The Burning Wire

by Jeffery Deaver

  "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 knuckle or two, the pressure of fear.

  Fear breeds respect. Just the way of the world.

  "Now here's what we're doing. This's important. You got a date coming up, I'm recalling."

  A hearing, about leaving the jurisdiction. Dellray didn't care about losing him. Jeep's usefulness was pretty much gone. That was the nature of CIs; they have a shelf life of fresh yogurt. Jeep-Jim was going to appeal to the New York State parole board about permission to move to Georgia. Of all places.

  "If you'd put in a word, Fred, sir, that'd be great." And he turned big soupy eyes the agent's way.

  Wall Street should take a lesson from the confidential informant world. No derivatives, no default swaps, no insurance, no cooking the books. It was simple. You gave your snitch something of X value, and he gave you something equally important.

  If he didn't produce, he was out. If you didn't pay, you got shit.

  And all so very transparent.

  "Okay," Dellray said. "Whatchu want's on the table. Now 'bout what I want. And what I have to say up front is it's time sensitive. You know what that means, Jim?"

  "Somebody's gonna get fucked and pretty soon."

  "Rightie-ro. Now, listen close. I need to find Brent."

  A pause. "William Brent? Why would I know where to find him?" Jeep-Jim, Slim-Jim, asked this with too much rise in his voice, telling Dellray that the snitch had at least some idea where to find the man.

  Dellray sang, "Georgia's on my mind."

  A full sixty seconds passed while Jeep did some negotiating with himself.

  "I mean, maybe I could . . . the thing is, there's a possibility . . ."

  "You gonna finish those sentences or can I eat 'em?"

  "Lemme check something."

  Jeep-James-Jim rose and walked into the corner of the place and began texting, leaving Dellray amused at the paranoia about overhearing a text message. Jeepy boy would probably do well in Georgia.

  Dellray sipped water the waiter had brought. He hoped the skinny guy's mission would be successful. . . . One of the agent's biggest successes was running William Brent, a middle-aged white guy, unathletic and looking like a Wal-Mart checker. He'd been key in bringing down a very nasty conspiracy. A domestic terrorist group--racists and separatists--had a plan to blow up a number of synagogues on a Friday evening and blame Islamic fundamentalists for it. They had money but not the means, so they turned to a local organized crime family, who also had no love of either Jews or Muslims. Brent had been hired by the family to help and he'd fallen for Dellray's twitchy character--an arms dealer from Haiti selling rocket-propelled grenades.

  Brent got collared and Dellray turned him. Surprising everyone, he took to confidential informing as if he'd studied all his life for the job. Brent infiltrated high up in both the racist group and the family and brought down the conspiracy. His debt to society paid, Brent nonetheless went on to work with Dellray in various personas--a mean-ass hired killer, a jewelry and bank heist mastermind, a radical anti-abortion activist. He proved to be one of the sharpest CIs the agent had ever run. And a chameleon in his own right. He was the flip side of Fred Dellray (some years ago it was even suspected, but never proven, that Brent had run a network of his own snitches--inside the NYPD itself).

  Dellray ran him for a year until he got overexposed and Brent retired into the comfy quilt of witness protection. But word was that in one of his new personas he remained well connected, a player on the street.

  Since none of Dellray's usual sources had come up with anything about Justice For or Rahman or the grid attack, the agent thought of William Brent.

  Jimmy-Jeep returned and sat down on the squeaking bench. "I think I can make it happen. But what's this about, man? I mean, I don't want him to clip me."

  Which was, Dellray reflected, one fairly significant difference between Wall Street and the CI
business.

  He said, "No, no, Jimmy boy, you're not hearing me. I'm not asking you t'turn inta a little fly on the wall. I'm asking you to play matchmaker is all. You get me a sit-down and you'll be eating peaches down in Georgia in no time."

  Dellray slid forward a card that contained only a phone number. "This's what he should call. Go make it happen."

  "Now?"

  "Now."

  Jeep nodded toward the kitchen. "But my lunch. I didn't 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 two quarter-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 aluminum like the wire, could reveal broken or bent saw teeth, or other unique patterns that could link tools found in the perp's possession to the one used in a crime.

  "Now, the split bolts?"

  Cooper found distinctive scratch marks on all the bolts, suggesting that the perp's wrench had probably left them.

  "Love soft brass," Rhyme muttered. "Just love it. . . . So he's got well-used tools. More and more, looking like he's an insider."

  Sellitto disconnected his call. "Nothing. Maybe somebody saw somebody in a blue jumpsuit. But it might've been an hour after it happened. When the whole friggin' block was crawling with Algonquin repair crews wearing friggin' blue jumpsuits."

  "What've you found out, Rookie?" Rhyme barked. "I want sources for the wire."

  "I'm on hold."

  "Tell 'em you're a cop."

  "I did."

  "Tell 'em you're the chief cop. The big cheese."

  "I--"

  But Rhyme's attention was already on something else: the iron bars forming the grate that barred entrance to the access tunnel.

  "How he'd cut through them, Mel?"

  A careful look revealed he hadn't used a hacksaw but a bolt cutter.

  Cooper examined the ends of the bars through a microscope fitted with a digital camera and took pictures. He then transferred the shots to the central computer and assembled them onto one screen.

  "Any distinctive marks?" Rhyme asked. As with the broken hacksaw tooth and scratches on the bolts and nuts, any unusual marking on the cutter would link its owner to the crime scene.

  "How's that one?" Cooper asked, pointing at the screen.

  There was a tiny crescent of scratch in roughly the same position on the cut surfaces of several of the bars. "That'll do. Good."

  Then Pulaski cocked his head and readied his pen as somebody at Bennington Electrical picked up the phone to speak to the young cop in his new capacity as the emperor of the New York City Police Department.

  After a brief conversation he hung up.

  "What the hell's with the cable, Pulaski?"

  "First of all, that model cable's real common. They--"

  "How common?"

  "They sell millions of feet of it every year. It's mostly for medium-voltage distribution."

  "Sixty thousand volts is medium?"

  "I guess so. You can buy it from any electrical supply wholesaler. But he did say that Algonquin buys it in bulk."

  Sellitto asked, "Who there would order it?"

  "Technical Supplies Department."

  "I'll give 'em a call," Sellitto said. He did so and had a brief conversation. He disconnected. "They're going to check if anything's missing from inventory."

  Rhyme was gazing at the grating. "So he climbed through the manhole earlier and into the Algonquin work space under the alley."

  Sachs said, "He might've been down the steam pipe manhole to do some work and seen the grating that led to the tunnel."

  "Definitely suggests it's an employee." Rhyme hoped this was the case. Inside jobs made cops' work a lot easier. "Let's keep going. The boots."

  She said, "Similar boot prints in both the access tunnel and near where the wire was rigged inside the substation."

  "And any prints from the coffee shop?"
<
br />   "That one," Pulaski responded, as he pointed to an electrostatic print. "Under the table. Looks like the same brand to me."

  Mel Cooper examined it and concurred. The young officer continued, "And Amelia had me check the boots of the Algonquin workers who were there. They were all different."

  Rhyme turned his attention to the boot. "What's the brand, do you think, Mel?"

  Cooper was browsing through the NYPD's footwear database, which contained samples of thousands of shoes and boots, the vast majority of which were men's shoes. Most serious felonies involving physical presence at the scene were committed by men.

  Rhyme had been instrumental in creating the expanded shoe and boot database years ago. He worked out voluntary arrangements with all the major manufacturers to have scans of their lines sent into the NYPD regularly.

  His fingers flying over the keys, Cooper said, "Got a match. Albertson-Fenwick Boots and Gloves, Inc. Model E-20." He perused the screen. "Not surprising, they've got special insulation. They're for workers who have regular contact with live electrical sources. They meet ASTM Electrical Hazard Standard F2413-05. These're size eleven."

  Rhyme squinted as he looked them over. "Deep treads. Good." This meant they would retain significant quantities of trace material.

  Cooper continued, "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.