The Burning Wire

Sellitto were running a case and they wanted him.
    “Mel, glad you were available.”
    “Hm. Available . . . Didn’t you call my lieutenant and threaten him with all sorts of terrible things if he didn’t release me from the Hanover-Sterns case?”
    “I did it for you, Mel. You were being wasted on insider trading.”
    “And I thank you for the reprieve.”
    Cooper nodded a greeting to those in the room, knuckled his Harry Potter glasses up on his nose and walked across the lab to the examination table on silent, brown Hush Puppies shoes. Though by appearances the least athletic man Rhyme had ever seen, apart from himself, of course, Mel Cooper nonetheless moved with the grace of a soccer player, and Rhyme was reminded that he was a champion ballroom dancer.
    “Let’s hear the details,” Rhyme said, turning to Sachs.
    She flipped through her notes and explained what the power company field executive had told her.
    “Algonquin Consolidated Power provides electricity—they call it ‘juice’—for most of the area. Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey.”
    “That’s the smokestacks on the East River?”
    “That’s right,” she said to Cooper. “Their headquarters is there and they have a steam and electricity generation plant. Now, what the Algonquin supervisor said was that the UNSUB could’ve broken into the substation at any time in the last thirty-six hours to rig the wire. The substations are generally unmanned. A little after eleven this morning he, or they, got into the Algonquin computers, kept shutting down substations around the area and rerouted all that electricity through the substation on Fifty-seven. When voltage builds up to a certain point, it has to complete a circuit. You can’t stop it. It either jumps to another wire or to something that’s grounded. Normally the circuit breakers in the substation would pop but the perp had reset them to take ten times the load, so it was sitting in that”—she pointed to the cable—“waiting to burst. Like a dam. The pressure built up and the juice had to go someplace.”
    She picked up an evidence bag containing teardrop-shaped bits of metal. “And then it blew,” she repeated. “These were all over the place. Like shrapnel.”
    “What are they?” Sellitto asked.
    “Molten droplets from the bus sign pole. Blew them everywhere. Nicked the concrete and went right through the sides of some cars. The vic was burned but that’s not what killed him.” Her voice grew soft, Rhyme noticed. “It was like a big shotgun blast. Cauterized the wounds.” She grimaced. “That kept him conscious for a while. Take a look.” A nod at Pulaski.
    The officer plugged the flash cards into a nearby computer and created files for the case. A moment later photos popped up on the high-def monitors nearby. After years and years in the crime scene business,Rhyme was largely inured to even the most horrific images; these, though, troubled him. The young victim’s body had been riddled by the dots of metal. There was little blood, thanks to the searing heat of the projectiles. Had the perp known that’s what his weapon would do, sealing the punctures? Keeping his victims conscious to feel the pain? Was this part of his MO? Rhyme could understand now why Sachs was so troubled.
    “Christ,” the big detective muttered.
    Rhyme shook aside the image and asked, “Who was he?”
    “Name was Luis Martin. Assistant manager in a music store. Twenty-eight. No record.”
    “No connection to Algonquin, MTA . . . any reason anybody’d want him dead?”
    “None,” Sachs said.
    “Wrong time, wrong place,” Sellitto summarized.
    Rhyme said, “Ron. The coffee shop? What’d you find?”
    “A man in dark blue overalls came into the place about ten forty-five. He had a laptop with him. He went online.”
    “Blue overalls?” Sellitto asked. “Any logo? ID?”
    “Nobody saw. But the Algonquin workers there, their uniforms were the same dark blue.”
    “Get a description?” the rumpled cop persisted.
    “Probably white, probably forties, glasses, dark cap. Couple people said no glasses and no cap. Blond hair, red hair, dark hair.”
    “Witnesses,” Rhyme muttered disparagingly. You could have a shooter naked to the waist kill somebody in front of ten witnesses and each one would describe him as wearing ten different colored T-shirts. In the past few years his doubt about the value of eyewitnesseshad tempered somewhat—because of Sachs’s