The Burning Wire

helpful information. And if, as Sachs had reported, she wanted to meet him in the process, he could live with that.
    She nodded at Thom Reston with a knowing look about the importance of—and burdens upon—caregivers. He asked if there was anything she wanted and she said no. “I can’t stay long. It’s late and I’m not feeling too well.” Her face had a hollow look; she’d undoubtedly be thinking of the terrible moments in the elevator. She wheeled closer to Rhyme. Susan’s arms clearly worked fine; she was a paraplegic and would probably have suffered a thoracic injury, in her mid or upper back.
    “No burns?” Rhyme asked.
    “No. I didn’t get a shock. The only problem was smoke—from the . . . from the men in the elevator with me. One caught fire.” The last sentence was a whisper.
    “What happened?” Sachs asked.
    A stoic look. “We were near the ground floor when the elevator stopped suddenly. The lights went out, except for the emergency light. One of the businessmen behind me reached for the panel to hit the HELP button. As soon as he touched it he just started moaning and dancing around.”
    She coughed. Cleared her throat. “It was terrible. He couldn’t let go of the panel. His friend grabbed him or he brushed against him. It was like a chain reaction. They just kept jerking around. And one of them caught fire. His hair . . . the smoke, the smell.” Susan was whispering now. “Horrible. Just horrible. They were dying, right around me, they were dying. I was screaming. I realized it was some electrical problem and I didn’t want to touch the metal hand rim of the chair or the metal door frame. I just sat there.”
    Susan shuddered. Then repeated, “I just sat there. Then the car moved down the last few feet and the door opened. There were dozens of people in the lobby, they pulled me out. . . . I tried to warn them not to touch anything but the electricity was off by then.” She coughed softly for a moment. “Who is this man, Ray Galt?” Susan asked.
    Rhyme told her, “He thinks he got sick from power lines. Cancer. He’s out for revenge. But there may be an ecoterror connection. He might’ve been recruited by a group that’s opposed to traditional power companies. We don’t know yet. Not for sure.”
    Susan blurted, “And he wants to kill innocent people to make his point? What a hypocrite.”
    Sachs said, “He’s a fanatic so he doesn’t even register hypocrisy. Whatever he wants to do is good. Whatever stops him from doing what he wants is bad. Very simple universe.”
    Rhyme glanced at Sachs, who caught the cue and asked Susan, “You said there was something that might help us?”
    “Yes, I think I saw him.”
    Despite his distrust of witnesses, Rhyme said encouragingly, “Go ahead. Please.”
    “He got onto the elevator at my floor.”
    “You think it was him? Why?”
    “Because he spilled some water. Accidentally, it seemed, but now I know he did it on purpose. To improve the connection.”
    Sachs said, “The water that Ron found on the soles of their shoes. Sure. We wondered where that came from.”
    “He was dressed like a maintenance man with a watering can for the plants. He was wearing brown overalls. Kind of dirty. It seemed odd. And the building doesn’t have plants in the hall and we don’t in our office.”
    “There’s still a team there?” Rhyme asked Sachs.
    She said that there would be. “Fire, maybe. Not PD.”
    “Have them call the building manager, wake him up if they have to. See if they have a plant maintenance service. And check video security.”
    A few minutes later they had their answer: no plant waterers for the building or any of the companies on the eighth floor. And security cameras were only in the lobby, with wide-angle lenses uselessly showing“a bunch of people coming, a bunch of people going,” one of the fire marshals reported. “Can’t make out a single face.”
    Rhyme called up the DMV picture of Galt on the screen. “Is that him?” he asked Susan.
    “Could be. He didn’t look at us and I didn’t look at him really.” A knowing glance toward Rhyme. “His face wasn’t exactly at eye level.”
    “Anything else you remember about him?”
    “When he was walking toward the car and then when he first got in, he kept looking at his watch.”
    “The deadline,” Sachs pointed out. Then added, “He set it off early, though.”
    “Only a few minutes,” Rhyme said. “Maybe he was worried that