crime scenes himself, usually logging more hours on the job than even junior officers. She knew that walking the grid was what he missed most about his life before the accident.
    “What’s the crime scene kit like?” Rhyme asked. Jesse Corn had dug one up from the Sheriff’s Department equipment room for her to use.
    Sachs opened the dusty metal attaché case. It didn’tcontain a tenth of the equipment of her kit in New York but at least there were the basics: tweezers, a flashlight, probes, latex gloves and evidence bags. “Crime scene lite,” she said.
    “We’re fish out of water on this one, Sachs.”
    “I’m with you there, Rhyme.” She pulled on the gloves as she looked over the room. Garrett’s bedroom was what’s known as a secondary crime scene—not the place where the actual crime occurred but the location where it was planned, for instance, or to which the perps fled and hid out after a crime. Rhyme had long ago taught her that these were often more valuable than the primary scenes because perps tended to be more careless in places like this, shedding gloves and clothes and leaving behind weapons and other evidence.
    She now