The Burning Wire

“They’re fairly new so there’re no distinctive wear marks that tell us much about his height, weight or other characteristic.”
    “I’d say he walks straight, though. Agree?” Rhyme was looking at the prints on his screen, broadcast from a camera over the examining table.
    “Yes.”
    Sachs wrote this on the board.
    “Good, Sachs. Now, Rookie, what’s the invisible evidence you found?” Gazing at the plastic envelope labeled Coffee Shop Opposite Blast—Table Where Suspect Was Sitting .
    Cooper was examining it. “Blond hair. One inch long. Natural, not dyed.”
    Rhyme loved hair as a forensic tool. It could often be used for DNA sampling—if the bulb was attached—and it could reveal a lot about the suspect’s appearance, through color and texture and shape. Age and sex could also be reckoned with more or less accuracy. Hair testing was becoming more and more popular as a forensic and an employment tool since hair retained traces of drugs longer than urine or blood. An inch of hair held a two-month history of drug use. In England hair was frequently used to test for alcohol abuse.
    “We’re not sure it’s his,” Sellitto pointed out.
    “Of course not,” Rhyme muttered. “We’re not sure of anything at this point.”
    But Pulaski said, “It’s pretty likely, though. I talked to the owner. He makes sure the busboys wipe the table down after every customer. I checked. And nobody’d wiped it after the perp was there, because of the explosion.”
    “Good, Rookie.”
    Cooper continued, speaking of the hair, “No naturalor artificial curves. It’s straight. No evidence of depigmentation, so I’d put him under fifty years old.”
    “I want a tox-chem analysis. ASAP.”
    “I’ll send it to the lab.”
    “A commercial lab,” Rhyme ordered. “Wave a lot of money at them for fast results.”
    Sellitto grumbled, “We don’t have a lot of money, and we’ve got our own perfectly good lab in Queens.”
    “It’s not perfectly good if they don’t get me the results before our perp kills somebody else, Lon.”
    “How’s Uptown Testing?” Cooper asked.
    “Good. Remember, wave money.”
    “Jesus, the city doesn’t revolve around you , Linc.”
    “It doesn’t?” Rhyme asked, with surprise in his eyes that was both feigned and genuine.

Chapter 14
    WITH THE SEM-EDS —the scanning electron microscope and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscope—Mel Cooper analyzed the trace evidence Sachs had collected where the UNSUB had rigged the wire. “I’ve got some kind of mineral, different from the substrata around the substation.”
    “What’s it made up of?”
    “It’s about seventy percent feldspar, then quartz, magnetite, mica, calcite and amphiboles. Some anhydrite too. Curious, large percentages of silicon.”
    Rhyme knew the geology of the New York area well. When mobile, he’d strolled around the city,scooping up samples of dirt and rock and creating databases that could help him match perp and locale. But this combination of minerals was a mystery to him. It certainly wasn’t from around here. “We need a geologist.” Rhyme thought for a moment and made a call with speed dial.
    “Hello?” a man’s soft voice answered.
    “Arthur,” Rhyme said to his cousin, who lived not far away, in New Jersey.
    “Hey. How are you?”
    Rhyme reflected that it seemed everybody was asking about his health today, though Arthur was just making conversation.
    “Good.”
    “It was nice seeing you and Amelia last week.”
    Rhyme had recently reconnected with Arthur Rhyme, who’d been like a brother to him and with whom he’d grown up outside Chicago. Though the criminalist was hardly one for weekends in the country, he’d astonished Sachs by suggesting that the two of them take up an invitation to visit Art Rhyme and his wife, Judy, at their small vacation house on the shore. Arthur revealed that he’d actually built a wheelchair ramp to make it accessible. They’d gone out to the place, along with Thom and Pammy and her dog, Jackson, for a couple of days.
    Rhyme had enjoyed himself. While the women and canine hiked the beach, he and Arthur had talked science and academia and world events, their opinions growing inarticulate in direct proportion to the consumption of single malt scotch; Arthur, like Rhyme, had a pretty good collection.
    “You’re on speaker here, Art, with . . . well, a bunch of cops.”
    “I’ve been watching the news. You’re running thiselectricity incident,