The Burning Wire

Sachs, call Susan Stringer and see if she knows anything about them.”
    Sachs pulled out her phone and had a conversation with the woman. When she hung up she said, “Okay, she doesn’t know the lawyer or the man who got on at the sixth floor. But Larry Fishbein was anaccountant she knew a little. She overheard him complaining that there was something odd about the books of a company where he’d just done an audit. Some money was disappearing. And wherever it was, the place was really hot. Too hot to golf.”
    “Maybe Arizona. Call and find out.”
    Sellitto got the number of the man’s firm from Sachs and called. He spoke for a few minutes and then disconnected. “Bingo. Fishbein was in Scottsdale. He got back Tuesday.”
    “Ah, Scottsdale . . . Where Vetter had his company.”
    McDaniel said, “What is this, Lincoln? I still don’t see the motive.”
    After a moment Rhyme said, “Andi Jessen’s opposed to renewable energy, right?”
    Sachs said, “That’s a little strong. But she’s definitely not a fan.”
    “What if she was bribing alternative energy companies to limit production or doing something else to sabotage them?”
    “To keep demand for Algonquin’s power high?” McDaniel asked. A motive in his pocket, he seemed more on board now.
    “That’s right. Vetter and Fishbein might’ve had information that would’ve sunk her. If they’d been murdered in separate incidents, just the two of them, the investigators might’ve wondered if there was a connection. But Andi arranged this whole thing to make it look like they were random victims so nobody’d put the pieces together. That’s why the demands were impossible to comply with. She didn’t want to comply with them. She needed the attacks to take place.”
    Rhyme said to Sachs, “And get the names of theinjured and check out their histories. Maybe one of them was a target too.”
    “Sure, Rhyme.”
    “But,” Sellitto said with unusual urgency in his voice, “there’s the third demand letter, the email. That means she still needs to kill somebody else. Who’s the next victim?”
    Rhyme continued to type as quickly as he could on his keyboard. His eyes rose momentarily to the digital clock on the wall nearby. “I don’t know. And we’ve got less than two hours to figure it out.”

Chapter 71
    DESPITE THE HORROR of Ray Galt’s attacks, Charlie Sommers couldn’t deny the exhilaration that now, well, electrified him.
    He’d taken a coffee break, during which he’d spent the time jotting diagrams for a possible invention (on a napkin, of course): a way to deliver hydrogen gas to homes for fuel cells. He was now returning to the main floor of the New Energy Expo in the Manhattan Convention Center on the West Side, near the Hudson River. It was filled with thousands of the most innovative people in the world, inventors, scientists, professors, the all-important investors too, each devoted to one thing: alternative energy. Creating it, delivering it, storing it, using it. This was the biggest conference of its sort in the world, timed to coincide with Earth Day. It brought together those who knew the importanceof energy but knew too the importance of making and using it in very different ways from what we’d been used to.
    As Sommers made his way through the halls of the futuristic convention center—finished just a month or so ago—his heart was pounding like that of a schoolboy at his first science fair. He felt dizzy, head swiveling back and forth as he took in the booths: those of companies operating wind farms, nonprofits seeking backers to create microgrids in remote parts of Third World countries, solar power companies, geothermal exploration operations and smaller outfits that made or installed photovoltaic arrays, flywheel and liquid sodium storage systems, batteries, superconductive transport systems, smart grids . . . the list was endless.
    And utterly enthralling.
    He arrived at his company’s ten-foot-wide booth at the back end of the hall.
    ALGONQUIN CONSOLIDATED POWER
SPECIAL PROJECTS DIVISION
THE SMARTER ALTERNATIVE TM
    Although Algonquin was probably bigger than the five largest exhibitors here put together, his company had bought only the smallest booth available for the new-energy show, and he was the only one manning it.
    Which was a pretty clear indication of how CEO Andi Jessen felt about renewables.
    Still, Sommers didn’t care. Sure, he was here as a company representative, but he’d also come