The Burning Wire

closer to him she looked at his wide eyes and glanced down, following their path. He was lying not on the bare floor but on a thick piece of what looked like Teflon or plastic.
    “Stop!” she shouted to the officer reaching forward to help the man. “It’s a trap!”
    The patrolman froze.
    She remembered what Sommers had told her about wounds and blood making the body much less resistant to electricity.
    Then, without touching the worker, she walked around behind him.
    His hands were bound, yes. But not with tape or rope—with bare copper wire. Which had been spliced into one of the lines on the wall. She grabbed Sommers’s voltage detector and aimed it at the wire wrapped around Barzan’s flesh.
    The meter jumped off the scale at 10,000v. Had the patrolman touched him, the juice would have streaked through him, through the officer and into the ground, killing them instantly.
    Sachs stepped back and turned up the volume on her radio to call Nancy Simpson and have her find Bob Cavanaugh and tell the operations director he needed to cut the head off another snake.

Chapter 39
    RON PULASKI HAD managed to nurse Ray Galt’s damaged computer printer back to life. And he was grabbing the hot sheets of paper as they eased into the output tray.
    The young officer pored over them desperately, searching for clues as to the man’s whereabouts, accomplices, the location of Justice For . . . anything that might move them closer to stopping the attacks.
    Detective Cooper sent him a text, explaining that they hadn’t successfully stopped Galt at a hotel downtown. They were still searching for the killer in the Wall Street area. Did Pulaski have anything that could help?
    “Not yet. Soon, I hope.” He sent the message, turned back to the printouts.
    Of the eight remaining pages in the print queue, nothing was immediately relevant to finding and stopping the killer. But Pulaski did learn something that might become helpful: Raymond Galt’s motive.
    Some of the pages were printouts of postings that Galt had made on blogs and online newsletters. Others were downloads of medical research, some very detailed and written by doctors with good credentials. Some were written by quacks in the language and tone of conspiracy theorists.
    One had been written by Galt himself and posted on a blog about environmental causes of serious disease.
    My story is typical of many. I was a lineman and later a troubleman (like a supervisor) for many years working for several power companies in direct contact with lines carrying over one hundred thousand volts. It was the electromagnetic fields created by the transmission lines, that are uninsulated, that led to my leukemia, I am convinced. In addition it has been proven that power lines attract aerosol particles that lead to lung cancer among others, but this is something that the media doesn’t talk about .
    We need to make all the power companiesbut more important the public aware of these dangers. Because the companies won’t do anything voluntarily, why should they? If the people stopped using electricity by even half we could save thousands of lives a year and make them (the companies) more responsible. In turn they would create safer ways to deliver electricity. And stop destroying the earth too .
    People, you need to take matters into your own hands!
    —Raymond Galt
    So that was it. He was ill, he felt, because of companies like Algonquin. And he was fighting back in the time he had left. Pulaski knew the man was a killer, yet he couldn’t help but feel a bit of sympathy for him. The officer had found liquor bottles, most of them at least half empty, in one of the cupboards. Sleeping pills too. And antidepressants. It was no excuse to kill anybody, but dying alone of a terminal disease and the people responsible for your death not caring? Well, Pulaski could understand where the anger came from.
    He continued through the printouts, but found only more of the same: rants and medical research. Not even emails whose addresses they might trace to see if they could find Galt’s friends and clues to his whereabouts.
    He looked through them once more, thinking about Assistant Special Agent in Charge Tucker McDaniel’s weird theory about cloud zone communications, looking for code words and secret messagesthat might be embedded in the text. Then he decided he’d wasted enough time on that and bundled up the printouts. He spent a few minutes bagging the rest of the evidence, collecting