The Empty Chair

the samples submitted from the people in the building matched the dirt in the treads of Garrett’s shoe. Rhyme scowled as the last sample of dirt from the employees settled into the tube.
    “Damn.”
    “Was a good try though,” Bell said.
    A waste of precious time.
    “Should I pitch out the samples?” Ben asked.
    “No. Never throw out your exemplars without recording them,” he said firmly. Then remembered not to be too abrasive in his instructions; the big man was here only by the grace of family ties. “Thom, help us out. Sachs asked for a Polaroid camera from the state. It’s got to be here someplace. Find it and take close-ups of all the tubes. Mark down the name of each employee on the back of the pictures.”
    The aide found the camera and went to work.
    “Now let’s analyze what Sachs found at Garrett’s foster parents’ house. The pants in that bag—see if there’s anything in the cuffs.”
    Ben carefully opened the plastic bag and examined the trousers. “Yessir, some pine needles.”
    “Good. Did they fall off the branches or are they cut?”
    “Cut, looks like.”
    “Excellent. That means he did something to them. He cut them on purpose. And that purpose may have to do with the crime. We don’t know what that is yet but I’d guess it’s camouflage.”
    “I smell skunk,” Ben said, sniffing the clothes.
    Rhyme said, “That’s what Amelia said. Doesn’t do us any good, though. Not yet anyway.”
    “Why not?” the zoologist asked.
    “Because there’s no way to link a wild animal to a specific location. A stationary skunk would be helpful; amobile one isn’t. Let’s look at the trace on the clothes. Cut a couple pieces of the pants and run them through the chromatograph.”
    While they waited for the results Rhyme examined the rest of the evidence from the boy’s room. “Let me see that notebook, Thom.” The aide flipped through the pages for Rhyme. They contained only bad drawings of insects. He shook his head. Nothing helpful there.
    “Those other books?” Rhyme nodded toward the four hardbound books Sachs had found in his room. One— The Miniature World —had been read so often it was falling apart. Rhyme noticed passages were circled or underlined or marked with asterisks. But none of the passages gave any clue as to where the boy might have spent time. They seemed to be trivia about insects. He told Thom to put them aside.
    Rhyme then looked over what Garrett had hidden in the wasp jar: money, pictures of Mary Beth and of the boy’s family. The old key. The fishing line.
    The cash was just a crumpled mass of fives and tens and silver dollars. There were, Rhyme noted, no helpful jottings in the margins of the bills (where many criminals write messages or plans—a fast way to get rid of incriminating instructions to co-conspirators is to buy something and send the note off into the black hole of circulation). Rhyme had Ben run the PoliLight—an alternative light source—over the money and found that both the paper and the silver dollars contained easily a hundred different partial fingerprints, too many to provide any helpful clues. There was no price sticker on the picture frame or fishing line and thus no way to trace them to stores Garrett might’ve frequented.
    “Three-pound-test fishing line,” Rhyme commented, looking at the spool. “That’s light, isn’t it, Ben?”
    “Hardly catch a bluegill with that, sir.”
    The results of the trace on the boy’s slacks flickeredonto the computer screen. Rhyme read aloud: “Kerosene, more ammonia, more nitrates and that camphene again. Another chart, Thom, if you’d be so kind.”
    He dictated.
    F OUND AT S ECONDARY C RIME S CENE —G ARRETT’S R OOM
    Skunk Musk
    Cut Pine Needles
    Drawings of Insects
    Pictures of Mary Beth and Family
    Insect Books
    Fishing Line
    Money
    Unknown Key
    Kerosene
    Ammonia
    Nitrates
    Camphene
    Rhyme stared at the charts. Finally he said, “Thom, make a call. Mel Cooper.”
    The aide picked up the phone, dialed from memory.
    Cooper, who worked with NYPD forensics, weighed in at probably half Ben’s weight. He looked like a timid actuary and he was one of the top forensic lab men in the country.
    “Can you speaker me, Thom?”
    A button was pushed and a moment later the soft tenor of Cooper’s voice said, “Hello, Lincoln. Something tells me you’re not in the hospital.”
    “How’d you figure that one out, Mel?”
    “Didn’t take much deductive reasoning. Caller ID says