The Burning Wire

attack sat in front of the substation, empty, lopsided; the right tires were deflated. Near the front the paint was scorched. Half the windows were gray and opaque.
    An EMS medic approached, a stocky African-American woman, and nodded. Sachs said, “Hi.”
    The woman gave a tentative nod of greeting. Med techs had witnessed just about all the carnage you could see but she was shaken. “Detective, you better take a look.”
    Sachs followed her to the ambulance, where a body lay on a gurney, waiting transport to the morgue. It was covered with a dark green waxy tarp.
    “Was the last passenger, looks like. We thought we could save him. But . . . we only got him this far.”
    “Electrocuted?”
    “You better see,” she whispered. And lifted the covering.
    Sachs froze as the smell of burned skin and hair rose and she gazed at the victim, a Latino in a business suit—or what was left of one. His back and much of the right side of his body was a mix of skin and cloth from the burn. She guessed second and third degree. But that wasn’t what unsettled her so much;she’d seen bad burns, accidental and intentional, in her line of work. The most horrifying sight was in his flesh, exposed when the EMS team had cut away the cloth of his suit. She was looking at dozens of smooth puncture wounds, which covered his body. It was as if he’d been hit by a blast from a huge shotgun.
    “Most of them,” the medic said, “entrance and exit.”
    They went all the way through?
    “What’d cause that?”
    “Don’t know. Never seen anything like it, all my years.”
    And Sachs realized something else. The wounds were all distinct and clearly visible. “There’s no blood.”
    “Whatever it was cauterized the wounds. That’s why . . .” Her voice went soft. “That’s why he stayed conscious for as long as he did.”
    Sachs couldn’t imagine the pain. “How?” she asked, half to herself.
    And then she got the answer.
    “Amelia,” Ron Pulaski called.
    She glanced toward him.
    “The bus sign pole. Take a look. Brother . . .”
    “Jesus,” she muttered. And walked closer to the edge of the crime scene tape. About six feet from the ground a hole had been blasted clean through the metal pole, five inches wide. The metal had melted like plastic under a blowtorch. She then focused on the windows of the bus and a delivery truck parked nearby. She’d thought the glass was frosted from the fire. But, no, small bits of shrapnel—the same that had killed the passenger—had hit the vehicles. The sheet-metal skins were also punctured.
    “Look,” she whispered, pointing at the sidewalkand the facade of the substation. A hundred tiny craters had been dug into the stone.
    “Was it a bomb?” Pulaski asked. “Maybe the respondings missed it.”
    Sachs opened a plastic bag and removed blue latex gloves. Pulling them on, she bent down and collected a small disk of metal shaped like a teardrop at the base of the post. It was so hot it softened the glove.
    When she realized what it was, she shivered.
    “What’s that?” Pulaski asked.
    “The arc flash melted the pole.” She looked around and saw a hundred or more drops on the ground or sticking to the side of the bus, buildings and nearby cars.
    That’s what had killed the young passenger. A shower of molten metal drops flying through the air at a thousand feet a second.
    The young officer exhaled slowly. “Getting hit by something like that . . . burning right through you.”
    Sachs shivered again—at the thought of the pain. And at the thought of how devastating the results of the attack might have been. This portion of street was relatively empty. Had the substation been closer to the center of Manhattan, easily ten or fifteen passersby would have died.
    Sachs looked up and found herself staring at the UNSUB’s weapon: From one of the windows overlooking Fifty-seventh Street about two feet of thick wire dangled. It was covered in black insulation but the end was stripped away and the bare cable was bolted to a scorched brass plate. It looked industrial and mundane and not at all the sort of thing that could have produced such a terrible explosion.
    Sachs and Pulaski joined the cluster of two dozen Homeland Security, FBI and NYPD agents and officersat the FBI’s command post van. Some were in tactical gear, some in crime scene coveralls. Others, just suits or regulation uniforms. They were dividing up the labor. They’d be canvassing for witnesses and