The Burning Wire (Lincoln Rhyme 9)

Rhyme hadn't heard that part of the conversation during the weekend out of town. It must've occurred on one of the beach walks.

Sachs called, "No hurry."

After they disconnected, Rhyme couldn't help but look at her with a raised eyebrow. "You're taking up cooking?"

"Pammy's going to teach me." She shrugged. "How hard can it be? I figure it's just like rebuilding a carburetor, only with perishable parts."

Rhyme gazed at the chart. "Tephra . . . So maybe our perp's been to Seattle or Portland recently or to Hawaii. I doubt that much trace would travel very well, though. I'm betting he was in or near a museum, school, geologic exhibit of some kind. Do they use volcanic ash in any kind of business? Maybe polishing stones. Like Carborundum."

Cooper said, "This's too varied and irregular to be milled commercially. Too soft too, I'd think."

"Hm. How about jewelry? Do they make jewelry out of lava?"

None of them had ever heard of that, though, and Rhyme concluded that the source had to be an exhibit or display that the perp had attended or that was near where he lived or where a future target was. "Mel, have somebody in Queens start calling--check out any exhibits, traveling or permanent displays in the area that have anything to do with volcanoes or lava. Manhattan first." He gazed at the access door, wrapped in plastic. "Now, let's look at what Amelia went swimming with. Your turn at bat, Rookie. Make us proud."

Chapter 15

CLEANING HIS LATEX gloves with the pet-hair roller--and drawing an approving look from Rhyme--the young officer hefted the access door and surrounding frame, still connected. The door was about eighteen inches square and the frame added another two or so inches. It was painted dark gray.

Sachs was right. It was a tight fit. The UNSUB very likely would have sloughed off something from his body as he entered the substation.

The door opened with four small turn latches on both sides. They would have been awkward to loosen with a gloved hand, so there was a chance he'd used bare fingers, especially since he'd planned on blowing up the door with the battery bomb and destroying evidence.

Fingerprints fell into one of three categories. Visible (the sort left by a bloody thumb on a white wall), impressible (left in pliable material, like plastic explosive), and latent (hidden to the unaided eye). There were dozens of good ways to raise latent prints but one of the best, on metal surfaces, was simply to use store-bought Super Glue, cyanoacrylate. The object would be put in an airtight enclosure with a container of the glue, which would then be heated until it turned gaseous. The vapors would bond with

any number of substances left by the finger--amino and lactic acids, glucose, potassium and carbon trioxide--and the resulting reaction created a visible print.

The process could work miracles, raising prints that were completely invisible before.

Except not in this case.

"Nothing," Pulaski said, discouraged, peering at the access door through a very Sherlock Holmesian magnifier. "Only glove smudges."

"Not surprising. He's been fairly careful so far. Well, collect trace from the inside of the frame, where he made contact."

Pulaski did this, using a soft brush over the newsprint examination sheets and taking swabs. He placed whatever he found--to Rhyme it seemed like very little--into bags and organized them for Cooper to analyze.

Sellitto took a call and then said, "Hold on. You're being speakered."

"Hello?" came the voice.

Rhyme glanced at Sellitto. "Who?" he whispered.

"Szarnek."

The NYPD Computer Crimes expert.

"What do you have for us, Rodney?"

Rock music clattered around in the background. "I can almost guarantee that whoever played with the Algonquin servers had the pass codes up front. In fact, I will guarantee that. First of all, we found no evidence of any attempted intrusion. No brute force attack. No shredded code of rootkits, suspicious drivers or kernel modules or--"

"Just the bottom line, you don't mind."

"Okay, what I'm saying is we looked at every port . . ." He hesitated at Rhyme's sigh. "Ah, bottom line. It was and wasn't an inside job."

"Which means?" Rhyme grumbled.

"The attack was from outside Algonquin's physical building."