The Burning Wire

Sachs and Pulaski were crouching, looking for entrances and exits, when they heard the first whimpers.
    Pulaski turned an alarmed face toward the detective. She held up a finger and listened.
    A woman’s voice, it seemed. She was in pain, maybe held hostage, being tortured? The woman who’d spotted Galt? Someone else?
    The sound faded. Then returned. They listened for a long ten seconds. Amelia Sachs gestured Ron Pulaski closer. They were in the back of the school, smelling urine, rotting plasterboard, mold.
    The whimpering grew louder. What the hell was Galt doing? Maybe the victim had information he needed for his next attack. “No, no, no.” Sachs was sure that’s what the voice was saying.
    Or maybe Galt had slipped further from reality. Maybe he’d kidnapped an Algonquin worker and was torturing her, satisfying his lust for revenge. Maybe she was in charge of the long-distance transmission lines. Oh, no, Sachs thought. Could it be Andi Jessen herself? She sensed Pulaski staring at her with wide eyes.
    “No . . . please,” the woman cried.
    Sachs hit TRANSMIT and radioed Emergency Service. “Bo . . . it’s Amelia, K?”
    “Go ahead, K.”
    “He’s got a hostage here. Where are you?”
    “Hostage? Who?”
    “Female. Unknown.”
    “Roger that. We’ll be five minutes. K.”
    “He’s hurting her. I’m not going to wait. Ron and I’re going in.”
    “You have logistics?”
    “Just what I told you before. Galt’s in the middle of the building. Ground floor. Armed with a forty-five ACP. Nothing’s electrified here. The power’s off.”
    “Well, that’s the good news, I guess. Out.”
    She disconnected and whispered to Pulaski, pointing, “Now, move! We’ll stage at the back door.”
    The young officer said, “Sure. Okay.” An uneasy glance into the shadows of the building, from which another moan floated out on the foul air.
    Sachs surveyed their route to the back door and loading dock. The crumbling asphalt was littered with broken bottles and papers and cans. Noisy to traverse, but they didn’t have a choice.
    She gestured Pulaski forward. They began to pick their way over the ground, trying to be quiet, though they couldn’t avoid crunching glass beneath their shoes.
    But as they approached, they had some luck, which Sachs believed in, even if Lincoln Rhyme did not. Somewhere nearby a noisy diesel engine rattled to life, providing good covering sound.
    Sometimes you do catch a break, Sachs thought. Lord knows we could use one now.

Chapter 61
    HE WASN’T GOING to lose Rhyme.
    Thom Reston had his boss out of the Storm Arrow chair and into a near standing position, pinned against the wall. In autonomic dysreflexia attacks, the patient should be kept upright—the books say sitting, but Rhyme had been in his chair when the vessels tightened en masse and the aide wanted to get him even more elevated, to force the blood back toward the ground.
    He’d planned for occurrences like this—even rehearsing when Rhyme wasn’t around, since he knew his boss wouldn’t have the patience for running mock emergencies. Now, without even looking, he grabbed a small vial of vasodilator medication, popped the cap with one thumb and slipped the delicate pill under Rhyme’s tongue.
    “Mel, help me here,” Thom said.
    The rehearsals didn’t include a real patient; Thom’s unconscious boss was presently 180 pounds of dead weight.
    Don’t think about it that way, he thought.
    Mel Cooper leapt forward, supporting Rhyme while Thom hit speed-dial button one on the phone he always made sure was charged and that had the best signal of any he’d tested. After two brief rings he was connected, and in five long seconds he was speaking to a doctor in a private hospital. An SCI team was dispatched immediately. The hospital Rhyme went to regularly for specialized therapy and regular checkups hada large spinal cord injury department and two emergency response teams, for situations where it would take too long to get a disabled patient to the hospital.
    Rhyme had had a dozen or so attacks over the years, but this was the worst Thom had ever seen. He couldn’t support Rhyme and take his blood pressure simultaneously, but he knew it was dangerously high. His face was flushed, he was sweating. Thom could only imagine the pain of the excruciating headache as the body, tricked by the quadriplegia into believing it needed more blood and quickly, pumped hard and constricted the vessels.
    The condition could