The Burning Wire

cartel . .  .
    Rhyme now realized that Richard Logan, sitting cuffed and shackled in a chair between two uniformed patrolmen, was speaking to him. In a cool, eerily analytical voice, the killer repeated, “A setup? All fake. You knew all along.”
    “I knew.” Rhyme regarded him carefully. Though he’d confirmed the name Richard Logan, it wasimpossible to think of him as that. To Rhyme he would always be the Watchmaker. The face was different, yes, after the plastic surgery, but the eyes were those of the same man who’d proved every bit as smart as Rhyme himself. Smarter even, on occasion. And unbridled by the trivia of law and conscience.
    The shackles were sturdy and the cuffs tight but Lon Sellitto sat nearby anyway, keeping an eye on the man, as if the cop thought that Logan was using his considerable mental prowess to plan an escape.
    But Rhyme believed not. The prisoner’s darting eyes had taken in the room and the other officers and had concluded that there was nothing to be gained by resisting.
    “So,” Logan said evenly, “how did you do it?” He seemed genuinely curious.
    As Sachs and Cooper logged and bagged the new evidence, Rhyme, with no small ego himself, was pleased to indulge him. “When our FBI agent told me that it was somebody else, not Galt, that jarred me out of my rut. You know the risk of making assumptions. . . . I’d been assuming all along that Galt was the perp. But once that idea got turned upside down, I started thinking about the whole”—Rhyme smiled at the fortuitous word that popped into his mind—“the whole arc of the crimes. Take the trap at the school: What was the point of trying to hurt only two or three officers? And with a noisy generator? It occurred to me that that’d be a good way to get some planted evidence inside the lab—and big enough to hide a microphone.
    “I took the chance that the generator was bugged and that you were listening. So I started rambling about new theories involving Andi Jessen and her brother, which is where the evidence was obviouslyleading us. But at the same time I was typing out instructions for everybody in the lab. They were all reading over my shoulder. I had Mel—my associate—scan the generator for a bug . . . and there it was. Well, if you wanted the generator to be found, that meant that any evidence in it was planted. So whoever it pointed to was not involved in the crimes: Andi Jessen and her brother were innocent.”
    Logan was frowning. “But you never suspected her?”
    “I did, yes. We thought Andi’d lied to us. You heard that on the microphone?”
    “Yes, though I wasn’t sure what you meant.”
    “She told Sachs that she got her skills from her father. As if she was hiding the fact that she’d been a lineman and could rig arc flashes. But if you think about what she said, she wasn’t denying that she’d worked in the field but that she was simply saying her talent was mostly on the business side of the operation. . . . Well, if it wasn’t Andi or her brother, then who? I kept going back over the evidence.” A glance at the charts. “There were some items unaccounted for. The one that stuck in my mind was the spring.”
    “Spring? Yes, you mentioned that.”
    “We found a tiny hairspring at one of the scenes. Nearly invisible. We thought it could have been from a timer in some switchgear. But I decided if it could come from a timer, it could also be used in watchmaking. That put me in mind of you, of course.”
    “A hairspring?” Logan’s face fell. “I always use a roller on my clothes”—he nodded to a rack of pet-hair rollers near an examination table—“to make sure I pick up any trace before I go out on a job. That must’ve fallen into my cuff. And you want to know something funny, Lincoln? It probably got therebecause I was putting away a lot of my old supplies and tools. What I told you before . . . I’d become fascinated with the idea of electronic timekeeping. That’s what I was going to try next. I wanted to make the most perfect clock in the world. Even better than the government’s atomic clock. But an electronic one.”
    Rhyme continued, “And then all the other pieces fell into place. My conclusion about the letters—that they were written by Galt under threat—worked if you were the one dictating them. The alternative jet fuel? It was being tested mostly in military jets—but that means it was also being tested in some private and commercial