The Burning Wire

electrical engineering in BK or New Jersey the same way the Nine-Eleven hijackers had studied flying.
    Then something else: He had to admit he’d been distracted lately. Something from his Other Life, he called it, his life with Serena, which he kept as separate from the street as you’d keep flame from gasoline. And that something was pretty significant: Fred Dellray was now a father. Serena had had a baby boy a year ago. They’d talked about it beforehand, and she’d insisted that even after their child was born Dellray wouldn’t change his job one bit. Even if it involvedrunning dangerous undercover sets. She understood that his work defined him the way dancing defined her; it would be more dangerous to him, ultimately, to move behind a desk.
    But was being a father altering him as an agent? Dellray looked forward to taking Preston to the park or a store with him, feeding the boy, reading to him. (Serena had come by the nursery, laughed and gently taken Kierkegaard’s existentialist manifesto Fear and Trembling from Dellray’s lengthy hand and replaced it with Goodnight Moon . Dellray hadn’t realized that even at that young age, words count.)
    The subway now stopped in the Village, and passengers rustled aboard.
    Instinctively the undercover operative within him immediately spotted four people of note: two almost-guaranteed-to-be pickpockets, one kid who was carrying a knife or box cutter and a young, sweaty businessman pressing a protective hand against a pocket so hard that he’d split open the bag of coke if he wasn’t careful.
    The street . . . how Fred Dellray loved the street.
    But these four had nothing to do with his mission and he let them fade from his consciousness, as he told himself: Okay, you fucked up. You missed Rahman, and you missed Justice For. But the casualties and damage were minimal. McDaniel was condescending but hasn’t made you a scapegoat, not yet. Which somebody else might’ve done in a heartbeat.
    Dellray could still find a lead to their UNSUB and stop him before another of those terrible attacks happened. Dellray could still redeem himself.
    At the next subway stop, he climbed out and began his trek east. Eventually he came to bodegas and tenements and old, dark social clubs, rancid-smellingdiners, radio taxi operations whose signs were in Spanish or Arabic or Farsi. No fast-moving professionals like in the West Village; here people weren’t moving around much at all, but merely sitting—men mostly—on rickety chairs or on doorsteps, the young ones slim, the old round. They all watched with cautious eyes.
    This was where the serious work of the street got done. This was Fred Dellray’s office.
    He strode up to a coffee shop window and looked inside—with some difficulty since the glass hadn’t been cleaned for months.
    Ah, yeah, there. He spotted what would either be his salvation or his downfall.
    His last chance.
    Tapping one ankle against the other just to make sure the pistol strapped there hadn’t shifted, he opened the door and stepped inside.

Chapter 11
    “ HOW ARE YOU feeling?” Sachs asked, walking into the lab.
    Rhyme said stiffly, “I’m fine. Where’s the evidence?” Sentences spoken without discernible punctuation.
    “The techs and Ron are bringing it. I took the Cobra by myself.”
    Meaning, he supposed, she’d driven home like a crazy woman.
    “And how are you ?” Thom asked.
    “Wet.”
    Which went without saying. Her hair was drying but the clothes were still drenched. Her condition wasn’t an issue. They knew she was fine. They’d established that earlier. Rhyme had been shaken at the time but now she was all right and he wanted to get on with the evidence.
    But isn’t that just another way of saying there’s a forty-five percent chance that somebody else somewhere in New York City’s going to get electrocuted? . . . And it could be happening right now .
    “Well, where are—?”
    “What happened?” she asked Thom, a glance toward Rhyme.
    “I said I was fine.”
    “I’m asking him .” Sachs’s own temper flared a bit.
    “Blood pressure was high. Spiking.”
    “And now it’s not high, Thom, is it?” Lincoln Rhyme said testily. “It’s nice and normal. That’s sort of like saying the Russians sent missiles to Cuba. That was tense for a while. But since Miami isn’t a radioactive crater, I guess that problem sorted itself out, now, didn’t it? It’s. In. The. Past. Call Pulaski, call the techs from Queens. I