The Steel Kiss

“Sachs, you okay?” Rhyme asked. She’d refused a trip to the emergency room and remained at the scorched site to excavate and to walk the grid, as soon as the fire department gave the all-clear, while Rhyme, Whitmore and Thom had returned to his town house here.

“Little smoke. Nothing.” More coughing. She handed the crate to Cooper, who examined the bags.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

He stepped to the chromatograph to begin running the analysis. Sachs, wiping her eyes, was looking over at Juliette Archer. Rhyme realized they’d never met. He introduced them.

Archer said, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Sachs nodded a greeting, rather than offering a hand, of course. “You’re the intern Lincoln mentioned was going to be helping out.”

Rhyme supposed he’d never mentioned that Archer was in wheelchair. In fact, he believed he’d never told Sachs anything about his student, even the name or sex.

Sachs looked briefly at Rhyme, a cryptic glance, perhaps chiding, perhaps not. And then to Archer: “Nice to meet you.”

Whitmore disconnected from one, then another, call, “Detective Sachs. You sure you’re all right?”

“Nothing, really.”

The lawyer said, “Never thought when I got a call about taking on a personal injury lawsuit, it would turn out like this.”

Rhyme said to Sachs, “So your case and our case, they’re one and the same—often misstated as one in the same, by the way.”

From his perch near the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, Mel Cooper said, “I don’t quite follow what’s going on.”

Rhyme explained about Unsub 40’s reading Todd Williams’s blog and deciding to tap him for help in hacking a DataWise controller to turn it into a weapon. “He says, we can guess, he wants to help Williams expose the dangers of these things, down with digital society, capitalism, bullshit like that.” Rhyme nodded to the blog post, still on one of the monitors. “Williams teaches the unsub how to hack the system and the unsub kills him. He’s expendable.”

Archer added, “He’s also a liability. A news story about the escalator accident might mention the controller in the press. Williams would know who was behind it.”

Rhyme nodded and continued, “Amelia is after him in Brooklyn and follows him into the mall, where he’s going to kill his first victim.”

Archer asked, “How do we know it’s his first victim?”

A reasonable question. But Rhyme said, “Williams was killed just a few weeks ago and I don’t recall any suspicious product-related deaths in the news. We may find more, but for now let’s assume the escalator was the first. The question is, was it a one-off? Or does he have more planned?”

“And why?” the lawyer asked. “What’s his motive? Using a controller to kill—it has to be a lot of trouble.”

Rhyme added, “And it’s a lot riskier,” at the same time as Archer said, “And he’s more at risk.” The criminalist grunted a laugh. “Well, we don’t know why and we don’t particularly care. When we catch him, we can ask. When the hell is the computer going to be ready?”

“Ron said it should be within the hour.”

“And where the hell is the rookie?” Rhyme muttered. “That other case? Gutiérrez, I think he mentioned.”

“I think so.”

“Was Gutiérrez the killer or killee?”

Sachs said, “Perp. I don’t know why it’s heated up.”

“Well, we’ll make do… ”

Which brought Sachs’s attention to bear on Rhyme.

“Do you mean that?”

“What?” Not understanding at all what she was getting at.

“ ‘We’ll make do.’ Are you going to help us? It’s criminal now.”

“Of course I will.”

A faint smile on her face.

Rhyme said, “I don’t have any choice. We get the unsub, then Sandy Frommer can sue him for wrongful death.”

Rhyme recalled what Whitmore had said about intervening causes. The controller itself wasn’t the cause of Greg Frommer’s death; it was Unsub 40’s hacking that had killed him. It was like someone’s cutting the brake lines of a car, killing the driver. The car manufacturer wasn’t liable.

A look at the lawyer. “Sandy will be able to sue the unsub, right?”

“Of course. The O. J. Simpson scenario. If we’re lucky this individual—your unsub—has assets.”

“I’m not un-retiring, Sachs. But our paths coincide for a while.”

The smile faded. “Sure.”

Mel Cooper tested the evidence Sachs had found. He asked, “Site of origin?”

“Right.”

Arson produces very distinct patterns as flames start and spread. It’s at the origin site that investigators can expect to find the best evidence about the perp.

He read from the GC/MS monitor. “Traces of wax, low-octane gasoline—not enough to link it to a particular maker—and cotton, plastic, matches.”

“Candle bomb.”

“Right.”

A simple improvised explosive device can be made from a jug of gasoline, using a candle as a fuse.

Cooper confirmed that the trace was so minimal he couldn’t source any of the other ingredients in the unsub’s IED. As Rhyme had suspected.

Sachs got another call, coughed a bit before taking it. “Hello?” Nodding, listening. “Thanks.”

It wasn’t good news, Rhyme could tell.