The Empty Chair (Lincoln Rhyme 3)

No one could read the lettering.

"Any idea what was inside originally?" Rhyme asked.

She picked up the bag and smelled it. "Musty. Been inside someplace for a long time. Can't tell what was in it." Sachs turned the bag inside out and hit it hard with the flat of her hand. A few old, shriveled corn kernels fell onto the ground.

"Corn, Rhyme."

"My namesake." Jesse laughed.

Rhyme asked, "Farms around here?"

Sachs relayed the question to the search party.

"Dairy, not corn," Lucy said, looking at Ned and Jesse, who nodded.

Jesse said, "But you'd feed corn to cows."

"Sure," Ned said. "I'd guess it came from a feed-and-grain store someplace. Or a warehouse."

"You hear that, Rhyme?"

"Feed and grain. Right. I'll get Ben and Jim Bell on that. Anything else, Sachs?"

She looked at her hands. They were blackened. She turned the bag over. "Looks like there's scorch on the bag, Rhyme. It wasn't burned itself but it was sitting in something that had."

"Any idea what?"

"Bits of charcoal, looks like. So I'd guess wood."

"Okay," he said. "It's going on the list."

She glanced at Garrett's and Lydia's footprints. "We're going after them again," she told Rhyme.

"I'll call when I have some more answers."

Sachs announced to the search party, "Back up to the top." Feeling the shooting pains in her knees she gazed up to the lip of the quarry, muttering, "Didn't seem that high when we got here."

"Oh, hey, that's a rule--hills're always twice as tall going up as coming down," said Jesse Corn, the resident storehouse of aphorisms, as he politely let her precede him up the narrow path.

... chapter fourteen

Lincoln Rhyme, ignoring a glistening black-and-green fly that strafed nearby, was gazing at the latest evidence chart.

FOUND AT SECONDARY CRIME SCENE--QUARRY

Old Burlap Bag--Unreadable Name on It

Corn--Feed and Grain?

Scorch Marks on Bag

Deer Park Water

Planters Cheese Crackers

The most unusual evidence is the best evidence. Rhyme was never happier at a crime scene than when he found something completely unidentifiable. Because it meant that if he could identify it there'd be limited sources he could trace it back to.

But these items--the evidence Sachs had found at the quarry--were common. If the printing on the bag had been legible then he might have traced that to a single source. But it wasn't. If the water and crackers had price stickers they might have been traced to the stores that sold them and to a clerk who recalled Garrett and might have some information about where to find him. But they didn't. And scorched wood? That led to every barbecue in Paquenoke County. Useless.