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?"