The Burning Wire

sense—practical, meaning how little juice did one need tostun 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 transmitterand 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 clickedthe 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