The Burning Wire by Jeffery Deaver

headquarters to see Rhyme in person. He occupied a special place in the hierarchy of the NYPD; there had been a recent turnover and the head of forensics had gone to Miami–Dade County. Several senior detectives were now running the operation until a permanent head could be appointed. There was even some talk of hiring Rhyme back to run Crime Scene once more.
    When the deputy commissioner had called about this, Rhyme had pointed out that he might have a few problems with the JST—the NYPD job standard test portion of the requirements. The physical fitness exam required candidates to complete a timed obstacle course: sprint to a six-foot-high barrier and jump over it, restrain a fake bad guy, race up stairs, drag a 176-pound mannequin to safety and pull the trigger of a weapon sixteen times with one’s dominant hand, fifteen with the other.
    Rhyme demurred, explaining to the NYPD official who came to see him that he could never pass the test. He could probably clear only a five-foot barrier. But he was flattered by the interest.
    Sachs returned downstairs, wearing jeans and a light blue sweater, tucked in, her hair washed and lightly damp, pulled back into a ponytail once more, bound with a black rubber band.
    At that moment Thom went to answer the doorbell and another figure stepped into the doorway.
    The slim man, whose retiring demeanor suggested he was a middle-aged accountant or shoe salesman,was Mel Cooper, in Rhyme’s opinion one of the best forensic lab people in the country. With degrees in math, physics and organic chemistry, and a senior official in both the International Association for Identification and International Association of Blood Pattern Analysis, he was constantly in demand at Crime Scene headquarters. But, since Rhyme was responsible for kidnapping the tech from a job in upstate New York years ago and getting him to the NYPD, it was understood that Cooper would drop what he was doing and head to Manhattan if Rhyme and Sellitto were running a case and they wanted him.
    “Mel, glad you were available.”
    “Hm. Available . . . Didn’t you call my lieutenant and threaten him with all sorts of terrible things if he didn’t release me from the Hanover-Sterns case?”
    “I did it for you, Mel. You were being wasted on insider trading.”
    “And I thank you for the reprieve.”
    Cooper nodded a greeting to those in the room, knuckled his Harry Potter glasses up on his nose and walked across the lab to the examination table on silent, brown Hush Puppies shoes. Though by appearances the least athletic man Rhyme had ever seen, apart from himself, of course, Mel Cooper nonetheless moved with the grace of a soccer player, and Rhyme was reminded that he was a champion ballroom dancer.
    “Let’s hear the details,” Rhyme said, turning to Sachs.
    She flipped through her notes and explained what the power company field executive had told her.
    “Algonquin Consolidated Power provides electricity—they call it ‘juice’—for most of the area. Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey.”
    “That’s the smokestacks on the East River?”
    “That’s right,” she said to Cooper. “Their headquarters is there and they have a steam and electricity generation plant. Now, what the Algonquin supervisor said was that the UNSUB could’ve broken into the substation at any time in the last thirty-six hours to rig the wire. The substations are generally unmanned. A little after eleven this morning he, or they, got into the Algonquin computers, kept shutting down substations around the area and rerouted all that electricity through the substation on Fifty-seven. When voltage builds up to a certain point, it has to complete a circuit. You can’t stop it. It either jumps to another wire or to something that’s grounded. Normally the circuit breakers in the substation would pop but the perp had reset them to take ten times the load, so it was sitting in that”—she pointed to the cable—“waiting to