Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

"Okay. Those batteries. Could they be dangerous?" The image of the polka-dot wounds covering the passenger's body kept surfacing.

"Well, sure." This was apparently a naive question. He added, "But the terminals're covered with insulated caps."

Sachs turned and walked back to the substation. "I'm going inside, Rhyme."

She approached, noting that, for some reason, the powerful lights made the interior even more ominous than when it was dark.

The door to hell, she was thinking.

"I'm getting seasick, Sachs. What're you doing?"

What she was doing, she realized, was hesitating, looking around, focusing on the gaping doorway. She realized that, though Rhyme couldn't see it, she was also rubbing her finger compulsively against the quick of her thumb. Sometimes she broke the skin doing this and surprised herself by finding dots or streaks of blood. That was bad enough, but she sure didn't want to break through the latex glove now and contaminate the scene with her own trace. She straightened her fingers and said, "Just checking it out."

But they'd known each other too long for any bullshit. He asked, "What's wrong?"

Sachs took a deep breath. Finally she answered: "Little spooked, got to say. That arc thing. The way the vic died. It was pretty bad."

"You want to wait? Call in some experts from Algonquin. They can walk you through it."

She could tell from his voice, a tone, a pacing of his words, that he didn't want her to. It was one of the things she loved about him-the respect he showed by not coddling her. At home, at dinner, in bed, they were one thing. Here they were criminalist and crime scene cop.

She thought of her personal mantra, inherited from her father: "When you move they can't getcha."

So move.

"No, I'm fine." Amelia Sachs stepped into hell.

"CAN YOU SEE okay?"

"Yes," Rhyme responded.

Sachs had clicked on the halogen lamp affixed to her headband. Small but powerful, it shined a fierce beam throughout the dim space. Even with the halogens, there were many shadowy crevices. The substation was cavernous inside, though from the sidewalk it had seemed smaller, narrow and dwarfed by the buildings on either side.

Her eyes burned and nose stung from the smoke residue. Rhyme insisted that anyone searching scenes smell the air; scents could tell you a great deal about the perp and the nature of the crime. Here, though, the only odor was a sour perfume: a burned-rubber, metallic oily odor, reminding her of car engines. She flashed on memories of herself and her father spending Sunday afternoons, backs aching, hunched over the open hood of a Chevy or Dodge muscle car, coaxing the mechanical nervous and vascular systems back to life. More recent memories too: Sachs and Pammy, the teenager who'd become a surrogate niece, together tuning the Torino Cobra, as Pammy's small dog, Jackson, sat patiently on the tool bench and watched the surgeons at work.

Swinging her head to train her miner's light around the hazy area, she noticed large banks of equipment, some beige or gray and relatively new-looking, some dating back to the last century: dark green and labeled with metal plaques offering the manufacturer and city of origin. Some, she noted, had addresses with no ZIP codes, revealing the distant era of their birth.

The main floor of the station was circular, overlooking the open basement, twenty feet below, visible over a pipe railing. Up here the floor was concrete but some of the platforms and the stairs were steel.

Metal.

One thing she knew about electricity was that metal was a good conductor.

She located the UNSUB's cable, running from the window about ten feet to a piece of equipment that the worker had described. She could see where the suspect'd had to stand to string the wire. She began walking the grid at that spot.

Rhyme asked, "What's that on the floor? Shiny."

"Looks like grease or oil," she said, her voice falling. "Some of the equipment ruptured in the fire. Or maybe there was a second arc here." She noted burned circles, a dozen of them, which seemed to be where sparks had slammed into the walls and surrounding equipment.

"Good."

"What?"

"His footprints'll come through nice and clear."

This was true. But, as she looked down at the greasy residue on the floor, she was thinking: Was oil, like metal and water, a good conductor too?

And where are the fucking batteries?

She did indeed find some good footprints near the window in which the perp had knocked a hole to feed the deadly wire outside and near where he'd bolted it to the Algonquin line.

"Could've been left by the workers," she said of the prints, "when they came in after the spark."

"We'll just have to find out, won't we?"

She or Ron Pulaski would take prints of the workers' footgear to compare with these, to eliminate them as suspects. Even if Justice For was ultimately responsible, there was no reason why they couldn't recruit an insider for their terrorist plans.

Though as she laid down numbers and photographed the sole marks, she said, "I think they're our UNSUB's, Rhyme. They're all the same. And the toe's similar to what was on the ledge."

"Excellent," Rhyme breathed.

Sachs then took electrostatic impressions of them and put the sheets near the door. She looked over the cable itself, which was thinner than she expected, only about a half inch in diameter. It was covered with black insulation of some kind and was made of silver-colored strands, woven together. It wasn't, she was surprised to see, copper. About fifteen feet long, in total. It was joined to the Algonquin main line by two wide brass or copper bolts with three-quarter-inch holes in them.

"So that's our weapon?" Rhyme asked.

"This's it."

"Heavy?"

She hefted it, gripping the rubbery insulation. "No. It's aluminum." It was troubling to her that, like a bomb, something so small and light could cause such mayhem. Sachs looked over the hardware and judged what she'd need from her tool kit to dismantle it. She stepped outside to retrieve the bag from her car's trunk. Her own tools, which she used on her car and for home repair, were more familiar to her than the ones in the Crime Scene Unit RRV; they were like old friends.

"How's it going?" Pulaski asked.

"It's going," she muttered. "You find how he got in?"

"I checked the roof. No access. Whatever the Algonquin people said, I'm thinking it has to be underground. I'm going to check out nearby manholes and basements. There're no obvious routes but that's the good news, I guess. He might've been feeling pretty cocky. If we're lucky we might find something good."

Rhyme constantly urged officers under him to remember that one crime always had multiple scenes associated with it. There was, yes, perhaps just one location where the actual offense had occurred. But there're always entrance and exit routes to consider-and those might be two different paths, or more if multiple perps were involved. There could be staging areas. There could be rendezvous locations. And there could be the motel where they got together to gloat and share the loot afterward. And nine times out of ten, it's those scenes-the secondary or tertiary-where the perps forgot to wear gloves and clean up trace. Sometimes they even left their names and addresses lying around.

Through Sachs's microphone Rhyme had heard the comment and said, "Good call, Rookie. Only lose the 'luck.' "

"Yessir."

"And lose the smug grin too. I saw that."

Pulaski's face went still. He'd forgotten Rhyme was using Amelia Sachs for his eyes as well as ears and legs. He turned and walked off to continue his search for the perp's access to the substation.

Returning inside with her tools, Sachs wiped them down with adhesive pads to remove any contaminating trace. She walked up to the circuit breaker, the spot where the attacker's cable was mounted with the bolts. She started to reach for the metal portion of the wire. Involuntarily her gloved hand stopped before she touched it. She stared at the raw metal gleaming under the beam of her helmet light.