The Empty Chair

camphene. You ever hear of that?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Well, Garrett walked through some of it, whatever it is.” He looked at the evidence bag. “Now, what else do we have? That white tissue Sachs found. . . .”
    Ben picked up the bag, held it close to Rhyme. There was a lot of blood on the tissue. He glanced at the other tissue sample—the Kleenex that Sachs had found in Garrett’s room. “They the same?”
    “Look the same,” Ben said. “Both white, both the same size.”
    Rhyme said, “Give them to Jim Bell. Tell him I want a DNA analysis. The drive-through variety.”
    “The, uhm . . . what’s that, sir?”
    “The down-and-dirty DNA, the polymerase chain reaction. We don’t have time for the RFLP—that’s the one-in-six-billion version. I just want to know if it’s Billy Stail’s blood or somebody else’s. Have somebody scrounge up samples from Billy Stail’s body and from Mary Beth and Lydia.”
    “Samples? Of what?”
    Rhyme forced himself once more to remain patient. “Of genetic material. Any tissue from Billy’s body. For the women, getting some hair would be the easiest—as long as the bulb’s attached. Have a deputy pick up a brush or comb from Mary Beth’s and Lydia’s bathrooms and get it over to the same lab that’s running the test on the Kleenex.”
    The man took the bag and left the room. He returned a moment later. “They’ll have it in an hour or two, sir. They’re going to send it to the med center in Avery, not to the state police. Deputy Bell, I mean, Sheriff Bell, thought that would be easier.”
    “An hour?” Rhyme muttered, grimacing. “Way too long.”
    He couldn’t help wondering if this delay might be just long enough to keep them from finding the Insect Boy before he killed Lydia or Mary Beth.
    Ben stood with his bulky arms at his sides. “Uhm, I could call them back. I told ’em how important it was but . . . Do you want me to?”
    “That’s okay, Ben. We’ll keep going here. Thom, time for our charts.”
    The aide wrote on the blackboard as Rhyme dictated to him.
    F OUND AT P RIMARY C RIME S CENE —B LACKWATER L ANDING
    Kleenex with Blood
    Limestone Dust
    Nitrates
    Phosphate
    Ammonia
    Detergent
    Camphene
    Rhyme gazed at it. More questions than answers. . . .
    Fish out of water . . .
    His eye fell on the pile of dirt that Ben had dug out of the boy’s shoe. Then something occurred to him. “Jim!” he shouted, his voice booming and startling both Thom and Ben. “Jim! Where the hell is he? Jim!!”
    “What?” The sheriff came running into the room, alarmed. “Something wrong?”
    “How many people work in the building here?”
    “I don’t know. ’Bout twenty.”
    “And they live all over the county?”
    “More’n that. Some travel from Pasquotank, Albemarle and Chowan.”
    “I want ’em all down here now.”
    “What?”
    “Everybody in the building. I want soil samples from their shoes. . . . Wait: And the floor mats in their cars.”
    “Soil . . .”
    “Soil! Dirt! Mud! You know. I want it now!”
    Bell retreated. Rhyme said to Ben, “That rack? Over there?”
    The zoologist lumbered toward the table on which was a long rack holding a number of test tubes.
    “It’s a density gradient tester. It profiles the specific gravity of materials like dirt.”
    He nodded. “I’ve heard of it. Never used one.”
    “It’s easy. Those bottles there—” Rhyme was looking toward two dark glass bottles. One labeled tetra, the other ethanol. “You’re going to mix those the way I tell you and fill up the tubes close to the top.”
    “Okay. What’s that going to do?”
    “Start mixing. I’ll tell you when we’re through.”
    Ben mixed the chemicals according to Rhyme’s instructions and then filled twenty of the tubes with alternating bands of different colored liquids—the ethanol and the tetrabromoethane.
    “Pour a little of the soil sample from Garrett’s shoe into the tube on the left. The soil’ll separate and that’ll give us a profile. We’ll get samples from employees here who live in different areas of the county. If any of them match Garrett’s that means the dirt he picked up could be from nearby.”
    Bell arrived with the first of the employees and Rhyme explained what he was going to do. The sheriff grinned in admiration. “That’s an idea and a half, Lincoln. CousinRoland knew what he was doing when he sang your praises.”
    But the half hour spent on this exercise was futile. None of