The Burning Wire (39 page)

"Richard Logan, do not move!" It was that police detective they'd just been talking about, Amelia Sachs. "Keep your hands in view. If you move your hands you will be shot."

Behind her were two other men. Logan took them to be police too. One was heavy and wearing a wrinkled blue suit. The other, skinnier, was in shirtsleeves, wearing black-framed glasses.

All three officers trained weapons on him.

But Logan's eyes were on Amelia Sachs, who seemed the most eager to shoot. He realized that Rhyme had asked the question about Sachs to alert them that he was ready to say the magic words and spring the trap.

I guess that's about it, then. . . .

But the consequence was that she would have heard Logan's comment about her, her inferior skills.

Still, when she stepped forward to cuff him, it was with utmost professionalism, gently almost. Then she eased him to the floor with minimal discomfort.

The heavy officer stepped forward and reached for the wires coiled around Rhyme.

"Gloves, please," said the criminalist calmly.

The big cop hesitated. Then pulled on latex gloves and removed the cables. He said into his radio, "It's clear up here. You can put the power back on."

A moment later lights filled the room and, surrounded by the clicks of the equipment returning to life and the diodes flickering red, green and white, Richard Logan, the Watchmaker, was read his rights.

Chapter 79

IT WAS TIME
for the heroics.

Not generally the bailiwick of inventors.

Charlie Sommers decided he had removed enough insulation from the lightweight cable so that he was ready to try for the short circuit.

In theory this should work.

The risk was that, in its desperation to get to the ground, the instant he moved it closer to the return, the massive voltage in the feeder line would arc to the cable then consume his body in a plasma spark. He was only ten feet above the concrete; Sommers had seen videos of arc flashes that were fifty feet in length.

But he'd waited long enough.

First step. Connect the cable to the main line.

Thinking of his wife, thinking of his children--and his
other
children: the inventions he'd fathered over the years--he leaned toward the hot wire and with a deep breath touched the lightweight cable to it, using his hands.

Nothing happened. So far, so good. His body and the wires were now at the same potential. In effect, Charlie Sommers was simply a portion of a 138,000v line.

He worked the bare section of the cable around the far side of the energized line and caught the end underneath. He twisted it so there was tight contact.

Gripping the insulated part of the lightweight cable, he eased back, in his unsure fire-hose swing, and stared at the place he'd decided to close the connection: a girder that rose to the ceiling but, more important for his purposes, descended deep into the earth.

To which all juice had a primal instinct to return.

The girder was about six feet away.

Charlie Sommers gave a faint laugh.

This was fucking ridiculous. The minute the exposed end of the other wire neared the metal beam, the current would anticipate the contact and lunge outward in a huge explosion of arc flash. Plasma, flame, molten metal drops flying at three thousand feet per second . . .

But he saw no other choice.

Now!

Cut its head off . . . .

He began to feed the cable to the metal bar.

Six feet, five, four . . .

"Hey there! Charlie? Charlie Sommers?"

He gasped. The end of the cable swung wildly but he reeled it in fast.

"Who's there?" Sommers blurted before realizing that it might be Andi Jessen's brother, who'd come to shoot him.

"It's Ron Pulaski. I'm that officer works with Detective Sachs."

"Yes, what?" Sommers gasped. "What're you doing here?"

"We've been trying to call you for a half hour."

"Get out of here, Officer. It's dangerous!"

"We couldn't get through. We called you right after you hung up speaking to Amelia and Lincoln."

Sommers steadied his voice. "I don't have my goddamn phone. Look, I'm shutting down the power here, in the whole area. It's the only way to stop him. There's going to be a huge--"

"He's already stopped."

"What?"

"Yessir, they sent me here to find you. To tell you that what they were saying on the phone was fake. They knew the killer was listening in and they couldn't tell you what they were really planning. We had to make him think we believed the attack was happening here. As soon as I left Lincoln's, I tried to call you. But we couldn't get through. Somebody said they saw you coming down here."

Jesus Lord in heaven.

Sommers stared at the cable dangling below him. The juice in the feeder cable could decide at any moment that it wanted to take a shortcut to get back home and Sommers would simply disappear.

Pulaski called, "Say, what exactly're you doing up there?"

Killing myself.

Sommers retracted the cable slowly and then he reached into the enclosure and began undoing the connection with the main line, expecting--no, positive--that at any moment he would hear, very, very briefly, the arc flash hum and bang as he died.

The process of unraveling the beast seemed to take forever.

"Anything I can do, sir?"

Yes, shut the hell up.

"Um, just stay back and give me a minute, Officer."

"Sure."

Finally, the cable came away from the feeder line and Sommers dropped it to the floor. Then he eased out of the fire hose sling, hung for a moment, and tumbled to the ground on top of the cable. He collapsed in pain from the fall but stood and tested for broken bones. He sensed there was none.

"What's that you were saying, sir?" Pulaski asked.

He'd been repeating a frantic mantra:
stay put, stay put, stay put. . . .

But he told the cop, "Nothing." Then he dusted off his slacks and looked around. He asked, "Hey, Officer?"

"Yessir?"

"By any chance you pass a restroom on your way down here?"

Chapter 80

"CHARLIE SOMMERS'S OKAY,"
Sachs called, slipping away her cell phone. "Ron just called."

Rhyme frowned. "I didn't know he
wasn't
okay."

"Seems he tried to play hero. He was going to shut down the power at the convention center. Ron found him in the basement with a wire and some tools. He was hanging from the ceiling."

"Doing what?"

"I don't know."

"What part of 'stay put' did he have trouble with?"

Sachs shrugged.

"You couldn't've just called him?"

"Didn't have his phone on him. Something about a hundred thousand volts."

Andi Jessen's brother was fine too, though filthy and hungry and furious. He'd been recovered from the back of Logan's white van parked in the alley behind Rhyme's townhouse. Logan had shared nothing with him and had kept him in the dark--in both senses. Randall Jessen had assumed he'd been kidnapped in some scheme to extort money from his wealthy CEO sister. Randall'd heard nothing of the attacks, and Logan's plan was apparently to electrocute him in Rhyme's basement, as if he'd accidentally touched a hot wire dismantling the switch he'd installed to kill Rhyme. He'd been reunited with his sister, who'd been briefed by Gary Noble about the situation.

Rhyme wondered if she'd respond to the fact that the target of her attacks in the press--the alternative energy world--had been behind the scheme.

Rhyme asked, "And Bob Cavanaugh? The Operations man?"

"McDaniel's guys got him. He was in his office. No resistance. Tons of business records on start-up alternative energy companies the conspirators planned to do deals with after they'd taken over Algonquin. The Bureau'll get the other names from his computer and phone records--if he doesn't cooperate."

A green cartel . . .

Rhyme now realized that Richard Logan, sitting cuffed and shackled in a chair between two uniformed patrolmen, was speaking to him. In a cool, eerily analytical voice, the killer repeated, "A setup? All fake. You knew all along."

"I knew." Rhyme regarded him carefully. Though he'd confirmed the name Richard Logan, it was impossible to think of him as that. To Rhyme he would always be the Watchmaker. The face was different, yes, after the plastic surgery, but the eyes were those of the same man who'd proved every bit as smart as Rhyme himself. Smarter even, on occasion. And unbridled by the trivia of law and conscience.

The shackles were sturdy and the cuffs tight but Lon Sellitto sat nearby anyway, keeping an eye on the man, as if the cop thought that Logan was using his considerable mental prowess to plan an escape.

But Rhyme believed not. The prisoner's darting eyes had taken in the room and the other officers and had concluded that there was nothing to be gained by resisting.

"So," Logan said evenly, "how did you do it?" He seemed genuinely curious.

As Sachs and Cooper logged and bagged the new evidence, Rhyme, with no small ego himself, was pleased to indulge him. "When our FBI agent told me that it was somebody else, not Galt, that jarred me out of my rut. You know the risk of making assumptions. . . . I'd been assuming all along that Galt was the perp. But once that idea got turned upside down, I started thinking about the whole"--Rhyme smiled at the fortuitous word that popped into his mind--"the whole
arc
of the crimes. Take the trap at the school: What was the point of trying to hurt only two or three officers? And with a noisy generator? It occurred to me that that'd be a good way to get some planted evidence inside the lab--and big enough to hide a microphone.

"I took the chance that the generator was bugged and that you were listening. So I started rambling about new theories involving Andi Jessen and her brother, which is where the evidence was obviously leading us. But at the same time I was typing out instructions for everybody in the lab. They were all reading over my shoulder. I had Mel--my associate--scan the generator for a bug . . . and there it was. Well, if you wanted the generator to be found, that meant that any evidence in it was planted. So whoever it pointed to was
not
involved in the crimes: Andi Jessen and her brother were innocent."

Logan was frowning. "But you
never
suspected her?"

"I did, yes. We thought Andi'd lied to us. You heard that on the microphone?"

"Yes, though I wasn't sure what you meant."

"She told Sachs that she got her skills from her father. As if she was hiding the fact that she'd been a lineman and could rig arc flashes. But if you think about what she said, she wasn't denying that she'd worked in the field but that she was simply saying her talent was mostly on the business side of the operation. . . . Well, if it wasn't Andi or her brother, then who? I kept going back over the evidence." A glance at the charts. "There were some items unaccounted for. The one that stuck in my mind was the spring."

"Spring? Yes, you mentioned that."

"We found a tiny hairspring at one of the scenes. Nearly invisible. We thought it could have been from a timer in some switchgear. But I decided if it could come from a timer, it could also be used in watchmaking. That put me in mind of you, of course."

"A hairspring?" Logan's face fell. "I always use a roller on my clothes"--he nodded to a rack of pet-hair rollers near an examination table--"to make sure I pick up any trace before I go out on a job. That must've fallen into my cuff. And you want to know something funny, Lincoln? It probably got there because I was putting away a lot of my old supplies and tools. What I told you before . . . I'd become fascinated with the idea of electronic timekeeping. That's what I was going to try next. I wanted to make the most perfect clock in the world. Even better than the government's atomic clock. But an electronic one."

Rhyme continued, "And then all the other pieces fell into place. My conclusion about the letters--that they were written by Galt under threat--worked if
you
were the one dictating them. The alternative jet fuel? It was being tested
mostly
in military jets--but that means it was also being tested in some private and commercial flights. I decided it wouldn't make sense for anybody to plan an attack at an airport or a military base; the security around the electrical systems would be too high. So where did that trace come from? The only aviation scenario that had come up recently didn't involve this case at all; it involved you--in Mexico. And we found a green fiber at one of the scenes . . . it was the exact shade of Mexican police uniforms. And it had aviation fuel in it."

"I left a fiber?" Angry with himself now. Furious.

"I supposed you picked it up from meeting with Arturo Diaz at the airport before you flew back to Philadelphia to kidnap Randall Jessen and drive to New York."

Logan could only sigh, confirming Rhyme's theory.

"Well, that was my theory, that you were involved. But it was purely speculation--until I realized I had the answer right in front of me. The definitive answer."

"What do you mean?"

"The DNA. We had the analysis of the blood we found on the access door near the first substation attack. But I never ran it through CODIS--the DNA database. Why should we? We
knew
Galt's identity."

This was the final check. Not long ago Rhyme had typed instructions to Cooper--he couldn't tell him orally because of the bug in the generator--to have the DNA lab send a copy of the sample to CODIS. "We had a sample of your DNA from your assignment in New York a few years ago. I was reading the confirmation that they were the same when you showed up. I scrambled to switch screens pretty quickly."

Logan's face tightened with anger at himself. "Yes, yes . . . In the substation, at the access door, I cut my finger on a burr of metal. I wiped the blood off as best I could but I was worried that you'd find it. It's why I rigged the battery to blow and burn off the DNA."

"Locard's principle," Rhyme said, citing the early-twentieth-century criminologist. He quoted, " 'In every crime there is an exchange'--"

Logan finished, "--'between criminal and victim or criminal and the site of the crime. It may be very difficult to find, but the connection exists. And it is the obligation of every crime scene professional to find that one common bit of evidence that will lead to the perpetrator's identity, if not his doorstep.' "

Rhyme couldn't help but laugh. That particular quotation was his own, a paraphrase of Locard's. It had appeared in an article about forensics he'd written only two or three months ago. Richard Logan had apparently been doing his homework too.

Or was it more than research?

That's why I took the job. . . . I needed to get close to you. . . .

Logan said, "You're not only a good criminalist, you're a good actor. You had me fooled."

"You've done some of that yourself now, haven't you?"

The men's eyes met and their gaze held steady. Then Sellitto's phone rang and he answered, had a brief conversation and hung up. "Transport's here."

Three officers arrived in the doorway, two uniforms and a brown-haired detective in blue jeans, blue shirt and tan sports coat. He had an easy-going smile, which was tempered by the fact he wore two very large automatic pistols, one on each hip.

"Hey, Roland," Amelia Sachs said, smiling.

Rhyme offered, "Haven't seen you for a while."

"Howdy. Well, you got yourself some catch here." Roland Bell was a transplant from a sheriff's office in North Carolina. He'd been a detective on the NYPD for some years but had yet to lose the Southern Mid-Atlantic twang. His specialty was protecting witnesses and making sure suspects didn't escape. There was nobody better at the job. Rhyme was pleased that he'd be the one shepherding the Watchmaker down to detention. "He'll be in good hands."

At a nod from Bell, the patrolmen helped Logan to his feet. Bell checked the shackles and cuffs and then searched the man himself. He nodded and they headed for the door. The Watchmaker turned back, saying coyly, "I'll see you again, Lincoln."

"I know you will. I'm looking forward to it."

The suspect's smile was replaced by a perplexed look.

Rhyme continued, "I'll be the expert forensic witness at your trial."

"Maybe there. Maybe someplace else." The man glanced at the Breguet. "Don't forget to keep it wound."

And with that he was gone.