The Burning Wire

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 toldher. “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.

Chapter 8
    “CAN YOU SEE OKAY?”
    “Yes,” Rhyme responded.
    Sachs had clicked on the halogen lamp affixed to her headband. Small but powerful, it shined a fierce beam throughout the dim space. Even with the halogens, there were many shadowy crevices. The substation was cavernous inside, though from the sidewalk it had seemed smaller, narrow and dwarfed by the buildings on either side.
    Her eyes burned and nose stung from the smoke residue. Rhyme insisted that anyone searching scenes smell the air; scents could tell you a great deal about the perp and the nature of the crime. Here, though, the only odor was a sour perfume: a burned-rubber, metallic oily odor, reminding her of car engines. She flashed on memories of herself and her father spending Sunday afternoons, backs aching, hunched over the open hood of a Chevy or Dodge muscle car, coaxing the mechanical nervous and vascular systems back to life. More recent memories too: Sachs and Pammy, the teenager who’d become a surrogate niece, together tuning the Torino Cobra, as Pammy’s small dog, Jackson, sat patiently on the tool bench and watched