"Your eyes."
"But--"
"Just look at them. See if the color of the unknown sample is different from the color of the known."
"How do I do that?"
Rhyme forced himself to answer calmly. "You just look at them."
Ben stared at one pile, then the other.
Back again. Once more.
And then once again.
Come on, come on ... it isn't that tricky. Rhyme struggled to be patient. One of the hardest things in the world for him.
"What do you see?" Rhyme asked. "Is the dirt from the two scenes different?"
"Well, I can't exactly tell, sir. I think one's lighter."
"'Scope them in the comparison."
Ben mounted the samples in a comparison microscope and looked through the eyepieces. "I'm not sure. Hard to say. I guess ... maybe there is some difference."
"Let me see."
Once again the massive muscles held the large microscope steady and Rhyme peered into the eyepieces. "Definitely different from the known," Rhyme said. "Lighter colored. And it has more crystal in it. More granite and clay and different types of vegetation. So it's not from Blackwater Landing. ... If we're lucky it came from his hidey-hole."
A faint smile crossed Ben's lips, the first Rhyme had seen.
"What?"
"Oh, well, that's what we call the cave a moray eel takes for his home ..." The young man's smile vanished as Rhyme's stare told him that this was not the time or place for anecdotes.
The criminalist said, "When you get the results of the limestone on the chromatograph run the dirt from the treads."
"Yessir."
A moment later the screen of the computer attached to the chromatograph/spectrometer flickered and lines shaped like mountains and valleys appeared. Then a window popped up and the criminalist maneuvered closer in his wheelchair. He bumped a table and the Storm Arrow jerked to the left, jostling Rhyme. "Shit."
Ben's eyes went wide with alarm. "Are you all right, sir?"
"Yes, yes, yes," Rhyme muttered. "What's that fucking table doing there? We don't need it."
"I'll get it out of the way," Ben blurted, grabbing the heavy table with one hand as if it were made of balsa wood and stashing it in the corner. "Sorry, I should've thought of that."
Rhyme ignored the zoologist's uncomfortable contrition and scanned the screen. "Large amounts of nitrates, phosphates and ammonia."
This was very troubling but Rhyme said nothing just yet; he wanted to see what substances were in the dirt that Ben had dug out of the treads. And shortly these results too were on the screen.
Rhyme sighed. "More nitrates, more ammonia--a lot of it. High concentrations again. Also, more phosphates. Detergent too. And something else.... What the hell is that?"
"Where?" Ben asked, leaning toward the screen.
"At the bottom. The database's identified it as 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.
FOUND AT PRIMARY CRIME SCENE--BLACKWATER LANDING
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. Cousin Roland knew what he was doing when he sang your praises."
But the half hour spent on this exercise was futile. None of 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 b
e 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; a mobile 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 flickered onto 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.
FOUND AT SECONDARY CRIME SCENE-- GARRETT'S ROOM
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 Paquenoke County Government Building. Delaying your operation?"
"No. Just helping out on a case here. Listen, Mel, I don't have much time and I need some information about a substance called camphene. Ever hear of it?"
"No. But hold on. I'll go into the database."
Rhyme heard frantic clicking. Cooper was also the fastest keyboarder Rhyme had ever met.
"Okay, here we go ... Interesting ..."
"I don't need interesting, Mel. I need facts."
"It's a terpene--carbon and hydrogen. Derived from plants. It used to be an ingredient in pesticides but it was banned in the early eighties. Its main use was in the late 1800s. It was used for fuel in lamps. It was state of the art at the time--replaced whale oil. Common as natural gas back then. You're trying to track down an unsub?"
"He's not an unknown subject, Mel. He's extremely known. We just can't find him. Old lamps? So trace camphene probably means that he's been hiding out someplace built in the nineteenth century."
"Likely. But there's another possibility. Says here that camphene's only present use is in fragrances."
"What sort?"
"Perfumes, aftershave and cosmetics mostly."
Rhyme considered this. "What percentage of a finished fragrance product is camphene?" he asked.
"Trace only. Parts per thousand."
Rhyme had always told his forensic teams never to be afraid to make bold deductions in analyzing the evidence. Still, he was painfully aware of the short time the two women might have to live and he felt they had only enough resources now to pursue one of these potential leads.
"We'll have to play the odds on this one," he announced. "We'll assume the camphene's from old lanterns, not fragrances, and act accordingly. Now, listen, Mel, I'm also going to be sending you a photocopy of a key. I need you to trace it."
"Easy. From a car?"
"I don't know."
"House?"
"Don't know."
"Recent?"
"No clue."
Cooper said dubiously, "May be less easy than I thought. But get it to me and I'll do what I can."
When they disconnected, Rhyme ordered Ben to photocopy both sides of the key and fax it to Cooper. Then he tried Sachs on the radio. It wasn't working. He called her on her cell phone.
"'Lo?"
"Sachs, it's me."
"What's wrong with the radio?" she asked.
"There's no reception."
"Which way should we go, Rhyme? We're across the river but we lost the trail. And, frankly"--her voice fell to a whisper--"the natives're restless. Lucy wants to boil me for dinner."
"I've got the basic analysis done but I don't know what to do with all the data--I'm waiting for that man from the factory in Blackwater Landing. Henry Davett. He should be here any minute. But listen, Sachs, there's something else I have to tell you. I found significant trace of ammonia and nitrates on Garrett's clothes and in the shoe he lost."
"A bomb?" she asked, her hollow voice revealing her dismay.
"Looks that way. And that fishing line you found's too light to do any serious fishing. I think he's using it for trip wires to set off the device. Go slow. Look for traps. If you see something that looks like a clue just remember that it might be rigged."
"Will do, Rhyme."
"Sit tight. I hope to have some directions for you soon."
Garrett and Lydia had covered another three or four miles.
The sun was high now. It was noon maybe, or close to it, and the day was hot as a tailpipe. The bottled water that Lydia had drunk at the quarry had quickly leached from her system and she was faint from the heat and thirst.
As if he sensed this Garrett said, "We'll be there soon. It's cooler. And I got more water."
The ground was open here. Broken forests, marshes. No houses, no roads. There were many old paths branching in different directions. It would be almost impossible for anyone searching for them to figure out which way they'd gone--the paths were like a maze.
Garrett nodded down one of these narrow paths, rocks to the left, a twenty-foot dr
op off to the right. They walked about a half mile along this route and then he stopped. He looked back.
When he seemed satisfied that no one was nearby he stepped into the bushes and returned with a nylon string--like thin fishing line--that he ran across the path just above the ground. It was nearly impossible to see. He connected it to a stick, which in turn propped up a three-or four-gallon glass bottle, filled with a milky liquid. There was some residue on the side and she got a whiff of it--ammonia. She was horrified. Was it a bomb? she wondered. As a nurse on ER duty she'd treated several teenagers who'd been hurt making homemade explosives. She remembered how their blackened skin had actually been shattered by the detonation.
"You can't do that," she whispered.
"I don't want any shit from you." He snapped his fingernails. "I'm gonna finish up here and then we're going home."
Home?
Lydia stared, numb, at the large bottle as he covered it with boughs.
Garrett pulled her down the path once more. Despite the increasing heat of the day he was moving faster now and she struggled to keep up with Garrett, who seemed to get dirtier by the minute, covered with dust and flecks of dead leaves. It was as if he were slowly turning into an insect himself every step they got farther from civilization. It reminded her of some story she was supposed to read in school but never finished.
"Up there." Garrett nodded toward a hill. "There's a place we'll stay. Go on to the ocean in the morning."
Her uniform was soaked with sweat. The top two buttons of the white outfit were undone and the white of her bra was visible. The boy kept glancing at the rounded skin of her breasts. But she hardly cared; at the moment she wanted only to escape from the Outside, to get into some cooling shade, wherever he was taking her.
Fifteen minutes later they broke from the woods and into a clearing. In front of them was an old gristmill, surrounded by reeds, cattails, tall grass. It sat beside a stream that had largely been taken over by the swamp. One wing of the mill had burnt down. Amid the rubble stood a scorched chimney--what was called a "Sherman Monument," after the Union general who burned houses and buildings during his march to the sea, leaving a landscape of blackened chimneys behind him.
Garrett led her into the front part of the mill, the portion that had been untouched by the fire. He pushed her through the doorway and swung the heavy oak door shut, bolted it. For a long moment he stood listening. When he seemed satisfied that no one was following he handed her another bottle of water. She fought the urge to gulp down the whole container. She filled her mouth, let it sit, feeling the sting against her parched mouth, then swallowed slowly.