The Burning Wire

her being hurt. But she explained, “My parents are in Florida.”
    Sachs asked, “You have a brother, don’t you? Didn’t I see his picture on your desk?”
    “My brother? We don’t stay in touch much. And he doesn’t live here—” Another voice interrupted her. Jessen came back on the line. “Look, I’m sorry, the governor’s calling. He’s just heard the news.”
    With a click she disconnected.
    “So.” Sellitto lifted his palms. His eyes grazed McDaniel but then settled on Rhyme. “This makes it all pretty fucking easy.”
    “Easy?” asked the Kid.
    “Yeah.” Sellitto nodded at the digital clock on a nearby flat-screen monitor. “If we can’t negotiate, all we gotta do is find him. In under three hours. Piece of cake.”

Chapter 27
    MEL COOPER AND Rhyme were working on the analysis of the letter. Ron Pulaski had arrived too, a few minutes earlier. Lon Sellitto was speeding downtownto coordinate with ESU, in the event they could either ID a suspect or find his possible target.
    Tucker McDaniel looked over the demand letter as if it were some type of food he’d never encountered. Rhyme supposed this was because handwriting on a piece of paper didn’t fall into cloud zone law enforcement. It was the antithesis of high-tech communications. His computers and sophisticated tracing systems were useless against paper and ink.
    Rhyme glanced at the script. He knew from his own training, as well as from working with Parker Kincaid, that handwriting doesn’t reveal anything about the personality of the writer, whatever the grocery store checkout-stand books and news pundits suggested. Analysis could be illuminating, of course, if you had another, identified sample to compare it with, so you could determine if the writer of the second document was the same as the one who wrote the first. Parker Kincaid would be doing this now, running a preliminary comparison with known handwriting samples of terror suspects and comparing them with the writing of those Algonquin employees who were on the company list.
    Handwriting and content could also suggest right- or left-handedness, level of education, national and regional upbringing, mental and physical illnesses and intoxication or drug-impaired states.
    But Rhyme’s interest in the note was more basic: the source of the paper, source of the ink, the fingerprints and trace embedded in the fibers.
    All of which, after Cooper’s diligent analysis, added up to a big fat nothing.
    The sources for both paper stock and ink were generic—they could have come from one of thousands of stores. Andi Jessen’s prints were the onlyones on the letter and those on the envelope were from the messenger and the doorman; McDaniel’s agents had taken samples of their prints and forwarded them to Rhyme.
    Useless, Rhyme reflected bitterly. The only deduction was that the perp was smart. And had a great sense of survival.
    But ten minutes later, they had a breakthrough, of sorts.
    Parker Kincaid was on the line from his document examination office in his house in Fairfax, Virginia.
    “Lincoln.”
    “Parker, what’ve we got?”
    Kincaid said, “First, the handwriting comparison. The control samples from Algonquin itself were pretty sparse, so I couldn’t do the complete analysis I would have liked.”
    “I understand that.”
    “But I’ve narrowed it down to twelve employees.”
    “Twelve. Excellent.”
    “Here are the names. Ready?”
    Rhyme glanced at Cooper, who nodded. The tech jotted them down as Kincaid dictated.
    “Now, I can give you a few other things about him. First, he’s right-handed. Then I picked some characteristics from the language and word choice.”
    “Go ahead.”
    At Rhyme’s nod, Cooper walked to the profile board.
    “He’s a product of high school and probably some college. And it was an American education. There are a few spelling, grammatical and punctuation mistakes but mostly with more difficult words or constructions. I put those down to the stress of what he’s doing. He was probably born here. I can’t say for sure that he isn’t of foreign extraction, but English is his first and, I’m almost positive, only language.”
    Cooper wrote this down.
    Kincaid continued, “He’s also pretty clever. He doesn’t write in the first person and avoids the active voice.”
    Rhyme understood. “He never says anything about himself.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Suggesting there could be others working with him.”
    “It’s a possibility.