The Burning Wire

you have, Mel?”
    Peering through the eyepiece of a microscope, the tech said, “Nothing helpful for sourcing him.”
    “ ‘Sourcing.’ Missed that word when I was in verb school,” Rhyme said sourly.
    “But I’ve got one thing,” Cooper said, ignoring Rhyme’s remark and reading the results from the chromatograph.” Traces of substances that the database is saying are ginseng and wolfberry.”
    “Chinese herbs, maybe tea,” Rhyme announced. A case several years ago had involved a snakehead, a smuggler of illegal aliens, and much of the investigation had centered around Chinatown. A police officerfrom mainland China, helping in the case, had taught Rhyme about herbalism, thinking it might help his condition. The substances had no effect, of course, but Rhyme had found the subject potentially helpful in investigations. At the moment he noted the find, but agreed with Cooper that it wasn’t much of a lead. There was a time when those substances would have been found only in Asian specialty shops and what Rhyme called “woo-woo stores.” Now products like that were in every Rite Aid pharmacy and Food Emporium throughout the city.
    “On the board, if you please, Sachs.”
    As she wrote, he looked over a series of small evidence bags lined up in a row, with her handwriting on the chain-of-custody cards. They were labeled with directions from the compass.
    “Ten little Indians,” Rhyme said, intrigued. “What do we have there?”
    “I got mad, Rhyme. No, I got fucking furious.”
    “Good. I find anger liberating. Why?”
    “Because we can’t find him. So I took samples of substrate from where he might’ve been. I crawled around in some pretty lousy places, Rhyme.”
    “Hence the smudge.” He looked at her forehead.
    She caught his eye. “I’ll wash it off later.” A smile. Seductive, he believed.
    He lifted an eyebrow. “Well, get searching. Tell me what you find.”
    She pulled on gloves and poured the samples into ten examining dishes. Donning magnifying goggles, she began sifting through them, using a sterile probe to search the contents of each bag. Dirt, cigarette butts, the bits of paper, the nuts and bolts, the bits of what seemed to be rodent shit, hairs, scraps of cloth,candy and fast food wrappers, grains of concrete, metal and stone. The epidermis of underground New York.
    Rhyme had learned long ago that in searching for evidence at crime scenes, the key was finding patterns. What repeated itself frequently? Objects in that category could be presumptively eliminated. It was the unique items, those that were out of place, that might be relevant. Outliers, statisticians and sociologists called them.
    Nearly everything that Sachs had found was repeated in every dish of the samples. But there was only one thing that was in a category of its own: a very tiny band of curved metal, nearly in a circle, about twice the width of a pencil lead. Though there were many other bits of metal—parts of screws and bolts and shavings—nothing resembled this.
    It was also clean, suggesting it had been left recently.
    “Where was this, Sachs?”
    Rising from her hunched-over pose and stretching, she looked at the label on the bag in front of the dish.
    “Twenty feet from the shaft, southwest. It’s where he would’ve had a view of all the wiring connections he’d made. It was under a beam.”
    So Galt would have been crouching. The metal bit could have fallen from his cuff or clothing. He asked Sachs to hold it up for him to examine closely. She put magnifying goggles on him, adjusted them. Then she took tweezers and picked up the bit, holding it close.
    “Ah, bluing,” he said. “Used on iron. Like on guns. Treated with sodium hydroxide and nitrite. For corrosion resistance. And good tensile properties. It’sa spring of some kind. Mel, what’s your mechanical parts database like?”
    “Not as updated as when you were chief, but it’s something.”
    Rhyme went online, laboriously typing the pass code. He could use voice recognition, but characters like @%$*—which the department had adopted to improve security—were troublesome to interpret vocally.
    The NYPD forensic database main screen popped up and Rhyme started in the Miscellaneous Metals—Springs category.
    After ten minutes of scrolling through hundreds of samples he announced, “It’s a hairspring, I think.”
    “What’s that?” Cooper asked.
    Rhyme was grimacing. “I’m afraid it’s bad news. If it’s his, it means