Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

"Stop!" she shouted to the officer reaching forward to help the man. "It's a trap!"

The patrolman froze.

She remembered what Sommers had told her about wounds and blood making the body much less resistant to electricity.

Then, without touching the worker, she walked around behind him.

His hands were bound, yes. But not with tape or rope-with bare copper wire. Which had been spliced into one of the lines on the wall. She grabbed Sommers's voltage detector and aimed it at the wire wrapped around Barzan's flesh.

The meter jumped off the scale at 10,000v. Had the patrolman touched him, the juice would have streaked through him, through the officer and into the ground, killing them instantly.

Sachs stepped back and turned up the volume on her radio to call Nancy Simpson and have her find Bob Cavanaugh and tell the operations director he needed to cut the head off another snake.

RON PULASKI HAD managed to nurse Ray Galt's damaged computer printer back to life. And he was grabbing the hot sheets of paper as they eased into the output tray.

The young officer pored over them desperately, searching for clues as to the man's whereabouts, accomplices, the location of Justice For… anything that might move them closer to stopping the attacks.

Detective Cooper sent him a text, explaining that they hadn't successfully stopped Galt at a hotel downtown. They were still searching for the killer in the Wall Street area. Did Pulaski have anything that could help?

"Not yet. Soon, I hope." He sent the message, turned back to the printouts.

Of the eight remaining pages in the print queue, nothing was immediately relevant to finding and stopping the killer. But Pulaski did learn something that might become helpful: Raymond Galt's motive.

Some of the pages were printouts of postings that Galt had made on blogs and online newsletters. Others were downloads of medical research, some very detailed and written by doctors with good credentials. Some were written by quacks in the language and tone of conspiracy theorists.

One had been written by Galt himself and posted on a blog about environmental causes of serious disease. My story is typical of many. I was a lineman and later a troubleman (like a supervisor) for many years working for several power companies in direct contact with lines carrying over one hundred thousand volts. It was the electromagnetic fields created by the transmission lines, that are uninsulated, that led to my leukemia, I am convinced. In addition it has been proven that power lines attract aerosol particles that lead to lung cancer among others, but this is something that the media doesn't talk about.

We need to make all the power companies but more important the public aware of these dangers. Because the companies won't do anything voluntarily, why should they? if the people stopped using electricity by even half we could save thousands of lives a year and make them (the companies) more responsible. In turn they would create safer ways to deliver electricity. And stop destroying the earth too.

People, you need to take matters into your own hands! -Raymond Galt.

So that was it. He was ill, he felt, because of companies like Algonquin. And he was fighting back in the time he had left. Pulaski knew the man was a killer, yet he couldn't help but feel a bit of sympathy for him. The officer had found liquor bottles, most of them at least half empty, in one of the cupboards. Sleeping pills too. And antidepressants. It was no excuse to kill anybody, but dying alone of a terminal disease and the people responsible for your death not caring? Well, Pulaski could understand where the anger came from.

He continued through the printouts, but found only more of the same: rants and medical research. Not even emails whose addresses they might trace to see if they could find Galt's friends and clues to his whereabouts.

He looked through them once more, thinking about Assistant Special Agent in Charge Tucker McDaniel's weird theory about cloud zone communications, looking for code words and secret messages that might be embedded in the text. Then he decided he'd wasted enough time on that and bundled up the printouts. He spent a few minutes bagging the rest of the evidence, collecting the trace and attaching chain-of-custody cards. Then he laid the numbers and photographed the entire site.

When he was finished, Pulaski looked up the dim hallway to the front door and felt the uneasiness return. He started toward the door, noting again that both the knob and the door itself were metal. What's the problem? he asked himself angrily. You opened it to get inside an hour ago. Leaving on the latex exam gloves, he tentatively reached out and pulled the door open, then, with relief, he stepped outside.

Two NYPD cops and an FBI agent were nearby. Pulaski nodded a greeting.

"You hear?" the agent asked.

Pulaski paused in the doorway of the apartment, then stepped farther away from the steel door. "About the attack? Yeah. I heard he got away. I don't know any details."

"He killed five people. Would've been more but your partner saved a lot of them."

"Partner?"

"That woman detective. Amelia Sachs. Bunch were injured. Badly burned."

Pulaski shook his head. "That's tough. That same way, the arc flash?"

"I don't know. He electrocuted them, though. That's all I heard."

"Jesus." Pulaski looked around the street. He'd never noticed how much metal there was on a typical residential block. A creepy feeling was flooding over him, the paranoia. There were metal posts and bars and rods everywhere, it seemed. Fire escapes, vents, pipes going into the ground, those metal sheets covering under-sidewalk elevators. Any one of them could be energized enough to send a charge right through you or to explode in a shower of metal shrapnel.

Killed five people…

Third-degree burns.

"You okay there, Officer?"

Pulaski gave a reflexive laugh. "Yeah." He wanted to explain his fear, but of course he didn't. "Any leads to Galt?"

"No. He's gone."

"Well, I gotta get this back to Lincoln Rhyme."

"Find anything?"

"Yeah. Galt's definitely the one. But I couldn't find anything about where he is now. Or what he's got planned next."

The FBI agent asked, "Who's going to do surveillance?" He nodded at the apartment. "You want to leave some of your people here?"

The implication being that the feds were perfectly happy to come along for the bust but since Galt wasn't here and probably wouldn't return-he must've heard on the news that they'd identified him-they didn't want to bother leaving their people on guard detail.

"That's not my call," the young officer said. He radioed Lon Sellitto and told him what he'd found. The lieutenant would arrange for two NYPD officers to remain on site, though hidden, until an official undercover surveillance team could be put together, just in case Galt tried to sneak back.

Pulaski then walked around the corner and into the deserted alleyway behind the building. He popped the trunk and loaded the evidence inside.

He slammed it, and looked around uneasily.

At all the metal, surrounded by metal.

Goddamn it, stop thinking about that! He got into the driver's seat and started to insert the key into the steering column. Then he hesitated. The car had been parked here, up the alley, out of sight of the apartment in case Galt did come back. If the perp was still free, was there a chance he'd returned and rigged some kind of a trap on Pulaski's car?

No, too far-fetched.

Pulaski grimaced. He started the car and put it in reverse.

His phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen. It was his wife, Jenny. He debated. No, he'd call her later. He slipped the phone away.

Glancing out the window he saw an electrical service panel on the side of a building, three large wires running from it. Shivering at the sight, Pulaski gripped the key and turned it. The starter gave that huge grinding sound when the engine's already running. In panic, believing that he was being electrocuted, the young cop grabbed the door handle and yanked it open. His foot slipped off the brake and landed on the accelerator. The Crown Victoria screeched backward, tires skidding. He slammed on the brake.