The Burning Wire

.
    He began to feed the cable to the metal bar.
    Six feet, five, four . . .
    “Hey there! Charlie? Charlie Sommers?”
    He gasped. The end of the cable swung wildly but he reeled it in fast.
    “Who’s there?” Sommers blurted before realizing that it might be Andi Jessen’s brother, who’d come to shoot him.
    “It’s Ron Pulaski. I’m that officer works with Detective Sachs.”
    “Yes, what?” Sommers gasped. “What’re you doing here?”
    “We’ve been trying to call you for a half hour.”
    “Get out of here, Officer. It’s dangerous!”
    “We couldn’t get through. We called you right after you hung up speaking to Amelia and Lincoln.”
    Sommers steadied his voice. “I don’t have my goddamn phone. Look, I’m shutting down the power here, in the whole area. It’s the only way to stop him. There’s going to be a huge—”
    “He’s already stopped.”
    “What?”
    “Yessir, they sent me here to find you. To tell you that what they were saying on the phone was fake. They knew the killer was listening in and they couldn’t tell you what they were really planning. We had to make him think we believed the attack was happening here. As soon as I left Lincoln’s, I tried to call you. But we couldn’t get through. Somebody said they saw you coming down here.”
    Jesus Lord in heaven.
    Sommers stared at the cable dangling below him. The juice in the feeder cable could decide at any moment that it wanted to take a shortcut to get back home and Sommers would simply disappear.
    Pulaski called, “Say, what exactly’re you doing up there?”
    Killing myself.
    Sommers retracted the cable slowly and then he reached into the enclosure and began undoing the connection with the main line, expecting—no, positive—that at any moment he would hear, very, very briefly, the arc flash hum and bang as he died.
    The process of unraveling the beast seemed to take forever.
    “Anything I can do, sir?”
    Yes, shut the hell up.
    “Um, just stay back and give me a minute, Officer.”
    “Sure.”
    Finally, the cable came away from the feeder line and Sommers dropped it to the floor. Then he eased out of the fire-hose sling, hung for a moment, and tumbled to the ground on top of the cable. He collapsed in pain from the fall but stood and tested for broken bones. He sensed there was none.
    “What’s that you were saying, sir?” Pulaski asked.
    He’d been repeating a frantic mantra: stay put, stay put, stay put. . .  .
    But he told the cop, “Nothing.” Then he dusted off his slacks and looked around. He asked, “Hey, Officer?”
    “Yessir?”
    “By any chance you pass a restroom on your way down here?”

Chapter 80
    “CHARLIE SOMMERS’S OKAY,” Sachs called, slipping away her cell phone. “Ron just called.”
    Rhyme frowned. “I didn’t know he wasn’t okay.”
    “Seems he tried to play hero. He was going to shut down the power at the convention center. Ron found him in the basement with a wire and some tools. He was hanging from the ceiling.”
    “Doing what?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What part of ‘stay put’ did he have trouble with?”
    Sachs shrugged.
    “You couldn’t’ve just called him?”
    “Didn’t have his phone on him. Something about a hundred thousand volts.”
    Andi Jessen’s brother was fine too, though filthy and hungry and furious. He’d been recovered from the back of Logan’s white van parked in the alley behind Rhyme’s town house. Logan had shared nothing with him and had kept him in the dark—in both senses. Randall Jessen had assumed he’d been kidnapped in some scheme to extort money from his wealthy CEO sister. Randall’d heard nothing of the attacks, and Logan’s plan was apparently to electrocute him in Rhyme’s basement, as if he’d accidentally touched a hot wire dismantling the switch he’d installed to kill Rhyme. He’d been reunited with his sister, who’d been briefed by Gary Noble about the situation.
    Rhyme wondered if she’d respond to the fact that the target of her attacks in the press—the alternative energy world—had been behind the scheme.
    Rhyme asked, “And Bob Cavanaugh? The Operations man?”
    “McDaniel’s guys got him. He was in his office. No resistance. Tons of business records on startup alternative energy companies the conspirators planned to do deals with after they’d taken over Algonquin. The Bureau’ll get the other names from his computer and phone records—if he doesn’t cooperate.”
    A green