The Burning Wire

“we’ve got a suspect. Good job, Lincoln.”
    “We’ll congratulate ourselves when he’s in custody.”
    He then squinted at the DMV information, which confirmed the address. “His place is on the Lower East Side? . . . Not many colleges or museums there. I think the volcanic ash must’ve come from the place he’s going to attack. Maybe the next target. And he’d want a public location, lots of people.”
    Lots of victims . . .
    A glance at the clock. It was ten-thirty.
    “Mel, check again with your geology person at HQ. We need to move!”
    “I’m on it.”
    McDaniel said, “I’ll call a magistrate for a warrant and get a tac team ready to hit Galt’s place.”
    Rhyme nodded and called Sellitto, still en route to city hall.
    The detective’s voice rattled from the speaker, “I’ve just blown through about five hundred traffic lights, Linc. I’m thinking if this asshole shuts down the grid and the lights go, we’re fucked. No way to—”
    Rhyme cut him off. “Lon, listen, we’ve got a name. Raymond Galt. He’s a troubleman at Algonquin. Not absolute but it looks likely. Mel’s going to email you the particulars.”
    Cooper, juggling the phone call about the lava search, began typing the relevant information about the suspect into a text.
    “I’ll get ESU down there now,” Sellitto called.
    “We’re sending our tac team,” McDaniel said quickly.
    Like schoolkids, Rhyme thought. “Whoever it is, I don’t think matters. But the point is now .”
    Via speaker conference, the detective and the agent agreed to task-force the raid and each arranged to assemble and deploy teams.
    Rhyme then warned, “We’re getting close to the deadline, so he probably won’t be there. If not, then I want only my person running the scene at Galt’s apartment.”
    “No problem,” McDaniel said.
    “Me?” Sachs lifted an eyebrow.
    “No. If we get any leads to the next attack, I want you there.” He glanced at Pulaski.
    “Me?” Same pronoun, different tone.
    “Get going, Rookie. And remember—”
    “I know,” Pulaski said. “Those arc things’re five thousand degrees Fahrenheit. I’ll be careful.”
    Rhyme grunted a laugh. “What I was going to say was: Don’t fuck up. . . . Now, move!”

Chapter 29
    PLENTY OF METAL . Metal everywhere.
    Ron Pulaski glanced at his watch: eleven a.m. Two hours until another attack.
    Metal . . . wonderfully conductive, and possibly connected to wires that ran to one of the invisible sources of juice in the bowels of the lousy apartment building he was standing in.
    Armed with a warrant, the FBI and ESU teams had found—to everyone’s disappointment but no one’s surprise—that Galt wasn’t there. Pulaski then shooed the officers out. And was now surveying the dim apartment, the basement unit in an old decrepit brownstone on the Lower East Side. He and three tactical officers had cleared the place—only the four of them, as Rhyme had ordered, to minimize contamination of the scene.
    The team was now outside and Pulaski was examining the small place by himself. And seeing a lot of metal that could be rigged, the way the battery was rigged in the substation—the trap that had nearly killed Amelia.
    Also picturing the metal disks on the sidewalk, seeing the scars in the concrete and in the body of pooryoung Luis Martin. And he recalled something else too, something even more troubling: Amelia Sachs’s eyes looking spooked. Which they never did. If this electricity crap could scare her . . .
    Last night, after his wife, Jenny, had gone to bed, Ron Pulaski went online to learn what he could about electricity. If you understand something, Lincoln Rhyme had told him, you fear it less. Knowledge is control. Except with electricity, with power, with juice, that wasn’t quite the case. The more he learned, the more uneasy he grew. He could grasp the basic concept but he kept coming back to the fact it was so damn invisible. You never knew exactly where it was. Like a poisonous snake in a dark room.
    He then shook himself out of these thoughts. Lincoln Rhyme had entrusted the scene to him. So get to work. On the drive here, he’d called in and asked if Rhyme wanted him to hook up via radio and video and walk him through the scene like he sometimes did with Amelia.
    Rhyme had said, “I’m busy, Rookie. If you can’t run a scene by now there’s no damn hope for you.”
    Click .
    Which to most people would’ve been an insult, but it put a big