Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

Brent got collared and Dellray turned him. Surprising everyone, he took to confidential informing as if he'd studied all his life for the job. Brent infiltrated high up in both the racist group and the family and brought down the conspiracy. His debt to society paid, Brent nonetheless went on to work with Dellray in various personas-a mean-ass hired killer, a jewelry and bank heist mastermind, a radical anti-abortion activist. He proved to be one of the sharpest CIs the agent had ever run. And a chameleon in his own right. He was the flip side of Fred Dellray (some years ago it was even suspected, but never proven, that Brent had run a network of his own snitches-inside the NYPD itself).

Dellray ran him for a year until he got overexposed and Brent retired into the comfy quilt of witness protection. But word was that in one of his new personas he remained well connected, a player on the street.

Since none of Dellray's usual sources had come up with anything about Justice For or Rahman or the grid attack, the agent thought of William Brent.

Jimmy-Jeep returned and sat down on the squeaking bench. "I think I can make it happen. But what's this about, man? I mean, I don't want him to clip me."

Which was, Dellray reflected, one fairly significant difference between Wall Street and the CI business.

He said, "No, no, Jimmy boy, you're not hearing me. I'm not asking you t'turn inta a little fly on the wall. I'm asking you to play matchmaker is all. You get me a sit-down and you'll be eating peaches down in Georgia in no time."

Dellray slid forward a card that contained only a phone number. "This's what he should call. Go make it happen."

"Now?"

"Now."

Jeep nodded toward the kitchen. "But my lunch. I didn't eat yet."

"What kinda place is this?" Dellray barked suddenly, looking around, horrified.

"What do you mean, Fred?"

"You can't get food to go?"

FIVE HOURS HAD passed since the attack and the tension was climbing in Rhyme's townhouse. None of the leads was panning out.

"The wire," he snapped urgently. "Where'd it come from?"

Cooper shoved his thick glasses up on his nose again. He pulled on latex examining gloves but before touching the evidence he cleaned his hands with a pet hair roller and discarded the tape. Rhyme had been instructing his team to do this ever since he'd analyzed a case for the New Jersey State Police and found that some fiber evidence had come not from the suspect in custody but from the inside pocket of a detective's jacket. The investigator had stuffed a wad of loose rubber gloves there, after seeing some cop on a popular crime scene TV show do the same. The odds of contamination were slim but a forensic detective's job was only partly to find and analyze the evidence; they had to make sure it remained pristine enough to convict the bad guys in a courtroom filled with sharp defense lawyers.

After the infamous New Jersey fiber case, he insisted his people roll gloves after donning them if they hadn't been in contamination-free bags or boxes.

Using surgical scissors, Cooper cut the plastic wrapper off and exposed the wire. It was about fifteen feet long and most of it was covered with black insulation. The wire itself wasn't solid but comprised many silver-colored strands. At one end was bolted the thick, scorched brass plate. Attached to the other end were two large copper bolts with holes in the middle.

"They're called split bolts, the Algonquin guy told me," Sachs said. "Used for splicing wires. That's what he used to hook the cable to the main line."

She then explained how he'd hung the plate-it was called a "bus bar," the worker had also explained-out the window. It was attached to the cable with two quarter-inch bolts. The arc had flashed from the plate into the nearest ground source, the pole.

Rhyme glanced at Sachs's thumb, ragged and dark with a bit of dried blood. She tended to chew her nails and worry digits and her scalp. Tension built up in her like the voltage in the Algonquin substation. She dug into her thumb again and then-as if forcing herself to stop-pulled on latex gloves of her own.

Lon Sellitto was on the phone with the officers canvassing for witnesses up and down Fifty-seventh Street. Rhyme gave him a fast questioning glance but the detective's grimace-deeper than the one that usually graced his features-explained that the efforts so far were unfruitful. Rhyme turned his attention back to the wire.

"Move the camera over it, Mel," Rhyme said. "Slowly."

Using a handheld video unit, the tech scanned the wire from top to bottom, turned it over and went back the other way. What the camera saw was broadcast in high definition on the large screen in front of Rhyme. He stared intently.

He muttered, "Bennington Electrical Manufacturing, South Chicago, Illinois. Model AM-MV-Sixty. Zero gauge, rated up to sixty thousand volts."

Pulaski gave a laugh. "You know that, Lincoln? Where'd you learn about wires?"

"It's printed on the side, Rookie."

"Oh. I didn't notice."

"Obviously. And our perp cut it to this length, Mel. What do you think? Not machine cut."

"I'd agree." Using a magnifying glass, Cooper was examining the end of the metal cable that had been bolted to the substation wire. He then focused the video on the cut ends. "Amelia?"

Their resident mechanic looked it over. "Hand hacksaw," she offered.

The split bolts were unique to the power industry, it turned out, but they could have come from dozens of sources.

The bolts affixing the wire to the bus bar were similarly generic.

"Let's get our charts going," Rhyme then said.

Pulaski wheeled several whiteboards forward from the corner of the lab. On the top of one Sachs wrote, Crime Scene: Algonquin Substation Manhattan-10, West 57th Street. On the other was UNSUB Profile. She filled in what they'd discovered so far.

"Did he get the wire at the substation?" Rhyme asked.

"No. There wasn't any stored there," the young man said.

"Then find out where he did get it. Call Bennington."

"Right."

"Okay," Rhyme continued. "We've got metalwork and hardware. That means tool marks. The hacksaw. Let's look at the wire closely."

Cooper switched to a large-object microscope, also plugged into the computer, and examined where the wire had been cut; he used low magnification. "It's a new saw blade, sharp."

Rhyme gave an envious glance toward the tech's deft hands, moving the focus and the geared stage of the 'scope. Then he returned to the screen. "New, yes, but there's a broken tooth."

"Near the handle."

"Right." Before people began to saw, they generally rested the blade on what they were about to cut, three or four times. Doing this, especially in soft aluminum like the wire, could reveal broken or bent saw teeth, or other unique patterns that could link tools found in the perp's possession to the one used in a crime.

"Now, the split bolts?"

Cooper found distinctive scratch marks on all the bolts, suggesting that the perp's wrench had probably left them.

"Love soft brass," Rhyme muttered. "Just love it… So he's got well-used tools. More and more, looking like he's an insider."

Sellitto disconnected his call. "Nothing. Maybe somebody saw somebody in a blue jumpsuit. But it might've been an hour after it happened. When the whole friggin' block was crawling with Algonquin repair crews wearing friggin' blue jumpsuits."

"What've you found out, Rookie?" Rhyme barked. "I want sources for the wire."

"I'm on hold."

"Tell 'em you're a cop."

"I did."

"Tell 'em you're the chief cop. The big cheese."

But Rhyme's attention was already on something else: the iron bars forming the grate that barred entrance to the access tunnel.