Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

Now, ironically, his first business trip after her death had brought him to New York, all expenses paid.

Happy to be here.

Sad Ruth couldn't be.

He was having lunch, sitting in the elegant, muted Battery Park Hotel dining room, chatting with a few of the other men who were here for the construction finance meeting, sipping a beer.

Businessman talk. Wall Street, team sports. Some individual sports talk too, but only golf. Nobody ever talked about tennis, which was Vetter's game. Sure, Federer, Nadal… but tennis wasn't a war story sport. The topic of women didn't much enter into the discussion; these men were all of an age.

Vetter looked around him, through the panoramic windows, and worked on his impression of New York because his secretary and associates back home would want to know what he thought. So far: really busy, really rich, really loud, really gray-even though the sky was cloudless. Like the sun knew that New Yorkers didn't have much use for light.

Mixed feelings…

Part of which was a little guilt about enjoying himself. He was going to see Wicked, to see if it stacked up to the Phoenix version, and probably Billy Elliott, to see if it stacked up to the trailers of the movie. He was going to have dinner in Chinatown with two of the bankers he'd met that morning, one based here and one from Santa Fe.

Maybe there was a hint of infidelity about the whole enjoyment thing.

Of course, Ruth wouldn't've minded.

But still.

Vetter also had to admit he was feeling a little out of his element here. His company did general construction, specializing in the basics: foundations, driveways, platforms, walkways, nothing sexy, but necessary and oh-so-profitable. His outfit was good, prompt and ethical… in a business where those qualities were not always fully unfurled. But it was small; the other companies that were part of the joint venture were bigger players. They were more savvy about business and regulatory and legislative matters than he was.

The conversation at the lunch table kept slipping from the Diamondbacks and the Mets to collateral, interest rates and high-tech systems that left Vetter confused. He found himself looking out the windows again at a large construction site next to the hotel, some big office building or apartment going up.

As he watched, one worker in particular caught his eye. The man was in a different outfit-dark blue overalls and yellow hard hat-and was carrying a roll of wire or cable over his shoulder. He emerged from a manhole near the back of the job site and stood, looking around, blinking. He pulled out a mobile phone and placed a call. Then he snapped it closed and wandered through the site and, instead of leaving, walked toward the building next door to the construction. He looked at ease, walking with a bounce in his step. Obviously he was enjoying whatever he was doing.

It was all so normal. That guy in the blue could have been Vetter thirty years ago. He could have been any one of Vetter's employees now.

The businessman began to relax. The scene made him feel a lot more at home-watching the guy in the blue uniform and the others in their Carhartt jackets and overalls, carrying tools and supplies, joking with one another. He thought of his own company and the people he worked with, who were like family. The older white guys, quiet and skinny and sunburned all of them, looking like they'd been born mixing concrete, and the newer workers, Latino, who chatted up a storm and worked with more precision and pride.

It told Vetter that maybe New York and the people he was doing this deal with were in many ways similar to his world and those who inhabited it.

Relax.

Then his eyes followed the man in the blue overalls and yellow hard hat as he disappeared into a building across from the construction site. It was a school. Sam Vetter noted some signs in the window.

Okay, he admitted, with a laugh, maybe New York is a little different from Scottsdale, after all.

RHYME CONTINUED TO look over the evidence, trying desperately to find, in the seemingly unrelated bits of metal and plastic and dust that had been collected at the scenes, some connection to spark his imagination and help Sachs figure out where exactly Galt had rigged the deadly cable to the water line running through Morningside Heights and Harlem.

If that's in fact what he'd done.

Spark his imagination… Bad choice of word, he decided.

Sachs continued to search Morningside Park, looking for the spliced wire running from the transmission cable to the pipes. He knew she'd be uneasy-there was no way to find the wire except to get close to it, to find where it had been attached to the water pipes. He recalled the tone of her voice, her hollow eyes as she'd described the shrapnel from the arc flash yesterday, peppering Luis Martin's body.

There were dozens of uniformed officers from the closest precinct, clearing Morningside Park and the buildings in the vicinity of the water pipe project. But couldn't the electricity follow a cast-iron pipe anywhere? Couldn't it produce an arc flash in a kitchen a mile away?

In his own kitchen, where Thom was now standing at the sink?

Rhyme glanced at the clock on his computer screen. If they didn't find the line in sixty minutes they'd have their answer.

Sachs called back. "Nothing, Rhyme. Maybe I'm wrong. And I was thinking at some point the line has to cross the subway. What if he's rigged it to hit a car? I'll have to search there too."

"We're still on the horn with Algonquin, trying to narrow it down, Sachs. I'll call you back." He shouted to Mel Cooper, "Anything?"

The tech was speaking with a supervisor in the Algonquin control center. Following Andi Jessen's orders, he and his staff were trying to find if there had been any voltage fluctuation in specific parts of the line. This might be possible to detect, since sensors were spaced every few hundred feet to alert them if there were problems with insulation or degradation in the electric transmission line itself. There was a chance they could pinpoint where Galt had tapped into the line to run his deadly cable to the surface.

But from Cooper: "Nothing. Sorry."

Rhyme closed his eyes briefly. The headache he'd denied earlier had grown in intensity. He wondered if pain was throbbing elsewhere. There was always that concern with quadriplegia. Without pain, you never know what the rebellious body's up to. A tree falls in the forest, of course it makes a sound, even if nobody's there. But does pain exist if you don't perceive it?

These thoughts left a morbid flavor, Rhyme realized. And he understood too that he'd been having similar ones lately. He wasn't sure why. But he couldn't shake them.

And, even stranger, unlike his jousting with Thom yesterday at this same time of day, he didn't want any scotch. Was nearly repulsed by the idea.

This bothered him more than the headache.

His eyes scanned the evidence charts but they skipped over the words as if they were in a foreign language he'd studied in school and hadn't used for years. Then they settled on the chart again, tracing the flow of juice from power generation to household. In decreasing voltages.

One hundred and thirty-eight thousand volts…

Rhyme asked Mel Cooper to call Sommers at Algonquin.

"Special Projects."

"Charlie Sommers?"

"That's right."