Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

"How he'd cut through them, Mel?"

A careful look revealed he hadn't used a hacksaw but a bolt cutter.

Cooper examined the ends of the bars through a microscope fitted with a digital camera and took pictures. He then transferred the shots to the central computer and assembled them onto one screen.

"Any distinctive marks?" Rhyme asked. As with the broken hacksaw tooth and scratches on the bolts and nuts, any unusual marking on the cutter would link its owner to the crime scene.

"How's that one?" Cooper asked, pointing at the screen.

There was a tiny crescent of scratch in roughly the same position on the cut surfaces of several of the bars. "That'll do. Good."

Then Pulaski cocked his head and readied his pen as somebody at Bennington Wire picked up the phone to speak to the young cop in his new capacity as the emperor of the New York City Police Department.

After a brief conversation he hung up.

"What the hell's with the cable, Pulaski?"

"First of all, that model cable's real common. They-"

"How common?"

"They sell millions of feet of it every year. It's mostly for medium-voltage distribution."

"Sixty thousand volts is medium?"

"I guess so. You can buy it from any electrical supply wholesaler. But he did say that Algonquin buys it in bulk."

Sellitto asked, "Who there would order it?"

"Technical Supplies Department."

"I'll give 'em a call," Sellitto said. He did so and had a brief conversation. He disconnected. "They're going to check to see if anything's missing from inventory."

Rhyme was gazing at the grating. "So he climbed through the manhole earlier and into the Algonquin work space under the alley."

Sachs said, "He might've been down the steam pipe manhole to do some work and seen the grating that led to the tunnel."

"Definitely suggests it's an employee." Rhyme hoped this was the case. Inside jobs made cops' work a lot easier. "Let's keep going. The boots."

She said, "Similar boot prints in both the access tunnel and near where the wire was rigged inside the substation."

"And any prints from the coffee shop?"

"That one," Pulaski responded, as he pointed to an electrostatic print. "Under the table. Looks like the same brand to me."

Mel Cooper examined it and concurred. The young officer continued, "And Amelia had me check the boots of the Algonquin workers who were there. They were all different."

Rhyme turned his attention to the boot. "What's the brand, do you think, Mel?"

Cooper was browsing through the NYPD's footwear database, which contained samples of thousands of shoes and boots, the vast majority of which were men's shoes. Most serious felonies involving physical presence at the scene were committed by men.

Rhyme had been instrumental in creating the expanded shoe and boot database years ago. He worked out voluntary arrangements with all the major manufacturers to have scans of their lines sent into the NYPD regularly.

After returning to forensic work, following his accident, Rhyme had stayed involved in maintaining the department's product and materials databases, including this one. After working on a recent case involving data mining he'd come up with an idea that was now used in many police departments around the country: He'd recruited (well, bullied) the NYPD into hiring a programmer to create computer graphics images that depicted the sole of each shoe in the database in different stages of wear-new, after six months, one year and two years. And then to show images of the soles of shoes worn by people who had splayed feet or were pigeon-toed. He'd also gotten the computer guru to indicate wear patterns as a function of height and weight.

The project was expensive but took surprisingly little time to get online and resulted in nearly instantaneous answers to the questions of the brand and age of shoe, and the height, weight and stride characteristics of the wearer.

The database had already helped in the identification of three or four perps.

His fingers flying over the keys, Cooper said, "Got a match. Albertson-Fenwick Boots and Gloves, Inc. Model E-20." He perused the screen. "Not surprising, they've got special insulation. They're for workers who have regular contact with live electrical sources. They meet ASTM Electrical Hazard Standard F2413-05. These're size eleven."

Rhyme squinted as he looked them over. "Deep treads. Good." This meant they would retain significant quantities of trace material.

Cooper continued, "They're fairly new so there're no distinctive wear marks that tell us much about his height, weight or other characteristic."

"I'd say he walks straight, though. Agree?" Rhyme was looking at the prints on his screen, broadcast from a camera over the examining table.

"Yes."

Sachs wrote this on the board.

"Good, Sachs. Now, Rookie, what's the invisible evidence you found?" Gazing at the plastic envelope labeled Coffee Shop Opposite Blast-Table Where Suspect Was Sitting.

Cooper was examining it. "Blond hair. One inch long. Natural, not dyed."

Rhyme loved hair as a forensic tool. It could often be used for DNA sampling-if the bulb was attached-and it could reveal a lot about the suspect's appearance, through color and texture and shape. Age and sex could also be reckoned with more or less accuracy. Hair testing was becoming more and more popular as a forensic and an employment tool since hair retained traces of drugs longer than urine or blood. An inch of hair held a two-month history of drug use. In England hair was frequently used to test for alcohol abuse.

"We're not sure it's his," Sellitto pointed out.

"Of course not," Rhyme muttered. "We're not sure of anything at this point."

But Pulaski said, "It's pretty likely, though. I talked to the owner. He makes sure the busboys wipe the table down after every customer. I checked. And nobody'd wiped it after the perp was there, because of the explosion."

"Good, Rookie."

Cooper continued, speaking of the hair, "No natural or artificial curves. It's straight. No evidence of depigmentation, so I'd put him under fifty years old."

"I want a tox-chem analysis. ASAP."

"I'll send it to the lab."

"A commercial lab," Rhyme ordered. "Wave a lot of money at them for fast results."

Sellitto grumbled, "We don't have a lot of money, and we've got our own perfectly good lab in Queens."

"It's not perfectly good if they don't get me the results before our perp kills somebody else, Lon."

"How's Uptown Testing?" Cooper asked.

"Good. Remember, wave money."

"Jesus, the city doesn't revolve around you, Linc."

"It doesn't?" Rhyme asked, with surprise in his eyes that was both feigned and genuine.

WITH THE SEM-EDS-THE scanning electron microscope and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscope-Mel Cooper analyzed the trace evidence Sachs had collected where the UNSUB had rigged the wire. "I've got some kind of mineral, different from the substrata around the substation."

"What's it made up of?"

"It's about seventy percent feldspar, then quartz, magnetite, mica, calcite and amphiboles. Some anhydrite too. Curious, large percentages of silicon."

Rhyme knew the geology of the New York area well. When mobile, he'd strolled around the city, scooping up samples of dirt and rock and creating databases that could help him match perp and locale. But this combination of minerals was a mystery to him. It certainly wasn't from around here. "We need a geologist." Rhyme thought for a moment and made a call with speed dial.

"Hello?" a man's soft voice answered.

"Arthur," Rhyme said to his cousin, who lived not far away, in New Jersey.

"Hey. How are you?"

Rhyme reflected that it seemed everybody was asking about his health today, though Arthur was just making conversation.