The Burning Wire (5 page)

Chapter 6

WEARING DRAB, DARK
blue Algonquin Consolidated Power worker overalls, a baseball-style cap without logo and safety glasses, the man busied himself at the service panel in the back of the health club in the Chelsea district of Manhattan.

As he did his work--mounting equipment and stripping, connecting and snipping wires, he thought about the attack that morning. The news was all over the incident.

One man was killed and several injured this morning when an overload in a power company substation in Manhattan produced a huge spark that jumped from the station to a bus sign pole, narrowly missing an MTA bus.

"It was like, you know, a lightning bolt," one witness, a passenger on the bus, reported. "Just filled the whole sidewalk. It blinded me. And that sound. I can't describe it. It was like this loud growl, then it exploded. I'm afraid to go near anything that's got electricity in it. I'm really freaked out. I mean, anybody who saw that thing is freaked out."

You're not alone, the man thought. People had been conscious of--and awed and frightened by--electricity for more than five thousand years. The word itself came from the Greek for "amber," a reference to the solidified tree resin that the ancients would rub to create static charges. The numbing effects of electricity created by eels and fish in the rivers and off the coasts of Egypt, Greece and Rome were described at length in scientific writings well before the Christian era.

His thoughts turned to water creatures at the moment since, as he worked, he furtively watched five people swimming slow laps in the club's pool. Three women and two men, all of retirement age.

One particular fish he'd come to be fascinated with was the torpedo ray, which gave its name to the weapons fired by submarines. The Latin word
torpore
--to stiffen or paralyze--was the source of the name. The ray had, in effect, two batteries in its body made up of hundreds of thousands of gelatinous plates. These generated electricity, which a complicated array of nerves transported through its body like wires. The current was used for defense but also offensively, for hunting. Rays would lie in wait and then use a charge to numb their next meal or sometimes kill it outright--larger rays could generate up to two hundred volts and deliver more amps than an electric drill.

Pretty fascinating . . .

He finished rigging the panel and regarded his job. Like linemen and master electricians all over the world, he felt a certain pride at the neatness. He'd come to feel that working with electricity was more than a trade; it was a science and an art. Closing the door, he walked to the far side of the club--near the men's locker room. And, out of sight, he waited.

Like a torpedo ray.

This neighborhood--the far West Side--was residential; no workers were getting their jogs or swims or squash games in now, early afternoon, though the place would fill up after working hours with hundreds of locals, eager to sweat away the tensions of the day.

But he didn't need a large crowd. Not at the moment. That would come later.

So people would think he was simply another worker and ignore him, he turned his attention to a fire control panel and took the cover off, examining the guts without much interest. Thinking again about electric rays. Those that lived in salt water were wired in parallel circuits and produced lower voltage because seawater was a better conductor than fresh and the jolt didn't need to be so powerful to kill their prey. Electric rays that inhabited rivers and lakes, on the other hand, were wired in
series
and produced higher voltage to compensate for the lower conductivity of freshwater.

This, to him, was not only fascinating but was relevant at the moment--for this test about the conductivity of water. He wondered if he'd made the calculations right.

He had to wait for only ten minutes before he heard footsteps and saw one of the lap swimmers, a balding man in his sixties, padding by on slippers. He entered the showers.

The man in the overalls snuck a peek at the swimmer, turning the faucet on and stepping under the stream of steaming water, unaware that he was being studied.

Three minutes, five. Lathering, washing . . .

Growing impatient, because of the risk of detection, gripping the remote control--similar to a large car-key fob--the man in the overalls felt his shoulder muscles stiffening.

Torpore.
He laughed silently. And relaxed.

Finally the club member stepped out of the shower and toweled off. He pulled his robe on and then stepped back into the slippers. He walked to the door leading to the locker room and took the handle.

The overalls man pressed two buttons on the remote simultaneously.

The elderly man gave a gasp and froze.

Then stepped back, staring at the handle. Looking at his fingers and quickly touching the handle once more.

Foolish, of course. You're never faster than electricity.

But there was no shock this time and the man was left to consider if maybe it was a burr of sharp metal or maybe even a painful jolt of arthritis in his fingers that he'd felt.

In fact, the trap had contained only a few milliamps of juice. He wasn't here to kill anyone. This was simply an experiment to tell two things: First, would the remote control switchgear he'd created work at this distance, through concrete and steel? It had, fine. And, second, what exactly was the effect of water on conductivity? This was the sort of thing that safety engineers talked and wrote about all the time but that no one had ever quantified in any practical sense--practical, meaning how little juice did one need to stun somebody wearing damp leather footgear into fibrillation and death.

The answer was pretty damn little.

Good.

Freaked me out . . .

The man in the overalls headed down the stairwell and out the back door.

He thought again about fish and electricity. This time, though, not the creation of juice but the detection of it. Sharks, in particular. They had, literally, a sixth sense: the astonishing ability to perceive the bioelectrical activity within the body of prey miles away, long before they could see it.

He glanced at his watch and supposed the investigation at the substation was well under way. It was unfortunate for whoever was looking into the incident there that human beings didn't have a shark's sixth sense.

Just as it would soon be unfortunate for many other people in the poor city of New York.

Chapter 7

SACHS AND PULASKI
dressed in hooded baby blue Tyvek jumpsuits, masks, booties and safety glasses. As Rhyme had always instructed, they each wrapped a rubber band around the feet, to make differentiating their footprints from the others easier. Then, encircling her waist with a belt, to which were attached her radio/video transmitter and weapon, Sachs stepped over the yellow tape, the maneuver sending some jolts of pain through her arthritic joints. On humid days or after a bout of running a tough scene or a foot pursuit, the knees or hips screaming, she harbored secret envy of Lincoln Rhyme's numbness. She'd never utter the thought aloud, of course, never even gave the crazy idea more than a second or two in her mind, but there it was. Advantages in all conditions.

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 hardhat. 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 dots, 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.