The Burning Wire (27 page)

Chapter 50

THAT SMELL AGAIN.

Could Amelia Sachs ever escape it?

And even if she scrubbed and scrubbed and threw her clothes out, could she ever
forget
it? Apparently the sleeve and hair of one of the victims had caught fire in the elevator car. The flames hadn't been bad but the smoke was thick and the smell was repulsive.

Sachs and Ron Pulaski were suiting up in their overalls. She asked one of the Emergency Service officers, "DCDS?" Gesturing toward the hazy car.

Deceased, confirmed dead at scene.

"That's right."

"Where're the bodies?"

"Up the hall. I know we fucked up the scene in the elevator, Detective, but there was so much smoke, we didn't know what was going on. We had to clear it."

She told him that was all right. Checking on the conditions of victims is the first priority. Besides, nothing contaminates a crime scene like fire. A few emergency worker footprints would make little difference.

"How'd it work?" she asked the ESU officer.

"We aren't sure. The building supervisor said the car stopped just above the ground floor. Then smoke started. And the screams. By the time they got the car down to the main floor and the door opened, it was all over."

Sachs shivered at the thought. The molten metal disks were bad enough, but, being claustrophobic, she was even more troubled by the thought of those four people in a confined space filled with electricity . . . and one of them burning.

The ESU officer looked over his notes. "The vics were an editor of an arts magazine, a lawyer and an accountant on the eighth floor. A computer parts salesman from the sixth. If you're interested."

Sachs was
always
interested in anything that made the victims real. Partly this was to keep her heart about her, to make certain she didn't become callous because of what she encountered on the job. But partly it was because of what Rhyme had instilled in her. For a man who was pure scientist, a rationalist, Rhyme's talent as a forensic expert was also due to his uncanny ability to step into the mind of the perp.

Years ago, at the very first scene they'd worked, a terrible crime also involving death by a utility system--steam, in that case--Rhyme had whispered to her something that seated itself in her mind every time she walked the grid: "I want you to be him," he'd told her, speaking of the perp. "Just get into his head. You've been thinking the way we think. I want you to think the way he does."

Rhyme had told her that while he believed forensic science could be taught, this empathy was an innate talent. And
Sachs
believed the best way to maintain this connection--this
wire,
she thought now, between your heart and your skill--was never to forget the victims.

"Ready?" she asked Pulaski.

"I guess."

"We're going to do the grid, Rhyme," she said into the microphone.

"Okay, but do it without me, Sachs."

She was alarmed. Despite his protests to the contrary, Rhyme hadn't been well. She could tell easily. But it turned out that there was another reason he was signing off. "I want you to walk the grid with that guy from Algonquin."

"Sommers?"

"Right."

"Why?"

"For one thing, I like his mind. He thinks broadly. Maybe it's his inventor's side. I don't know. But beyond that, something's not right, Sachs. I can't explain it. I feel we're missing something. Galt had to have planned this out for a month, at least. But now it looks like he's accelerating the attacks--two in one day. I can't figure that out."

"Maybe," she suggested, "it's because we've gotten on to him faster than he hoped."

"Could be. I don't know. But if that's the case it also means he'd love to take us out too."

"True."

"So I want a fresh perspective. I've already called Charlie, and he's willing to help. . . . Does he always eat when he talks on the phone?"

"He likes junk food."

"Well, when you're on the grid, make sure he's got something that doesn't crunch. Communications will patch you in, whenever you're ready. Just get back here ASAP with whatever you find. For all we know Galt's rigging another attack right now."

They disconnected. She glanced at Ron Pulaski, who was still clearly troubled.

I need you with us, Rookie. . . .

She called him over. "Ron, the major scene's downstairs, where he probably rigged the wires and that device of his." She tapped her radio. "I'll be online with Charlie Sommers. I need you to run the elevator." Another pause. "And process the bodies too. There probably won't be much trace. His MO is he doesn't have any direct contact with the vics. But it needs to be done. Are you okay with that?"

The young officer nodded. "Anything you need, Amelia." Sounding painfully sincere. He was making amends for the accident at Galt's apartment, she guessed.

"Let's get to it. And Vicks."

"What?"

"In the kit. Vicks VapoRub. Put some underneath your nose. For the smell."

In five minutes she was online with Charlie Sommers, grateful that he was helping her in running the scene--to give "technical support," which he defined, in his irreverent way, as helping to "save her ass."

Sachs clicked on her helmet light and started down the stairs into the basement of the building, describing to Charlie Sommers exactly what she saw in the dank, filthy area at the base of the elevator shaft. She was linked to him only through audio, not video, as she usually was with Rhyme.

The building had been cleared by ESU, but she was very aware of what Rhyme had told her earlier--that Galt could easily have decided to start targeting his pursuers. She looked around for a moment, taking only a few detours to shine the light on shadows that had a vaguely human form.

They turned out to be only shadows that had a vaguely human form.

He asked, "You see anything bolted to the railings the elevator rides on?"

She focused again on her search. "No, nothing on the rails. But . . . there's a piece of that Bennington cable bolted to the wall. I'm--"

"Test the voltage first!"

"Was just going to say that."

"Ah, a born electrician."

"No way. After this, I'm not even going to change my car batteries." She swept with the detector. "It's zero."

"Good. Where does the line go?"

"On one end, to a bus bar that's dangling in the shaft. It's resting against the bottom of the elevator car. It's scorched where it's made contact. The other end goes to a thick cable that runs into a beige panel on the wall, like a big medicine cabinet. The Bennington wire is connected to a main line with one of those remote switches like at the last scene."

"That's the incoming service line." He added that an office building like this didn't receive electricity the way a residence did. It took in a much larger amount, like a street transformer: 13,800 volts, which was then stepped down for distribution to the offices. It was a spot network. "So the car would descend and hit the hot bus bar. . . . But there has to be another switch somewhere, one that controls the power to the elevator. He needed to stop the car just before it got to the lobby. So the victims inside would hit the call button. Then the passenger's hand on the panel and his feet on the floor completed the circuit and electrocuted him and anybody who touched him or he was brushing up against."

Sachs looked around and found the other device. She told Sommers this.

He explained exactly how to dismantle the cables and what to look for. Before she removed any evidence, though, Sachs laid the numbers and photographed the scene. Then she thanked Sommers and told him that was all she needed for now. They disconnected and she walked the grid, including the entrance and exit routes--which turned out to be in all likelihood a door nearby that led to the alley. It had a flimsy lock and had recently been jimmied open. She took pictures of this too.

She was about to go upstairs and join Pulaski when she paused.

Four victims here in the elevator.

Sam Vetter and four others dead at the hotel, a number in the hospital. Luis Martin.

And fear throughout the city, fear of this invisible killer.

In her imagination she heard Rhyme say, "You have to become him."

Sachs rested the evidence by the stairs and returned to the base of the elevator shaft.

I'm him, I'm Raymond Galt. . . .

Sachs had trouble summoning the fanatic, the crusader, since that emotion didn't jibe, in her mind, with the extreme calculation that the man had shown so far. Anybody else would just have taken a shot at Andi Jessen or firebombed the Queens plant. But Galt was going to these precise, elaborate lengths to use a very complicated weapon to kill.

What did it mean?

I'm him. . . .

I'm Galt.

Then her mind went still and up bubbled the answer: I don't care about motive. I don't care why I'm doing this. None of that matters. All that's important is to focus on technique, like focusing on making the most perfect splice or switch or connection I can to cause the most harm.

That's the center of my universe.

I've become addicted to the process, addicted to the juice. . . .

And with that thought came another: It's all about angles. He had to get . . .
I
have to get the bus bar in just the right position to kiss the floor of the elevator car when it's
near
the lobby but not yet there.

Which means I have to watch the elevator in operation from all different perspectives down here to make sure the counterweight, the gears, the motor, the cables of the elevator don't knock aside the bus bar or otherwise interfere with the wire.

I have to study the shaft from all angles. I
have
to.

On her hands and knees Sachs made a circuit of the filthy basement all around the base of the shaft--anywhere that Galt could have seen the cable and bar and contacts. She found no footprints, no fingerprints. But she did find places where the ground had been recently disturbed, and it was not unreasonable to think that he'd crouched there to examine his deadly handiwork.

She took samples from ten locations and deposited them into separate evidence bags, marking them according to positions of the compass: "10' away, northwest." "7' away, south." She then gathered all the other evidence and climbed painfully on her arthritic legs to the lobby.

Joining Pulaski, Sachs looked into the interior of the elevator. It wasn't badly damaged. There were some smoke marks--accompanied by that terrible smell. She simply couldn't imagine what it would have been like to be riding in that car and suddenly have thirteen thousand volts race through your body. At least, she supposed, the vics would have felt nothing after the first few seconds.

She saw that he'd laid the numbers and taken pictures. "You find anything?"

"No. I searched the car too. But the panel hadn't been opened recently."

"He rigged everything from downstairs. And the bodies?"

His face was solemn, troubled, and she could tell that it had been a difficult chore. Still, he said evenly, "No trace. But there was something interesting. All three of them had wet soles. All their shoes."

"The fire department?"

"No, the fire was out by the time they got here."

Water. That was interesting. To improve the connection. But how did he get their shoes wet? Sachs then asked, "You said
three
bodies?"

"That's right."

"But that ESU guy said there were four vics."

"There were, but only three of them died. Here." He handed her a piece of paper.

"What's this?" On the slip was a name and phone number.

"The survivor. I figured you'd want to talk to her. Her name's Susan Stringer. She's at St. Vincent's. Smoke inhalation, some burns. But she'll be okay. They'll be releasing her in an hour or so."

Sachs was shaking her head. "I don't see how anybody could've survived. There were thirteen thousand volts in here."

Ron Pulaski replied, "Oh, she's disabled. In a wheelchair. Rubber tires, you know. Guess that insulated her."

Chapter 51

"HOW'D HE DO?"
Rhyme asked Sachs, who'd just returned to the lab.

"Ron? Little distracted. But he did a good job. Processed the bodies. That was tough. But he found something interesting. Somehow the vics all had wet shoes."

"How'd Galt manage that?"

"I don't know."

"You don't think Ron's too shaken up?"

"Not
too.
But
some.
But he's young. Happens."

"That's no excuse."

"No, it's not. It's an explanation."

"They're both the same to me," Rhyme muttered. "Where is he?"

The hour was after 8 p.m. "He went back to Galt's, thought he might've missed something."

Rhyme thought this wasn't a bad idea, though he was confident that the young officer had searched the scene well the first time. He added, "Just keep an eye on him. I won't risk anybody's life because he's distracted."

"Agreed."

The two of them and Cooper were here alone in the lab. McDaniel and the Kid were back at the federal building, meeting with Homeland Security, and Sellitto was down at the Big Building--One Police Plaza. Rhyme wasn't sure whom he was meeting with but there'd undoubtedly be a long list of people who wanted explanations about why there was no suspect in custody.

Cooper and Sachs were laying out the evidence that Sachs had collected at the office building. The tech then examined the cable and other items that were rigged at the base of the elevator shaft.

"There's one other thing." Sachs probably thought her voice was casual; in fact it was tripping with meaning to Rhyme. Tough to be in love with somebody; you can read them so well when they're up to something.

"What?" He gave her his inquisitor's gaze.

"There was a witness. She was in the elevator when the other people died."

"She hurt bad?"

"Apparently not. Smoke inhalation mostly."

"That would've been unpleasant. Burning hair." His nostrils flared slightly.

Sachs sniffed at her red strands. Her nose wrinkled too. "I'm taking a really long shower tonight."

"What'd she have to say?"

"I didn't get a chance to interview her. . . . She's coming over here as soon as she's released."

"Here?" Rhyme asked with surprise. Not only was he skeptical of witnesses in the first place, but there was a security question about letting a stranger into the lab. If a terrorist cell was behind the attacks, they might want to sneak one of their members into the inner sanctum of the investigators.

But Sachs laughed, deducing his thoughts. "I checked her out, Rhyme. She's clean. No record, no warrants. Longtime editor of some furniture magazine. Besides, I thought it wasn't a bad idea--I wouldn't have to spend the time getting to and from the hospital. I can stay here and work the evidence."

"What else?"

She hesitated. Another smile. "I was explaining too much?"

"Uh-huh."

"Okay. She's disabled."

"Is she now? That's still not answering my question."

"She wants to meet you, Rhyme. You're a celebrity."

Rhyme sighed. "Fine."

Sachs turned to him, eyes narrowed. "You're not arguing."

Now
he
laughed. "Not in the mood. Let her come over. I'll interview her myself. Show you how it's done. Short and sweet."

Sachs gave a cautious look.

Rhyme then asked, "What do you have, Mel?"

Peering through the eyepiece of a microscope, the tech said, "Nothing helpful for sourcing him."

" 'Sourcing.' Missed that word when I was in verb school," Rhyme said sourly.

"But I've got one thing," Cooper said, ignoring Rhyme's remark and reading the results from the chromatograph."Traces of substances that the database is saying are ginseng and wolfberry."

"Chinese herbs, maybe tea," Rhyme announced. A case several years ago had involved a snakehead, a smuggler of illegal aliens, and much of the investigation had centered around Chinatown. A police officer from mainland China, helping in the case, had taught Rhyme about herbalism, thinking it might help his condition. The substances had no effect, of course, but Rhyme had found the subject potentially helpful in investigations. At the moment he noted the find, but agreed with Cooper that it wasn't much of a lead. There was a time when those substances would have been found only in Asian specialty shops and what Rhyme called "woo-woo stores." Now products like that were in every Rite Aid pharmacy and Food Emporium throughout the city.

"On the board, if you please, Sachs."

As she wrote, he looked over a series of small evidence bags lined up in a row, with her handwriting on the chain-of-custody cards. They were labeled with directions from the compass.

"Ten little Indians," Rhyme said, intrigued. "What do we have there?"

"I got mad, Rhyme. No, I got fucking furious."

"Good. I find anger liberating. Why?"

"Because we can't find him. So I took samples of substrate from where he might've been. I crawled around in some pretty lousy places, Rhyme."

"Hence the smudge." He looked at her forehead.

She caught his eye. "I'll wash it off later." A smile. Seductive, he believed.

He lifted an eyebrow. "Well, get searching. Tell me what you find."

She pulled on gloves and poured the samples into ten examining dishes. Donning magnifying goggles, she began sifting through them, using a sterile probe to search the contents of each bag. Dirt, cigarette butts, the bits of paper, the nuts and bolts, the bits of what seemed to be rodent shit, hairs, scraps of cloth, candy and fast food wrappers, grains of concrete, metal and stone. The epidermis of underground New York.

Rhyme had learned long ago that in searching for evidence at crime scenes, the key was finding patterns. What repeated itself frequently? Objects in that category could be presumptively eliminated. It was the unique items, those that were out of place, that might be relevant. Outliers, statisticians and sociologists called them.

Nearly everything that Sachs had found was repeated in every dish of the samples. But there was only one thing that was in a category of its own: a very tiny band of curved metal, nearly in a circle, about twice the width of a pencil lead. Though there were many other bits of metal--parts of screws and bolts and shavings--nothing resembled this.

It was also clean, suggesting it had been left recently.

"Where was this, Sachs?"

Rising from her hunched-over pose and stretching, she looked at the label on the bag in front of the dish.

"Twenty feet from the shaft, southwest. It's where he would've had a view of all the wiring connections he'd made. It was under a beam."

So Galt would have been crouching. The metal bit could have fallen from his cuff or clothing. He asked Sachs to hold it up for him to examine closely. She put magnifying goggles on him, adjusted them. Then she took tweezers and picked up the bit, holding it close.

"Ah, bluing," he said. "Used on iron. Like on guns. Treated with sodium hydroxide and nitrite. For corrosion resistance. And good tensile properties. It's a spring of some kind. Mel, what's your mechanical parts database like?"

"Not as updated as when you were chief, but it's something."

Rhyme went online, laboriously typing the pass code. He could use voice recognition, but characters like @%$*--which the department had adopted to improve security--were troublesome to interpret vocally.

The NYPD forensic database main screen popped up and Rhyme started in the
Miscellaneous Metals--Springs
category.

After ten minutes of scrolling through hundreds of samples he announced, "It's a hairspring, I think."

"What's that?" Cooper asked.

Rhyme was grimacing. "I'm afraid it's bad news. If it's his, it means he might be changing his approach to the attacks."

"How?" Sachs wondered aloud.

"They're used in timers. . . . I'd bet he's worried we're getting close to him. And he's going to start using a timed device instead of a remote control. When the next attack happens, he could be in a different borough."

Rhyme had Sachs bag the spring and mark a chain-of-custody card.

"He's smart," Cooper observed. "But he'll slip up. They always do."

They
often
do, Rhyme corrected silently.

The tech then said, "Got a pretty good print from one of the remote's switches."

Rhyme hoped it was from somebody else, but, no, it was just one of Galt's--he didn't need to be diligent about obscuring his identity now that they'd learned his name.

The phone buzzed and Rhyme blinked to see the country code. He answered at once.

"Commander Luna."

"Captain Rhyme, we have, perhaps, a development."

"Go ahead, please."

"An hour ago there was a false fire alarm in a wing of the building Mr. Watchmaker was observing. On that floor is an office of a company that brokers real estate loans in Latin America. The owner's a colorful fellow. Been under investigation a few times. It made me suspicious. I looked into the background of this man and he's had death threats made before."

"By whom?"

"Clients whose deals turned out to be less lucrative than they would have wanted. He performs some other functions too, which I cannot find out about too easily. And if I cannot find out about them the answer is simple: He's a crook. Which means he has a very large and efficient security staff."

"So he's the sort of target that would require a killer like the Watchmaker."

"Exactly."

"But," Rhyme continued, "I would also keep in mind that the target could be at the exact opposite end of the complex from that office."

"You think the fire alarm was a feint."

"Possibly."

"I'll have Arturo's men consider that too. He's put his best--and most invisible--surveillance people on the case."

"Have you found anything more about the contents of the package that Logan received? The letter
I
with the blanks? The circuit board, the booklet, the numbers?"

"Nothing but speculation. And, as I think you would too, Captain, I feel speculation is a waste of time."

"True, Commander."

Rhyme thanked the man again and they disconnected. He glanced at the clock. The time was 10 p.m. Thirty-five hours since the attack at the substation. Rhyme was in turmoil. On the one hand, he was aware of the terrible pressure to move forward with a case in which the progress was frustratingly slow. On the other, he was exhausted. More tired than he remembered being in a long time. He needed sleep. But he didn't want to admit it to anyone, even Sachs. He was staring at the silent box of the phone, considering what the Mexican police commander had just told him, when he was aware of sweat dotting his forehead. This infuriated him. He wanted to wipe it before anyone noticed, but of course that was a luxury not available to him. He jerked his head from side to side. Finally the motion dislodged the drop.

But it also caught Sachs's attention. He sensed she was about to ask if he was feeling all right. He didn't want to talk about his condition, since he'd either have to admit that he wasn't, or lie to her. He wheeled abruptly to an evidence whiteboard and studied the script intently. Without seeing the words at all.

Sachs was starting toward him when the doorbell rang. A moment later there was some motion from the doorway and Thom entered the room with a visitor. Rhyme easily deduced the person's identity; she was in a wheelchair made by the same company that had produced his.