The Burning Wire

the surgeons at work.
    Swinging her head to train her miner’s light around the hazy area, she noticed large banks of equipment, some beige or gray and relatively new-looking, some dating back to the last century: dark green and labeled with metal plaques offering themanufacturer and city of origin. Some, she noted, had addresses with no ZIP codes, revealing the distant era of their birth.
    The main floor of the station was circular, overlooking the open basement, twenty feet below, visible over a pipe railing. Up here the floor was concrete but some of the platforms and the stairs were steel.
    Metal.
    One thing she knew about electricity was that metal was a good conductor.
    She located the UNSUB’s cable, running from the window about ten feet to a piece of equipment that the worker had described. She could see where the suspect’d had to stand to string the wire. She began walking the grid at that spot.
    Rhyme asked, “What’s that on the floor? Shiny.”
    “Looks like grease or oil,” she said, her voice falling. “Some of the equipment ruptured in the fire. Or maybe there was a second arc here.” She noted burned circles, a dozen of them, which seemed to be where sparks had slammed into the walls and surrounding equipment.
    “Good.”
    “What?”
    “His footprints’ll come through nice and clear.”
    This was true. But, as she looked down at the greasy residue on the floor, she was thinking: Was oil, like metal and water, a good conductor too?
    And where are the fucking batteries?
    She did indeed find some good footprints near the window in which the perp had knocked a hole to feed the deadly wire outside and near where he’d bolted it to the Algonquin line.
    “Could’ve been left by the workers,” she said of the prints, “when they came in after the spark.”
    “We’ll just have to find out, won’t we?”
    She or Ron Pulaski would take prints of the workers’ footgear to compare with these, to eliminate them as suspects. Even if Justice For was ultimately responsible, there was no reason why they couldn’t recruit an insider for their terrorist plans.
    Though as she laid down numbers and photographed the sole marks, she said, “I think they’re our UNSUB’s, Rhyme. They’re all the same. And the toe’s similar to what was on the ledge.”
    “Excellent,” Rhyme breathed.
    Sachs then took electrostatic impressions of them and put the sheets near the door. She looked over the cable itself, which was thinner than she expected, only about a half inch in diameter. It was covered with black insulation of some kind and was made of silver-colored strands, woven together. It wasn’t, she was surprised to see, copper. About fifteen feet long, in total. It was joined to the Algonquin main line by two wide brass or copper bolts with three-quarter-inch holes in them.
    “So that’s our weapon?” Rhyme asked.
    “This’s it.”
    “Heavy?”
    She hefted it, gripping the rubbery insulation. “No. It’s aluminum.” It was troubling to her that, like a bomb, something so small and light could cause such mayhem. Sachs looked over the hardware and judged what she’d need from her tool kit to dismantle it. She stepped outside to retrieve the bag from her car’s trunk. Her own tools, which she used on her car and for home repair, were more familiar to her than the ones in the Crime Scene Unit RRV; they were like old friends.
    “How’s it going?” Pulaski asked.
    “It’s going,” she muttered. “You find how he got in?”
    “I checked the roof. No access. Whatever the Algonquin people said, I’m thinking it has to be underground. I’m going to check out nearby manholes and basements. There’re no obvious routes but that’s the good news, I guess. He might’ve been feeling pretty cocky. If we’re lucky we might find something good.”
    Through Sachs’s microphone Rhyme had heard the comment and said, “Good call, Rookie. Only lose the ‘luck.’ ”
    “Yessir.”
    “And lose the smug grin too. I saw that.”
    Pulaski’s face went still. He’d forgotten Rhyme was using Amelia Sachs for his eyes as well as ears and legs. He turned and walked off to continue his search for the perp’s access to the substation.
    Returning inside with her tools, Sachs wiped them down with adhesive pads to remove any contaminating trace. She walked up to the circuit breaker, the spot where the attacker’s cable was mounted with the bolts. She started to reach for the metal portion of the wire.