The Burning Wire

skill in interviewing and because of Kathryn Dance, who’d proved that analyzing body language was scientific enough in most cases to produce repeatable results. Still, he could never completely shake his skepticism.
    “And what happened to this guy in the overalls?” Rhyme asked.
    “Nobody’s really sure. It was pretty chaotic. All they knew was that they heard this huge bang, the whole street went white with the flash and then everybody ran outside. Nobody could remember seeing him after that.”
    “He took his coffee with him?” Rhyme asked. He loved beverage containers. They were like ID cards, with the DNA and fingerprint information they contained, along with trace that adhered because of the sticky nature of milk, sugar and other additives.
    “Afraid he did,” Pulaski confirmed.
    “Shit. What’d you find at the table?”
    “This.” Pulaski pulled a plastic envelope out of a milk crate.
    “It’s empty.” Sellitto squinted and teased his imposing belly, maybe scratching an itch, maybe absently dismayed that his latest fad diet wasn’t working.
    But Rhyme looked at the plastic bag and smiled. “Good job, Rookie.”
    “Good job?” the lieutenant muttered. “There’s nothing there.”
    “My favorite sort of evidence, Lon. The bits that’re invisible. We’ll get to that in a minute. I’m wondering about hackers,” Rhyme mused. “Pulaski, what about wireless at the coffee shop? I was thinking about it and I’m betting they didn’t have it.”
    “You’re right. How’d you know?”
    “He couldn’t take the chance that it’d be down. He’s probably logging in through some cell phone connection. But we need to find out how he got into the Algonquin system. Lon, get Computer Crimes on board. They need to contact somebody in Internet security at Algonquin. See if Rodney’s available.”
    The NYPD Computer Crimes Unit was an elite group of about thirty detectives and support staff. Rhyme worked with one of them occasionally, Detective Rodney Szarnek. Rhyme thought of him as a young man, but in fact he had no idea of his age since he had the boyish attitude, sloppy dress and tousled hair of a hacker—an image and avocation that tend to take years off people.
    Sellitto placed the call and after a brief conversation hung up, reporting that Szarnek would call Algonquin’s IT team immediately to see about hacking into the grid servers.
    Cooper was looking reverently at the wire. “So that’s it?” Then lifting another of the bags that contained misshapen metal disks, the shrapnel, he added, “Lucky nobody was walking by. If this’d happened on Fifth Avenue, there could be two dozen people dead.”
    Ignoring the tech’s unnecessary observation, Rhyme focused on Sachs. He saw that her eyes had gone still as she looked at the tiny disks.
    In a voice perhaps harsher than necessary, to shake her attention away from the shrapnel, he called, “Come on, people. Let’s get to work.”

Chapter 12
    EASING INTO THE booth, Fred Dellray found himself looking at a pale skinny man who could have been a wasted thirty or a preserved fifty.
    The guy was wearing a sports jacket that was too big, its source either a very low-end thrift shop or a coat rack, when nobody was looking.
    “Jeep.”
    “Uhm, that’s not my name anymore.”
    “Not your name? Like nacho cheese. Then whose cheese is it?”
    “I don’t get—”
    “Whatcha name now?” Dellray asked, frowning deeply, playing a particular role, one he generally slipped into with people like this. Jeep, or Not Jeep, had been a sadistic junkie the FBI agent had collared in an undercover set that required Dellray to laugh his way through the man’s graphic depiction of torturing a college kid who’d reneged on a drug payment. Then came the bust and, after some negotiation and time served, the man became one of Dellray’s pets.
    Which meant a tight leash that had to be jerked occasionally.
    “It was Jeep. But I decided to change it. I’m Jim now, Fred.”
    Changes . The magic word of the day.
    “Oh, oh, speakin’ of names: ‘Fred . . . Fred ’? I’m your buddy, I’m your best friend? I didn’t remember those introductions, signing your dance card, meetin’ the parents.”
    “Sorry, sir.”
    “Tell ya what: Stick with ‘Fred.’ Don’t believe you when you say ‘sir.’ ”
    The man was a disgusting morsel of humanity, but Dellray had learned you had to walk a fine line. Never contempt, yet never hesitate to dig in a