“Ten-four, K,” Sachs responded and looked in the back of the wagon, wondering idly what was in the black suitcases.
Two-forty p.m.
The phone rang in Rhyme’s townhouse. Thom answered. “It’s a dispatcher from headquarters.”
“Put ’em through.”
The speakerphone burst to life. “Detective Rhyme, you don’t remember me but I worked at IRD when you were there. Civilian. Did phone detail then. Emma Rollins.”
“Of course. How’re the youngsters, Emma?” Rhyme had a memory of a large, cheerful black woman, supporting five children with two jobs. He recalled her blunt finger stabbing buttons so hard she once actually broke one of the government-issue phones.
“Jeremy’s starting college in a couple weeks and Dora’s still acting, or she thinks she is. The little ones’re doing just fine.”
“Lon Sellitto recruited you, did he?”
“Nosir. I heard you were working on the case and I booted some child back to 911. Emma’s taking this job, I told her.”
“What’ve you got for us?”
“We’re working out of a directory of companies making bolts. And a book that lists places wholesaling them. Here’s what we found. It was the letters did it. The ones stamped on the bolt. The CE. They’re made special for Con Ed.”
Hell. Of course.
“They’re marked that way because they’re a different size than most bolts this company sells – fifteen-sixteenths of an inch, and a lot more threads than most other bolts. That’d be Michigan Tool and Die in Detroit. They use ’em in old pipes only in New York. Ones made sixty, seventy years ago. The way the parts of the pipe fit together they have to be real close seals. Fit closer’n a bride and groom on their wedding night’s what the man told me. Trying to make me blush.”
“Emma, I love you. You stay on call, will you?”
“You bet I will.”
“Thom!” Rhyme shouted. “This phone isn’t going to work. I need to make calls myself. That voice-activation thing in the computer. Can I use it?”
“You never ordered it.”
“I didn’t?”
“No.”
“Well, I need it.”
“Well, we don’t have it.”
“Do something. I want to be able to make calls.”
“I think there’s a manual ECU somewhere.” Thom dug through a box against the wall. He found a small electronic console and plugged one end into the phone and the other into a stalk control that mounted next to Rhyme’s cheek.
“That’s too awkward!”
“Well, it’s all we’ve got. If we’d hooked up the infrared above your eyebrow like I suggested, you could’ve been making phone-sex calls for the past two years.”
“Too many fucking wires,” Rhyme spat out.
His neck spasmed suddenly and knocked the controller out of reach. “Fuck.”
Suddenly this minute task – not to mention their mission – seemed impossible to Lincoln Rhyme. He was exhausted, his neck hurt, his head. His eyes particularly. They stung and – this was more painful to him – he felt a chip of urge to rub the backs of his fingers across his closed lids. A tiny gesture of relief, something the rest of the world did every day.
Thom replaced the joystick. Rhyme summoned patience from somewhere and asked his aide, “How does it work?”
“There’s the screen. See it on the controller? Just move the stick till it’s on a number, wait one second and it’s programmed in. Then do the next number the same way. When you’ve got all seven, push the stick here to dial.”
He snapped, “It’s not working.”
“Just practice.”
“We don’t have time!”
Thom snarled, “I’ve been answering the phone for you way too long.”
“All right,” Rhyme said, lowering his voice – his way of apology. “I’ll practice later. Could you please get me Con Ed? And I need to speak to a supervisor.”
The rope hurt and the cuffs hurt but it was the noise that scared her the most.
Tammie Jean Colfax felt all the sweat in her body run down her face and chest and arms as she struggled to saw the handcuff links back and forth on the rusty bolt. Her wrists were numb but it seemed to her that she was wearing through some of the chain.
She paused, exhausted, and twitched her arms this way and that to keep a cramp at bay. She listened again. It was, she thought, the sound of workmen tightening bolts and hammering parts into place. Final taps of hammers. She imagined they were just finishing up their job on the pipe and thinking of going home.
Don’t go, she cried to herself. Don’t leave me. As long as the men were there, working, she was safe.
A final bang, then ringing silence.
Git on outa thayr, girl. G’on.
Mamma…
T.J. cried for several minutes, thinking of her family back in Eastern Tennessee. Her nostrils clogged but as she began to choke she blew her nose violently, felt an explosion of tears and mucus. Then she was breathing again. It gave her confidence. Strength. She began to saw once more.
“I appreciate the urgency, detective. But I don’t know how I can help you. We use bolts all over the city. Oil lines, gas lines…”
“All right,” Rhyme said tersely and asked the Con Ed supervisor at the company’s headquarters on Fourteenth Street, “Do you insulate wiring with asbestos?”
A hesitation.
“We’ve cleaned up ninety percent of that,” the woman said defensively. “Ninety- five.”
People could be so irritating. “I understand that. I just need to know if there’s still any asbestos used for insulation.”
“No,” she said adamantly. “Well, never for electricity. Just the steam and that’s the smallest percentage of our service.”
Steam!
It was the least-known and the scariest of the city’s utilities. Con Ed heated water to 1,000 degrees then shot it through a hundred-mile network of pipes running under Manhattan. The blistering steam itself was superheated – about 380 degrees – and rocketed through the city at seventy-five miles an hour.
Rhyme now recalled an article in the paper. “Didn’t you have a break in the line last week?”
“Yessir. But there was no asbestos leak. That site had been cleaned years ago.”
“But there is asbestos around some of your pipes in the system downtown?”
She hesitated. “Well…”
“Where was the break?” Rhyme continued quickly.
“Broadway. A block north of Chambers.”
“Wasn’t there an article in the Times about it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”
“And did the article mention asbestos?”
“It did,” she admitted, “but it just said that in the past asbestos contamination’d been a problem.”
“The pipe that broke, was it… does it cross Pearl Street farther south?”
“Well, let me see. Yes, it does. At Hanover Street. On the north side.”
He pictured T.J. Colfax, the woman with the thin fingers and long nails, about to die.
“And the steam’s going back on at three?”
“That’s right. Any minute now.”
“It can’t!” Rhyme shouted. “Somebody’s tampered with the line. You can’t turn that steam back on!”
Cooper looked up uneasily from his microscope.
The supervisor said, “Well, I don’t know…”
Rhyme barked to Thom, “Call Lon, tell him she’s in a basement at Hanover and Pearl. The north side.” He told him about the steam. “Get the fire department there too. Heat-protective outfits.”
Rhyme shouted into the speakerphone. “Call the work crews! Now! They can’t turn that steam back on. They can’t!” He repeated the words absently, detesting his exquisite imagination, which showed, in an endless loop, the woman’s flesh growing pink then red then splitting apart under the fierce clouds of sputtering white steam.