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“Jesus,” Sellitto muttered. “Does it take much?”
“No, a few drops’ll kill you. There’s no antidote. And you can’t wash it off. All you can do is try to treat the symptoms. Massive pain and infection.” He called to Cooper, “Anything else in addition to the acid in the sample?”
“Fragments and sludge of industrial concrete, sand, steel, a little iron, all in states suggesting they were dissolved by the acid.”
“What’s the concentration?” Rhyme asked.
“Thirty-two percent.”
“That’s a mistake. Run it again or recalibrate the equipment.”
“Done all of the above. Thirty-two percent.”
The highest concentration that Rhyme had ever heard of was twenty, and that was just for shipment and storage—in very specialized containers. The product was then greatly diluted for sale to end users. On the market, it was, at the most, two to four percent. A concentration that Sachs had collected at the scene would quickly eat through anything but the very few materials impervious to it, and gas released when it was exposed to air could kill within minutes.
She had been very fortunate to have missed any more exposure in the tunnel beneath the jobsite.
He glanced her way. She was only half listening. She was inhaling more oxygen and staring at some pictures of upturned rebar rods. They were rusty, but two were darker. Dried blood.
The operator must have landed on these when he fell from the sky.
Rhyme nodded at another one of her pictures on the monitor, depicting the counterweight trolley. The acid delivery device was a smoking discolored blob.
“Damn it. He got it up theresomehow. The top of the crane.We’ll have to work on that. Once it was in place, how was it activated?”
“The detonator,” Cooper said, holding up another clear plastic container. Inside was what appeared to be a small board of solid-state electronics, also deformed and charred by the acid. He was speaking with the respirator on, through the attached mike.
“Small charge, probably just pulled open a half-dozen big-caliber rounds for the gunpowder.”
“Antenna?”
“Hard to say.”
Rhyme grumbled, “Ofcourseit’s hard to say. It’s melted into oblivion. But if you had toguess.”
“Not remote. Timed.”
As Rhyme had figured. “Is it off the shelf?”
“No. Homemade.”
So, impossible to trace.
“How much acid?”
Cooper shrugged. “At this concentration, two liters. Maybe three.”
Sachs coughed, a snapping, painful sound. She discreetly lifted a tissue to her mouth once more. A fast glance. With yet another bout of irritation, she stuffed the wad away in her jeans pocket. A hit of oxygen, then she said, “He knew what he was doing. He’d have to calculate how much weight he’d need to remove from the counterweights to make the crane unstable. There’s this thing the foreman was telling me about. Moment. It’s—”
Rhyme said, “Moment equals force times distance. Expressed in units of newton-meters.”
Sellitto was nodding. “So he’s got a degree in engineering. Put that on the chart.”
“No,” Rhyme said dryly. “Put down that he stayed awake in high school science class. Everybody knows that formula.”
Lon Sellitto rolled his eyes. “No, noteverybody… But thereisone thing we do know.”
Rhyme and Sachs looked toward the detective.
