The Burning Wire

eat yet.”
    “What kinda place is this?” Dellray barked suddenly, looking around, horrified.
    “What do you mean, Fred?”
    “You can’t get food to go?”

Chapter 13
    FIVE HOURS HAD passed since the attack and the tension was climbing in Rhyme’s town house. None of the leads was panning out.
    “The wire,” he snapped urgently. “Where’d it come from?”
    Cooper shoved his thick glasses up on his nose again. He pulled on latex examining gloves but before touching the evidence he cleaned his hands with a pet hair roller and discarded the tape.
    Using surgical scissors, Cooper cut the plastic wrapper off and exposed the wire. It was about fifteen feet long and most of it was covered with black insulation. The wire itself wasn’t solid but comprised many silver-colored strands. At one end was bolted the thick, scorched brass plate. Attached to the other end were two large copper bolts with holes in the middle.
    “They’re called split bolts, the Algonquin guy told me,” Sachs said. “Used for splicing wires. That’s what he used to hook the cable to the main line.”
    She then explained how he’d hung the plate—it was called a “bus bar,” the worker had also explained—out the window. It was attached to the cable with twoquarter-inch bolts. The arc had flashed from the plate into the nearest ground source, the pole.
    Rhyme glanced at Sachs’s thumb, ragged and dark with a bit of dried blood. She tended to chew her nails and worry digits and her scalp. Tension built up in her like the voltage in the Algonquin substation. She dug into her thumb again and then—as if forcing herself to stop—pulled on latex gloves of her own.
    Lon Sellitto was on the phone with the officers canvassing for witnesses up and down Fifty-seventh Street. Rhyme gave him a fast questioning glance but the detective’s grimace—deeper than the one that usually graced his features—explained that the efforts so far were unfruitful. Rhyme turned his attention back to the wire.
    “Move the camera over it, Mel,” Rhyme said. “Slowly.”
    Using a handheld video unit, the tech scanned the wire from top to bottom, turned it over and went back the other way. What the camera saw was broadcast in high definition on the large screen in front of Rhyme. He stared intently.
    He muttered, “Bennington Electrical Manufacturing, South Chicago, Illinois. Model AM-MV-60. Zero gauge, rated up to sixty thousand volts.”
    Pulaski gave a laugh. “You know that, Lincoln? Where’d you learn about wires?”
    “It’s printed on the side, Rookie.”
    “Oh. I didn’t notice.”
    “Obviously. And our perp cut it to this length, Mel. What do you think? Not machine cut.”
    “I’d agree.” Using a magnifying glass, Cooper was examining the end of the metal cable that had been bolted to the substation wire. He then focused the video on the cut ends. “Amelia?”
    Their resident mechanic looked it over. “Hand hacksaw,” she offered.
    The split bolts were unique to the power industry, it turned out, but they could have come from dozens of sources.
    The bolts affixing the wire to the bus bar were similarly generic.
    “Let’s get our charts going,” Rhyme then said.
    Pulaski wheeled several whiteboards forward from the corner of the lab. On the top of one Sachs wrote, Crime Scene: Algonquin Substation Manhattan-10, West 57th Street . On the other was UNSUB Profile . She filled in what they’d discovered so far.
    “Did he get the wire at the substation?” Rhyme asked.
    “No. There wasn’t any stored there,” the young man said.
    “Then find out where he did get it. Call Bennington.”
    “Right.”
    “Okay,” Rhyme continued. “We’ve got metalwork and hardware. That means tool marks. The hacksaw. Let’s look at the wire closely.”
    Cooper switched to a large-object microscope, also plugged into the computer, and examined where the wire had been cut; he used low magnification. “It’s a new saw blade, sharp.”
    Rhyme gave an envious glance toward the tech’s deft hands, moving the focus and the geared stage of the ’scope. Then he returned to the screen. “New, yes, but there’s a broken tooth.”
    “Near the handle.”
    “Right.” Before people began to saw, they generally rested the blade on what they were about to cut, three or four times. Doing this, especially in soft aluminumlike the wire, could reveal broken or bent saw teeth, or other unique patterns that could link tools found in the perp’s