The Burning Wire

by Jeffery Deaver

  She paused on the sidewalk, all by herself within the deadly perimeter. When Rhyme had been head of Investigation Resources--the outfit at NYPD in charge of crime scenes--he ordered his forensic people to search alone, unless the scene was particularly large. He did this because you tended psychologically to be less conscientious with other searchers present, since you were aware there was always a backup to find something you missed. The other problem was that just as criminals left behind evidence, crime scene searchers, however swaddled in protective gear, did too. This contamination could ruin the case. The more searchers, the greater that risk.

  She looked into the gaping black doorway, smoke still escaping, and then considered the gun on her hip. Metal.

  The lines're dead . . .

  Well, get going, she told herself. The sooner you walk the grid after a crime, the better the quality of the evidence. Dots of sweat, full of helpful DNA, evaporated and became impossible to spot. Valuable fibers and hairs blew away, and irrelevant ones floated into the scene to confuse and mislead.

  She slipped the microphone into her ear, inside the hood, and adjusted the stalk mike. She clicked the transmitter at her side and heard Rhyme's voice through the headset. ". . . you there, Sachs? Are . . . okay, you're online. Was wondering. What's that?" he asked.

  He was seeing the same things she was, thanks to a small, high-definition video camera on a headband. She realized she was unintentionally looking at the hole burned into the pole. She explained to him what had happened: the spark, the molten raindrops.

  Rhyme was silent for a moment. Then he said, "That's quite a weapon. . . . Well, let's get going. Walk the grid."

  There were several ways to search crime scenes. One popular approach was to begin in the outside corner and walk in an increasingly smaller concentric circle until you reached the center.

  But Lincoln Rhyme preferred the grid pattern. He sometimes told students to think of walking the grid as if mowing a lawn--only doing so twice. You walked along a straight line down one side of the scene to the other, then turned around, stepped a foot or so to the left or right and went back in the direction you'd just come. Then, once you'd finished, you turned perpendicular to the lines you first walked and started all over again, doing the same back-and-forth.

  Rhyme insisted on this redundancy because the first search of a scene was crucial. If you did a cursory examination initially you subtly convinced yourself that there was nothing to be found. Subsequent searches were largely useless.

  Sachs reflected on the irony: She was about to walk the grid in part of a very different grid. She'd have to share that with Rhyme--but later. Now she needed to concentrate.

  Crime scene work was a scavenger hunt. The goal was simple: to find something, anything left behind by the perp--and something would have been left behind. The French criminalist Edmond Locard nearly a hundred years earlier had said that whenever a crime occurred there was a transfer of some evidence between the perpetrator and the crime scene or the victim. It might be virtually impossible to see, but it was there to find if you knew how to look and if you were patient and diligent.

  Amelia Sachs now began this search, starting outside the substation, with the weapon: the dangling cable.

  "Looks like he--"

  "Or they," Rhyme corrected through the headset. "If Justice For is behind this, they might have a sizeable membership."

  "Good point, Rhyme." He was making sure she didn't fall into the number-one problem crime scene searchers suffered from: failure to keep an open mind. A body, blood and a hot pistol suggested that the victim was shot to death. But if you got it into your head that that was the case, you might miss the knife that was actually used.

  She continued, "Well, he or they rigged it from inside. But I'd think he had to be outside here on the sidewalk at some point to check distances and angles."

  "To aim it at the bus?"

  "Exactly."

  "Okay, keep going--the sidewalk, then."

  She did, staring at the ground. "Cigarette butts, beer caps. Nothing near the door or the window with the cable, though."

  "Don't bother with them. He's not going to be smoking or drinking on the job. He's too smart--considering how he put this whole thing together. But there'd be some trace where he stood. Close to the building."

  "There's a ledge, see it?" She was looking down at a low stone shelf about three feet above the sidewalk. The top was set with spikes to keep pigeons, and humans, from perching there, but you could use it as a step if you wanted to reach something in the window. "Got some footprints, on the ledge. Not enough for electrostatic."

  "Let's see."

  She bent her head down and leaned forward. He was looking at what she was: shapes that could be toe marks of shoes close to the building.

  "You can't get prints?"

  "No. Not clear enough. But looking at them I'd say they're probably men's. Wide, square toes, but that's all I can see. No soles or heels. But it tells us that if there's a 'they' involved, it was probably just a 'he' rigging the trap outside."

  She continued to examine the sidewalk and found no items of physical evidence that seemed relevant.

  "Get trace, Sachs, and then search inside the substation."

  At her instruction, the other two techs from Queens set up powerful halogen lights just inside the door. She took pictures and then collected trace on the sidewalk and the ledge near the cable.

  "And don't forget--" Rhyme began.

  "Substrata."

  "Ah, one step ahead of me, Sachs."

  Not really, she reflected, since he'd been her mentor for years and if she hadn't picked up his procedures for walking the grid by now, she had no business in crime scene work. She now moved to an area just outside the perimeter and took a second rolling--substrata, control samples to compare to the first. Any difference between what was collected at some distance from the scene and at the spot where the UNSUB was known to have stood might be unique to him or his dwelling.

  Might not, of course . . . but that was the nature of crime scene work. Nothing was ever certain, but you did what you could, you did what you had to.

  Sachs handed off the bagged evidence to the technicians. She waved to the Algonquin supervisor she'd spoken to earlier.

  The field supervisor, just as solemn as before, hurried over. "Yes, Detective?"

  "I'm going to search inside now. Can you tell me exactly what to look for--how he rigged the cable? I need to find where he stood, what he touched."

  "Let me find somebody who does regular maintenance here." He looked over the workers. Then he called to another man, in dark blue Algonquin Consolidated Power overalls. A yellow hard hat. The worker tossed aside his cigarette and joined them. The field supervisor introduced them and told him Sachs's request.

  "Yes, ma'am," he said, his eyes leaving the substation for an excursion across Sachs's chest, even though her figure was largely hidden by her billowy blue Tyvek jumpsuit. She thought about glancing down at his excessive belly but of course she didn't. Dogs pee where you don't want them to; you can't correct them all the time.

  She asked, "I'll be able to see where he attached the cable to the power source?"

  "Everything'll be in the open, yeah," the man told her. "I'd think he'd connect close to the breakers. They're on the main floor. That'll be on the right side when you get in there."

  "Ask him if the line was live when the UNSUB rigged it," Rhyme said into her ear. "That'll tell us something about the perp's skill." She did.

  "Oh, yeah. He tapped into a hot line."

  Sachs was shocked. "How could he do that?"

  "Wore PPE--personal protective equipment. And made sure he was insulated pretty damn good on top of that."

  Rhyme added, "I've got another question for him. Ask him how he gets any work done if he spends so much time staring at women's breasts."

  She stifled a smile.

  But as she walked toward the entrance, traipsing along the sidewalk over the molten d
ots, all humor vanished. She paused, turned back to the supervisor. "Just confirming one last time. No power, right?" She nodded at the substation. "The lines are dead."

  "Oh, yeah."

  Sachs turned.

  Then he added, "Except for the batteries."

  "Batteries?" She stopped and looked back.

  The supervisor explained, "That's what operates the circuit breakers. But they're not part of the grid. They won't be connected to the cable."

  "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.

  Chapter 8

  "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."

  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.

  "Sachs?" Rhyme's voice startled her.

  She didn't answer. Saw in her mind the hole in the pole, the deadly bits of molten steel, the holes in the young victim.

>   The lines are dead. . . .

  But what if she got her hand on the metal and somebody two or three miles away in a comfy little control room decided to make it undead? Hit a switch, not knowing about the search?

  And where the fuck are those damn batteries?

  "We need the evidence back here," Rhyme said.

  "Right." She slipped a nylon cover over the end of her wrench so that any distinctive marks on her tools wouldn't transfer to the nuts or bolts and be confused with marks left by the perp's. She leaned forward and with only a moment of hesitation fitted the wrench onto the first bolt. With some effort she loosened it, working as quickly as she could, expecting to feel a searing burn at any moment, though she supposed with that much voltage she wouldn't feel anything at all as she was electrocuted.

  The second fixture was undone a moment later and she pulled the cable free. Coiling it, she wrapped the wire in plastic sheeting. The bolts and nuts went into an evidence bag. She set these outside the substation door for Pulaski or the technicians to collect and returned to continue her search. Looking at the floor, she saw more footsteps that seemed to match what she thought were the UNSUB's.

  Cocking her head.

  "You're making me dizzy, Sachs."

  She asked herself as much as Rhyme, "What was that?"

  "You hear something?"

  "Yes, can't you?"

  "If I could hear it, I wouldn't be asking."

  It seemed to be a tapping of some sort. She walked to the center of the substation and looked over the railing into darkness below.

  Her imagination?

  No, the sound was unmistakable.

  "I do hear it," Rhyme said.

  "It's coming from downstairs, the basement."

  A regular beat. Not like a human sound.

  A timed detonator? she wondered. And thought again about a booby trap. The perp was smart. He'd know that a crime scene team would spare no effort to search the substation. He'd want to stop them. She shared these thoughts with Rhyme.

  He replied, "But if he'd put together a trap why hadn't he done it near the wire?"

  They came to the same conclusion simultaneously but he voiced the thought: "Because there's some greater threat to him in the basement." Rhyme then pointed out, "If the power's off what's making the noise?"