The Empty Chair

started her search, walking a grid pattern—covering the floor in close parallel strips, the way you’d mow a lawn, foot by foot, then turning perpendicular and walking over the same territory again.
    “Talk to me, Sachs, talk to me.”
    “It’s a spooky place, Rhyme.”
    “Spooky?” he groused. “What the hell is ‘spooky’?”
    Lincoln Rhyme didn’t like soft observations. He liked hard—specific—adjectives: cold, muddy, blue, green, sharp. Rhyme even complained when she commented that something was “large” or “small.” (“Tell me inches or millimeters, Sachs, or don’t tell me at all.” Amelia Sachs searched crime scenes armed with a Glock 10, latex gloves and a Stanley contractor’s tape measure.)
    She thought: Well, I feel damn spooked. Doesn’t that count for anything?
    “He’s got these posters up. From the Alien movies. And Starship Troopers —these big bugs attacking people. He’s drawn some himself too. They’re violent. The place is filthy. Junk food, a lot of books, clothes, the bugs in the jars. Not much else.”
    “The clothes are dirty?”
    “Yep. Got a good one—a pair of pants, really stained. He’s worn them a lot; they must have a ton of trace in them. And they all have cuffs. Lucky for us—most kids his age’d wear only blue jeans.” She dropped them in a plastic evidence bag.
    “Shirts?”
    “T-shirts only,” she said. “Nothing with pockets.” Criminalists love cuffs and pockets; they trap all sorts of helpful clues. “I’ve got a couple of notebooks here, Rhyme. But Jim Bell and the other deputies must’ve looked through them.”
    “Don’t make any assumptions about our colleagues’ crime scene work,” Rhyme said wryly.
    “Got it.”
    She began flipping through the pages. “There’re no diaries. No maps. Nothing about kidnapping. . . . There’re just drawings of insects . . . pictures of the ones he’s got here in the terrariums.”
    “Any of girls, young women? Sado-sexual?”
    “No.”
    “Bring them along. How about the books?”
    “Maybe a hundred or so. Schoolbooks, books about animals, insects . . . Hold on—got something here—a Tanner’s Corner High School yearbook. It’s six years old.”
    Rhyme asked a question to someone in the room. He came back on the line. “Jim says Lydia’s twenty-six. She’d’ve been out of high school eight years. But check the McConnell girl’s page.”
    Sachs thumbed through the M ’s.
    “Yep. Mary Beth’s picture’s been cut out with a sharp blade of some kind. He sure fits the classic stalker profile.”
    “We’re not interested in profiles. We’re interested in evidence. The other books—the ones on his shelf—which ones does he read the most?”
    “How do I—”
    “Dirt on the pages,” he snapped impatiently. “Start on the ones nearest his bed. Bring back four or five of them.”
    She picked the four with the most well-thumbed pages. The Entomologist’s Handbook, The Field Guide to Insects of North Carolina, Water Insects of North America, The Miniature World.
    “I’ve got them, Rhyme. There’re a lot of marked passages. Asterisks by some of them.”
    “Good. Bring them back. But there’s got to be something more specific in the room.”
    “I can’t find a thing.”
    “Keep looking, Sachs. He’s a sixteen-year-old. You know the juvenile cases we’ve worked. Teenagers’ rooms are the centers of their universe. Start thinking like a sixteen-year-old. Where would you hide things?”
    She looked under the mattress, in and under the drawers of the desk, in the closet, beneath the grimy pillows. Then she shone the flashlight between the wall and the bed. She said, “Got something here, Rhyme. . . .”
    “What?”
    She found a mass of wadded-up Kleenex, a bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care lotion. She examined one of the Kleenexes. It was stained with what appeared to be dried semen.
    “Dozens of tissues under the bed. He’s been a busy boy with his right hand.”
    “He’s sixteen,” Rhyme said. “It’d be unusual if he wasn’t. Bag one. We might need some DNA.”
    Sachs found more under the bed: a cheap picture frame on which he’d painted crude drawings of insects—ants and hornets and beetles. Inside was mounted the cut-out yearbook photo of Mary Beth McConnell. There was also an album of a dozen other snapshots of Mary Beth. They were candids. Most of them were of the young woman on what seemed to be a college campus or walking down the