Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

They disconnected and Sachs returned to the surface and found Nancy Simpson. The detective was in the hotel lobby, which was now largely empty. Sachs started for one of the revolving doors not sealed off with police tape but stopped. She turned and climbed through the shattered window.

Simpson's hollow face revealed that she was still shaken. "Just talked to Bo. No idea where Galt got out of the system. With the power off he might've just walked down the subway tracks to Canal Street, got lost in Chinatown. Nobody knows."

Sachs looked at where blood and scorch marks stained the marble floors, outlining where the victims had been.

"Final count?"

"Five dead, looks like eleven injured, all seriously. Burns are mostly third degree."

"You canvass?"

"Yep. But nobody saw anything. Most of the guests who were here just vanished. They weren't even checking out." Simpson added that they had fled, with spouses, children, associates and suitcases in tow. The hotel staff had done nothing to stop them. Half the employees had left too, it seemed.

"What about our witness?"

"I'm trying to track him down. I found some people he was having lunch with. They said he saw Galt. That's why I'd really love to find him."

"Who is he?"

"His name's Sam Vetter. Was here from Scottsdale on business. His first trip to the city."

A patrolman walked past. "Excuse me, I heard you mention the name Vetter?"

"Right. Sam Vetter."

"He came up to me in the lobby. Said he had some information about Galt."

"Where is he?"

"Oh, you didn't know?" the officer said. "He was one of the victims. Was in the revolving door. He's dead."

AMELIA SACHS RETURNED with the evidence.

Rhyme's eyes narrowed as she walked quickly into the townhouse. In her wake was a repulsive odor. Burned hair, burned rubber, burned flesh. Some crips believed they had an increased sense of smell because of their disability; Rhyme wasn't sure if this was true but in any case he had no problem detecting the stench.

He looked over the evidence Sachs and a crime scene tech from Queens had carted in. The hungry itch to tackle the mysteries the clues might reveal filled him. As Sachs and Cooper laid it out, Rhyme asked, "ESU find where Galt got out of the tunnel?"

"No sign of him. None at all." She looked around. "Where's Ron?"

Rhyme said that the rookie still wasn't back. "I called, left a message. I haven't heard from him. The last he said he'd found Galt's motive but didn't go into it… What, Sachs?"

He'd caught her gazing out the window, her face still.

"I got it wrong, Rhyme. I wasted time evacuating the construction site and missed the real target completely."

She explained that it had been Bob Cavanaugh who figured out that the target was the hotel. She was sighing. "If I'd thought it out better, I might've saved them." She walked to a whiteboard and with a firm hand wrote, "Battery Park Hotel," at the top and just below that the names of the deceased victims, apparently a husband and wife, a businessman from Scottsdale, Arizona, a waiter and an advertising executive from Germany.

"It could've been a lot more. I heard you took out the windows and got people out that way."

Her response was a shrug.

Rhyme felt that "what if" had no part in the policing business. You did the best you could, you played the odds.

Though he too was feeling what Sachs was, angry that, despite their race against the clock and their correct deduction about the general locale where the attack would be, not only had they failed to save victims but they'd missed their chance to collar Galt.

But he wasn't as upset as she was. However many people were at fault and whatever their degree of blame, Sachs was always hardest on herself. He could have told her that undoubtedly more people would have died if she hadn't been there, and that Galt now knew that he'd been identified and nearly outthought. He might very well stop the attacks altogether and give up. But saying this to her would smack of condescension and, had it been directed at Rhyme himself, he wouldn't even have listened.

Besides, the stark truth was, yes, the perp got away because they'd got it wrong.

Sachs returned to assembling the evidence on the examining table.

Her face was paler than normal; she was a minimalist when it came to makeup. And Rhyme could see that this crime scene too had affected her. The bus incident had spooked her-and some of that was still in her eyes, a patina of ill ease. But this was a different horror, the residue of the image of the people in the hotel dying in such terrible ways. "They were… it was like they were dancing while they died, Rhyme," she'd described it to him.

She'd collected Galt's Algonquin overalls and hard hat, the gear bag containing tools and supplies, another of the heavy-duty cables, identical to the one Galt had used for the arc flash yesterday morning. There were also several bags of trace. Another item, too, in a thick plastic bag: connecting the cable to the main line involved something different from what Galt had used at the Algonquin substation on Fifty-seventh Street, she explained. He'd used split bolts but between the two wires was a plastic box, about the size of a hard-cover book.

Cooper scanned it for explosives and then opened it up. "Looks homemade but I have no idea what it is."

Sachs said, "Let's talk to Charlie Sommers."

In five minutes they were on a conference call with the inventor from Algonquin. Sachs described the attack at the hotel.

"I didn't know it was that bad," he said in a soft voice.

Rhyme said, "Appreciate your advice earlier-how he'd be rigging the current like he did, instead of the arc."

"Didn't help much, though," the man muttered.

"Can you look over this box we recovered?" Sachs asked. "It was connecting the Algonquin line to the one he ran to the hotel."

"Of course."

Cooper gave Sommers a URL for a secure streaming video and then turned the high-def camera over the guts of the box.

"Got it. Let me take a look… Go back to the other side… Interesting. Not commercial. Made by hand."

"That's what it looks like to us," Rhyme said.

"I've never seen anything like it. Not this compact. It's switchgear. That's our term for the switches in substations and on transmission systems."

"Just shuts a circuit on and off?"

"Yep. Like a wall switch, except I'd say it could handle a hundred thousand volts easy. A built-in fan, a solenoid and a receiver. Remote control."

"So he hooked the wires together without transferring any current, then when he was safely away he hit the switch. Andi Jessen said he might try something like that."

"Did she? Hm. Interesting." Then Sommers added, "But I don't think the issue is safety. Any troubleman knows how to splice wires safely. He did this for another reason."

Rhyme understood. "To time the attack-he'd turn on the juice the moment when most victims were exposed."

"I think that's it, yes."

Sachs added, "One of the workers who saw him said he was watching the scene on his laptop-it was probably hooked into a nearby security camera. I couldn't find where he cut in, though."

"Maybe that's why he hit the switch a few minutes early," Rhyme said. "He had the chance to get the most victims, and he knew Algonquin wasn't going to give in to his demand at that point anyway."

Sommers sounded impressed when he said, "He's talented. That's a clever piece of work. The switch seems simple but it was a lot harder to make than you'd think. There's a lot of electromagnetic power in voltage lines that big and he'd have to shield the electronics. He's smart. Which, I guess, is bad news."

"Where could he get the parts, the solenoid, the receiver, the fan?"