The Empty Chair

hand. “Can I ask you a question?”
    “What?”
    “Do you have children?”
    A hesitation. “No,” she responded. “Why?”
    “You understandably feel sympathy for him—I think we all do—but you might be confusing that with some latent maternal sense.”
    “What does that mean?”
    The doctor continued, “I mean that if you have some desire to have children yourself you might not be able to take an objective view about a sixteen-year-old boy’s innocence or guilt. Especially one who’s an orphan and has had a tough time in life.”
    “I can take a perfectly objective role,” she snapped. “There’s just too much that doesn’t add up. Garrett’s motives don’t make sense, he—”
    “Motives are the weak leg of the evidentiary stool, Sachs, you know that.”
    “I don’t need any more maxims, Rhyme,” she snapped.
    The criminalist sighed in frustration, glanced at the clock.
    Dr. Penny continued. “I heard you asking Cal Fredericks about Lancaster, about what was going to happen to the boy.”
    She lifted an eyebrow.
    “Well, I think you can help him,” the doctor said. “The best thing you can do is to just spend some time with him. The county’ll assign a caseworker to liaise with the guardian the court appoints and you’ll have to get their approval but I’m sure it can be arranged. He might even open up with you about Mary Beth.”
    As she was considering this Thom appeared in the doorway. “Van’s outside, Lincoln.”
    Rhyme glanced at the map one last time and then turned toward the doorway. “‘Once more into the breach, dear friends. . . .’”
    Jim Bell walked into the room and rested his hand on Rhyme’s insensate arm. “We’re organizing a search of the Outer Banks. With a little luck we’ll have her in a few days. Listen, I can’t thank you enough, Lincoln.”
    Rhyme deflected the gratitude with a nod and wished the sheriff good luck.
    “I’ll come visit you at the hospital, Lincoln,” Ben said. “I’ll bring some scotch. When’re they going to let you start drinking again?”
    “Not soon enough.”
    “I’ll help Ben finish up,” Sachs told him.
    Bell said to her, “We’ll get you a ride over to Avery.”
    She nodded. “Thanks. I’ll be there soon, Rhyme.”
    But the criminalist had, it seemed, already departed from Tanner’s Corner, mentally if not physically, and he said nothing. Sachs heard only the vanishing whine as the Storm Arrow steamed down the corridor.

    Fifteen minutes later they had most of the forensic equipment put away and Sachs sent Ben Kerr home, thanking him for his volunteer efforts.
    In his wake Jesse Corn had appeared at Sachs’s side. She wondered if he’d been staking out the corridor, waiting for a chance to catch her alone.
    “He’s quite somebody, isn’t he?” Jesse asked. “Mr. Rhyme.” The deputy began stacking boxes that didn’t need to be stacked.
    “That he is,” she said noncommittally.
    “That operation he’s talking about. Will it fix him?”
    It’ll kill him. It’ll make him worse. It’ll turn him into a vegetable.
    “No.”
    She thought Jesse would ask, Then why’s he doing it? But the deputy offered another one of his sayings: “Sometimes you just find yourself standing in need to do something. No matter it seems hopeless.”
    Sachs shrugged, thinking: Yeah, sometimes you just do.
    She snapped the locks on a microscope case and coiled the last of the electrical cords. She noticed a stack of books on the table, the ones she’d found in Garrett’s room in his foster parents’ house. She picked up The Miniature World, the book that the boy had asked Dr. Penny for. She opened it. Flipped through the pages, read a passage.
    There are 4,500 known species of mammals in the world but 980,000 known species of insects and an estimated two to three million more not yet discovered. The diversity and astonishing resilience of these creatures arouses more than simple admiration. One thinks of Harvard biologist and entomologist E. O. Wilson’s coined term “Biofilia,” by which he means the emotional affiliation humans feel toward other living organisms. There is certainly as great anopportunity for such a connection with insects as there is for a pet dog or prize racehorse, or indeed, other humans.
    She glanced out into the corridor, where Cal Fredericks and Bryan McGuire were still engaged in their complicated verbal fencing match. Garrett’s lawyer was clearly losing.
    Sachs snapped the book