The Burning Wire

was make a bomb. Apparently you can do that with batteries. You seal the vents and overcharge it. That produces hydrogen gas. When water hits the terminals, it short-circuits and the spark ignites the hydrogen. That’s what happened.”
    “And have the medics looked you over?”
    “No, no need. The bang was loud but it wasn’t thatbig. I got hit by some bits of plastic from the housing. Didn’t even bruise me. The impact knocked me down but I kept the access door above the water. I don’t think it’s contaminated too bad.”
    “Good, Ame—” His voice braked to a halt. For some reason, years ago they’d settled on an unspoken superstition: They never used their first names. He was troubled that he nearly had. “Good. So that’s how he got in.”
    “Had to be.”
    It was then that he was aware of Thom walking toward the wall. The aide grabbed the blood pressure monitor and wrapped it around Rhyme’s arm.
    “Don’t do that—”
    “Quiet,” Thom barked, silencing Rhyme. “You’re flushed and you’re sweating.”
    “Because we just had a fucking incident at a crime scene, Thom.”
    “You have a headache?”
    He did. He said, “No.”
    “Don’t lie.”
    “A little one. It’s nothing.”
    Thom slapped the stethoscope against his arm. “Sorry, Amelia. I need him quiet for thirty seconds.”
    “Sure.”
    Rhyme started to protest again, but then he decided that the sooner his blood pressure was taken the sooner he could get back to work.
    Without sensation he watched the cuff inflate and Thom listened as he let the air out of the sphygmomanometer. He ripped off the Velcro noisily. “It’s high. I want to make sure it doesn’t get any higher. I’m going to take care of some things now.”
    A polite euphemism for what Rhyme bluntly called the “piss and shit” detail.
    Sachs asked, “What’s going on there, Thom? Everything okay?”
    “Yes.” Rhyme was struggling to keep his voice calm. And to obscure the fact that he felt oddly vulnerable, though whether it was her near miss or his troubled condition he couldn’t say.
    He was embarrassed too.
    Thom said, “He’s had a spike in blood pressure. I want him off the phone now.”
    “We’ll bring back the evidence, Rhyme. Be there in a half hour.”
    Thom was starting forward to disconnect the call when Rhyme felt a tap in his head—it was cognitive, not physical. He barked, “Wait,” meaning the command for both Thom and Sachs.
    “Lincoln,” his aide protested.
    “Please, Thom. Just two minutes. It’s important.”
    Though clearly suspicious of the polite appeal, Thom nodded reluctantly.
    “Ron was searching for the place the perp got into the tunnel, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is he there?”
    Her jerky, grain-filled image looked around. “Yes.”
    “Get him on camera.”
    He heard Sachs call the officer over. A moment later he was seated, staring out of the monitor. “Yessir?”
    “You find where he got into the tunnel behind the substation?”
    “Yep.”
    “Yep? You sound like a dog, Rookie. Yip, yip.”
    “Sorry. Yes, I did.”
    “Where?”
    “There’s a manhole in an alley up the street. AlgonquinPower. It was for access to steam pipes. It didn’t lead to the substation itself. But about twenty feet inside, maybe thirty, I found a grating. Somebody’d cut an opening into it. Big enough to climb through. They’d stuck it back up but I could see it’d been cut.”
    “Recently?”
    “Right.”
    “Because there was no rust on the cut edges.”
    “Yeah, I mean yes. It led to this tunnel. It was really old. Might’ve been for delivering coal or something a long time ago. That’s what went to the access door that Amelia got. I was at the end of the tunnel and I saw the light when she took the door off. And I heard the battery blow and her scream. I got to her right away, through the tunnel.”
    The gruffness fell away. “Thanks, Pulaski.”
    An awkward moment. Rhyme’s compliments were so rare he’d found that people didn’t quite know what to do with them.
    “I was careful not to contaminate the scene too much, though.”
    “To save lives, contaminate to your heart’s content. Remember that.”
    “Sure.”
    The criminalist continued, “You walked the grid at the manhole—and where he cut through the grating? And the tunnel?”
    “Yessir.”
    “Anything jump out?”
    “Just footprints. But I’ve got trace.”
    “We’ll see what it says.”
    Thom whispered firmly, “Lincoln?”
    “Just a minute