The Burning Wire

she needed to concentrate.
    Crime scene work was a scavenger hunt. The goalwas 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—consideringhow 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 businessin 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