The Burning Wire (18 page)

Chapter 29

PLENTY OF METAL.
Metal everywhere.

Ron Pulaski glanced at his watch: eleven a.m. Two hours until another attack.

Metal . . . wonderfully conductive, and possibly connected to wires that ran to one of the invisible sources of juice in the bowels of the lousy apartment building he was standing in.

Armed with a warrant, the FBI and ESU teams had found--to everyone's disappointment but no one's surprise--that Galt wasn't there. Pulaski then shooed the officers out. And was now surveying the dim apartment, the basement unit in an old decrepit brownstone on the Lower East Side. He and three tactical officers had cleared the place--only the four of them, as Rhyme had ordered, to minimize contamination of the scene.

The team was now outside and Pulaski was examining the small place by himself. And seeing a lot of metal that could be rigged, the way the battery was rigged in the substation--the trap that had nearly killed Amelia.

Also picturing the metal disks on the sidewalk, seeing the scars in the concrete and in the body of poor young Luis Martin. And he recalled something else too, something even more troubling: Amelia Sachs's eyes looking spooked. Which they never did. If this electricity crap could scare her . . .

Last night, after his wife, Jenny, had gone to bed, Ron Pulaski went online to learn what he could about electricity. If you understand something, Lincoln Rhyme had told him, you fear it less. Knowledge is control. Except with electricity, with power, with juice, that wasn't quite the case. The more he learned, the more uneasy he grew. He could grasp the basic concept but he kept coming back to the fact it was so damn invisible. You never knew exactly where it was. Like a poisonous snake in a dark room.

He then shook himself out of these thoughts. Lincoln Rhyme had entrusted the scene to him. So get to work. On the drive here, he'd called in and asked if Rhyme wanted him to hook up via radio and video and walk him through the scene like he sometimes did with Amelia.

Rhyme had said, "I'm busy, Rookie. If you can't run a scene by now there's no damn hope for you."

Click.

Which to most people would've been an insult, but it put a big grin on Pulaski's face and he wanted to call his twin brother, a uniform down in the Sixth Precinct, and tell him what had happened. He didn't, of course; he'd save that for when they went out for beers this weekend.

And so, solo, he started the search, pulling on the latex gloves.

Galt's apartment was a cheesy, depressing place, clearly the home of a bachelor who cared zero about his environment. Dark, small, musty. Food half fresh and half old, some of it
way
old. Clothes piled up. The immediate search, as Rhyme had impressed on him, was not to gather evidence for trial--though he "better not fuck up the chain of custody cards"--but to find out where Galt might be going to attack again and what, if any, connection he had with Rahman and Justice For . . .

Presently he was searching fast through the unsteady, scabby desk and the battered filing cabinets and boxes for references to motels or hotels, other apartments, friends, vacation houses.

A map with a big red X and a note:
Attack here!

But of course there wasn't anything that obvious. In fact, there was very little helpful at all. No address books, notes, letters. The call log, in and out, on the phone had been wiped and, hitting
REDIAL,
he heard the electronic voice ask what city and state he needed a number for. Galt had taken his laptop with him and there was no other computer here.

Pulaski found sheets of paper and envelopes similar to what had been used for the demand note. A dozen pens too. He collected these and bagged them.

When he found nothing else helpful he began walking the grid, laying the numbers, photographing. And collecting samples of trace.

He moved as quickly as he could, though, as often, wrestling with the fear, which was always with him. Afraid that he'd get hurt again, which made him timid and want to pull back. But that in turn led to another fear: that if he didn't do 100 percent, he wouldn't live up to expectations. He'd disappoint his wife, his brother, Amelia Sachs.

Disappoint Lincoln Rhyme.

But it was so hard to shake the fear.

His hands started to quiver, breath came fast, and he jumped at the sound of a creak.

Calming, remembering his wife's comforting voice whispering, "You're okay, you're okay, you're okay . . ."

He started again. He located a back closet and was about to open it. But he noted the metal handle. He was on linoleum but he didn't know if that was safe enough. He was too spooked to open the door even with the CS latex gloves. He picked up a rubber dish mat and used that to grip the knob. He opened the door.

And inside was proof positive that Ray Galt was the perp: a hacksaw with a broken blade. The bolt cutter too. He knew his job here was only to walk the grid and collect evidence but he couldn't help pulling a small magnifier from his pocket and looking over the tool, noting that it had a notch on the blade that could have left the distinctive mark on the grating bar he'd collected at the substation scene near the bus stop. He bagged and tagged them. In another small cabinet he discovered a pair of Albertson-Fenwick boots, size 11.

His phone trilled, startling him. It was Lincoln Rhyme on caller ID. Pulaski answered at once. "Lincoln, I--"

"You find anything about hidey-holes, Rookie? Vehicles he might've rented? Friends he might be staying with? Anything at all about target locations?"

"No, he's kind of sanitized the place. I found the tools and boots, though. It's definitely him."

"I want
locations. Addresses.
"

"Yessir, I--"

Click.

Pulaski snapped the phone shut and carefully bagged the evidence he'd collected so far. Then he went through the entire apartment twice, including the refrigerator, the freezer, all the closets. Even food cartons large enough to hide something.

Nothing . . .

Now the fear was replaced by frustration. He'd found evidence that Galt was the attacker but nothing else about him. Where he might be, what his target was. Then his eyes settled on the desk again. He was looking at a cheap computer printer. On the top a yellow light was blinking. He approached it. The message was:
Clear jam.

What had Galt been printing?

The cop carefully opened the lid and peered into the guts of the machine. He could see the tangle of paper.

He could also see a sign that warned,
Danger! Electric Shock Risk! Unplug before clearing jam or servicing!

Presumably there might be other pages in the queue, something that could be helpful. Maybe even key. But if he unplugged the unit, the memory would dump the remaining pages of the job.

He started to reach in carefully. Then he pictured the molten bits of metal again.

Five thousand degrees . . .

A glance at his watch.

Shit. Amelia had told him not to go near electricity with anything metallic on. He'd forgotten about it. Goddamn head injury! Why couldn't he think straighter? He pulled the watch off. Put it in his pocket. Jesus our Lord, what good is that going to do? He put the Seiko on the desk, far away from the printer.

One more attempt, but the fear got to him again. He was furious with himself for hesitating.

"Shit," he muttered, and returned to the kitchen. He found some bulky pink Playtex gloves. He pulled them on and, looking around to make sure no FBI agents or ESU cops were peering in at the ridiculous sight, walked back to the printer.

He opened the evidence collection kit and selected the best tool to clear the jam and get the printer working again: tweezers. They were, of course, metal ones, just the ticket to make a nice, solid connection to any exposed electric wires Galt had rigged inside the printer.

He glanced at his watch, six feet away. Less than an hour and a half until the next attack.

Ron Pulaski leaned forward and eased the tweezers between two very thick wires.

Chapter 30

NEWS STATIONS WERE
broadcasting Galt's picture, former girlfriends were being interviewed, as was his bowling team and his oncologist. But there were no leads. He'd gone underground.

Mel Cooper's geology expert at Queens CS had found twenty-one exhibits in the New York metropolitan area that might involve volcanic ash, including an artist in Queens who was using lava rock to make sculpture.

Cooper muttered, "Twenty thousand dollars for something the size of a watermelon. Which is what it looks like, by the way."

Rhyme nodded absently and listened to McDaniel, now back at Federal Plaza, explain on speakerphone that Galt's mother hadn't heard from him for a few days. But that wasn't unusual. He'd been upset lately because he'd been sick. Rhyme asked, "You get a Title Three on them?"

The agent explained testily that the magistrate hadn't been persuaded to issue a wiretap on Galt's family members.

"But we've got a pen." A pen register phone tap wouldn't allow agents to listen to the conversation but would reveal the numbers of anyone who called them and of anybody they phoned. Those could then be traced.

Impatient, Rhyme had contacted Pulaski again, who'd responded immediately and with a shaking voice, saying the buzzing phone had scared the "you know what out of me."

The young officer told Rhyme he was extracting information from Raymond Galt's computer printer.

"Jesus, Rookie, don't do that yourself."

"It's okay, I'm standing on a rubber mat."

"I don't mean that. Only let experts go through a computer. There could be data-wipe programs--"

"No, no, there's no computer. Just the printer. It's jammed and I'm--"

"Nothing about addresses, locations of the next attack?"

"No."

"Call the minute, call the
second
you find something."

"I--"

Click.

The joint task force had had little luck in canvassing people on Fifty-seventh Street and in Ray Galt's neighborhood. The perp--no longer an UNSUB--had gone underground. Galt's mobile was "dead": The battery had been removed so it couldn't be traced, his service provider reported.

Sachs was on her own phone, head down, listening. She thanked the caller and disconnected. "That was Bernie Wahl again. He said he'd talked to people in Galt's department--New York Emergency Maintenance--and everybody said he was a loner. He didn't socialize. Nobody regularly had lunch with him. He liked the solitude of working on the lines."

Rhyme nodded at this information. He then told the FBI agent about the sources for the lava. "We've found twenty-one locations. We're--"

"Twenty-two," Cooper called, on the phone with the CS woman in Queens. "Brooklyn art gallery. On Henry Street."

McDaniel sighed. "That many?"

"Afraid so." Then Rhyme said, "We should let Fred know."

McDaniel didn't respond.

"Fred Dellray."
Your
employee, Rhyme added silently. "He should tell his CI about Galt."

"Right. Hold on. I'll conference him in."

There were some clicks and a few heartbeats of silence. Then they heard, " 'Lo? This's Dellray."

"Fred, Tucker here. With Lincoln. On conference. We've got a suspect."

"Who?"

McDaniel glanced at Rhyme, who explained about Ray Galt. "We don't have a motive, but it's pointing to him."

"You found him?"

"No. He's MIA. We've got a team at his apartment."

"The deadline's still a go?"

McDaniel said, "We have no reason to think otherwise. You found
anything,
Fred?"

"My CI's got some good leads. I'm waiting to hear."

"Anything you can share?" the ASAC asked pointedly.

"Not at this point. I'm meeting him at three. He tells me he's got something. I'll call him and give him Galt's name. Maybe that'll speed things up."

They disconnected. Only a moment later Rhyme's phone rang again. "Is this Detective Rhyme?" a woman asked.

"Yes. That's me."

"It's Andi Jessen. Algonquin Consolidated."

McDaniel identified himself, then: "Have you heard anything more from him?"

"No, but there's a situation I have to tell you about." Her husky, urgent voice got Rhyme's full attention.

"Go ahead."

"Like I told you, we changed the computer codes. So he couldn't repeat what happened yesterday."

"I remember."

"And I ordered security around all the substations. Twenty-four/seven. But about fifteen minutes ago a fire started in one of our Uptown substations. One in Harlem."

"Arson?" Rhyme asked.

"That's right. The guards were in front. It looks like somebody threw a firebomb through the back window. Or something. The fire's been extinguished but it caused a problem. Destroyed the switchgear. That means we can't manually take that substation offline. It's a runaway. There's no way to stop the electricity flowing through the transmission lines without shutting down the entire grid."

Rhyme sensed she was concerned but he didn't grasp the implications. He asked her to clarify.

She said, "I think he's done something that's pretty crazy--he cut directly into an area transmission line running from the substation that burned. That's nearly a hundred and fifty thousand volts."

"How could he do it?" Rhyme asked. "I thought he used the substation yesterday because it was too dangerous to splice into a main line."

"True, but, I don't know, maybe he's developed some kind of remote switchgear to let him rig a splice, then activate it later."

McDaniel asked, "Any idea where?"

"The line I'm thinking of is about three-quarters of a mile long. It runs under Central and West Harlem to the river."

"And you absolutely can't shut it down?"

"Not until the switchgear's repaired in the burned substation. That'll take a few hours."

"And this arc flash could be as bad as yesterday's?" Rhyme asked.

"At least. Yes."

"Okay, we'll check it out."

"Detective Rhyme? Tucker?" Her voice was less brittle than earlier.

It was the FBI agent who said, "Yes?"

"I'm sorry. I think I was being difficult yesterday. But I honestly didn't believe that one of my employees would do this."

"I understand," McDaniel said. "At least we've got the name now. If we're lucky we'll stop him before more people get hurt."

As they disconnected, Rhyme was shouting, "Mel, you get that? Uptown? Morningside Heights, Harlem. Museum, sculptor, whatever. Now, find me a possible target!" Rhyme then called the temporary head of the Crime Scene Unit in Queens--the man with his former job--and asked him to send a team to the substation closed because of the arson. "And have them bring back whatever they find, stat!"

"Got a possibility!" Cooper called, tilting his head away from the phone. "Columbia University. One of the biggest lava and igneous rock collections in the country."

Rhyme turned to Sachs. She nodded. "I can be there in ten minutes."

They were both glancing at the digital clock on Rhyme's computer screen.

The time was 11:29.