The Empty Chair

street of a small town. Two were of her inher bikini at a lake. In both of these she was bending down and the picture focused on the girl’s cleavage. She told Rhyme what she’d found.
    “His fantasy girl,” Rhyme muttered. “Keep going.”
    “I think we should bag this and get on to the primary scene.”
    “In a minute or two, Sachs. Remember—this was your idea, being Good Samaritans, not mine.”
    A shudder of anger at this. “What do you want?” she asked heatedly. “You want me to dust for prints? Vacuum for hairs?”
    “Of course not. We’re not after trial-quality evidence for the D.A.; you know that. All we need is something that’ll give us an idea where he might’ve taken the girls. He’s not going to bring them back home. He’s got a place he’s made just for them. And he’s been there earlier—to get it ready. He may be young and quirky but he still smells of an organized offender. Even if the girls’re dead I’ll bet he’s picked out nice, cozy graves for them.”
    Despite all the time they’d worked together Sachs still had trouble with Rhyme’s callousness. She knew it was part of being a criminalist—the distancing one must do from the horror of crime—but it was hard for her. Perhaps because she recognized that she had the same capacity for this coldness within herself, that numbing detachment that the best crime scene searchers must turn on like a light switch, a detachment that Sachs sometimes feared would deaden her heart irreparably.
    Nice, cozy graves . . .
    Lincoln Rhyme, whose voice was never more seductive than when he was imagining a crime scene, said to her, “Go on, Sachs, get into him. Become Garrett Hanlon. What are you thinking? What’s your life like? What do you do minute by minute by minute in that little room? What are your most secret thoughts?”
    The best criminalists, Rhyme had told her, were like talented novelists, who imagined themselves as theircharacters—and could disappear into someone else’s world.
    Eyes scanning the room once more. I’m sixteen. I’m a troubled boy, I’m an orphan, kids at school pick on me, I’m sixteen, I’m sixteen, I’m—
    A thought formed. She snagged it before it swam off.
    “Rhyme, you know what’s weird?”
    “Talk to me, Sachs,” he said softly, encouraging.
    “He’s a teenager, right? Well, I remember Tommy Briscoe—I dated him when I was sixteen. You know what he had all over his walls in his room?”
    “In my day and age it was that damn Farrah Fawcett poster.”
    “That’s it exactly. Garrett doesn’t have a single pinup, a single Playboy or Penthouse poster. No Magic cards, no Pokémon, no toys. No Alanis or Celine. No rock-musician posters. . . . And—hey, get this: no VCR, TV, stereo, radio. No Nintendo. My God, he’s sixteen and he doesn’t even have a computer.” Her goddaughter was twelve and the girl’s room was virtually an electronics showroom.
    “Maybe it’s a money thing—the foster parents.”
    “Hell, Rhyme, if I were his age and wanted to listen to music I’d build a radio. Nothing stops teenagers. But those aren’t the things that excite him.”
    “Excellent, Sachs.”
    Maybe, she reflected, but what did it mean? Recording observations is only half of the job of a forensic scientist; the other half, the far more important half, is drawing helpful conclusions from those observations.
    “Sachs—”
    “Shhhh.”
    She struggled to put aside the person she really was: the cop from Brooklyn, the lover of taut General Motors vehicles, former fashion model for the Chantelle agency on Madison Avenue, champion pistol shot, the woman who wore her straight red hair long and her fingernails short lest the habit of digging into her scalp and skin marher otherwise perfect flesh with yet more stigmata of the tension that drove her.
    Trying to turn that person into smoke and emerge as a troubled, scary sixteen-year-old boy. Someone who needed, or wanted, to take women by force. Who needed, or wanted, to kill.
    What do I feel?
    “I don’t care about normal pleasures, music, TV, computers. I don’t care about normal sex,” she said, half to herself. “I don’t care about normal relationships. People are like insects—things to be caged. In fact, all I care about are insects. They’re my only source of comfort. My only amusement.” She said this as she paced in front of the jars. Then she looked down at the floor at her feet. “The tracks of the