"I'm getting seasick, Sachs. What're you doing?"
What she was doing, she realized, was hesitating, looking around, focusing on the gaping doorway. She realized that, though Rhyme couldn't see it, she was also rubbing her finger compulsively against the quick of her thumb. Sometimes she broke the skin doing this and surprised herself by finding dots or streaks of blood. That was bad enough, but she sure didn't want to break through the latex glove now and contaminate the scene with her own trace. She straightened her fingers and said, "Just checking it out."
But they'd known each other too long for any bullshit. He asked, "What's wrong?"
Sachs took a deep breath. Finally she answered: "Little spooked, got to say. That arc thing. The way the vic died. It was pretty bad."
"You want to wait? Call in some experts from Algonquin. They can walk you through it."
She could tell from his voice, a tone, a pacing of his words, that he didn't want her to. It was one of the things she loved about him--the respect he showed by not coddling her. At home, at dinner, in bed, they were one thing. Here they were criminalist and crime scene cop.
She thought of her personal mantra, inherited from her father: "When you move they can't getcha."
So move.
"No, I'm fine." Amelia Sachs stepped into hell.
Chapter 8
"CAN YOU SEE OKAY?"
"Yes," Rhyme responded.
Sachs had clicked on the halogen lamp affixed to her headband. Small but powerful, it shined a fierce beam throughout the dim space. Even with the halogens, there were many shadowy crevices. The substation was cavernous inside, though from the sidewalk it had seemed smaller, narrow and dwarfed by the buildings on either side.
Her eyes burned and nose stung from the smoke residue. Rhyme insisted that anyone searching scenes smell the air; scents could tell you a great deal about the perp and the nature of the crime. Here, though, the only odor was a sour perfume: a burned-rubber, metallic oily odor, reminding her of car engines. She flashed on memories of herself and her father spending Sunday afternoons, backs aching, hunched over the open hood of a Chevy or Dodge muscle car, coaxing the mechanical nervous and vascular systems back to life. More recent memories too: Sachs and Pammy, the teenager who'd become a surrogate niece, together tuning the Torino Cobra, as Pammy's small dog, Jackson, sat patiently on the tool bench and watched the surgeons at work.
Swinging her head to train her miner's light around the hazy area, she noticed large banks of equipment, some beige or gray and relatively new-looking, some dating back to the last century: dark green and labeled with metal plaques offering the manufacturer and city of origin. Some, she noted, had addresses with no ZIP codes, revealing the distant era of their birth.
The main floor of the station was circular, overlooking the open basement, twenty feet below, visible over a pipe railing. Up here the floor was concrete but some of the platforms and the stairs were steel.
Metal.
One thing she knew about electricity was that metal was a good conductor.
She located the UNSUB's cable, running from the window about ten feet to a piece of equipment that the worker had described. She could see where the suspect'd had to stand to string the wire. She began walking the grid at that spot.
Rhyme asked, "What's that on the floor? Shiny."
"Looks like grease or oil," she said, her voice falling. "Some of the equipment ruptured in the fire. Or maybe there was a second arc here." She noted burned circles, a dozen of them, which seemed to be where sparks had slammed into the walls and surrounding equipment.
"Good."
"What?"
"His footprints'll come through nice and clear."
This was true. But, as she looked down at the greasy residue on the floor, she was thinking: Was oil, like metal and water, a good conductor too?
And where are the fucking batteries?
She did indeed find some good footprints near the window in which the perp had knocked a hole to feed the deadly wire outside and near where he'd bolted it to the Algonquin line.
"Could've been left by the workers," she said of the prints, "when they came in after the spark."
"We'll just have to find out, won't we?"
She or Ron Pulaski would take prints of the workers' footgear to compare with these, to eliminate them as suspects. Even if Justice For was ultimately responsible, there was no reason why they couldn't recruit an insider for their terrorist plans.