They had to be directly beneath the hotel, she figured, when they came to a ninety-degree turn to the right.
Again she took a fast look, but this time it was hard to see anything at all because of the greater darkness here.
Then she heard noises again.
One patrolman eased close. "A voice?"
She nodded.
"Keep low," she whispered.
They eased around the corner and made their way up the tunnel, crouching.
Then she shivered. It wasn't a voice. It was a moan. A desperate moan. Human.
"Flashlight!" she whispered. As a detective, she wore no utility belt, just weapons and cuffs, and she felt the painful blow as the officer behind her shoved the light into her side.
"Sorry," he muttered.
"Get down," she told the patrolmen softly. "Prone. Be prepared to fire. But only on my command . . . unless he takes me out first."
They eased to the filthy floor, guns pointed down the tunnel.
She aimed in that direction too. Holding the flashlight out to her side at arm's length so she wouldn't present a vital-zone target, she clicked it on, the blinding beam filling the grim corridor.
No gunshots, no arc flashes.
But Galt had claimed another victim.
About thirty feet away an Algonquin worker lay on his side, duct tape over his mouth, hands tied behind him. He was bleeding from the temple and behind his ear.
"Let's go!"
The other officers rose and the three of them hurried down the tunnel to the man she supposed was Joey Barzan. In the beam she could see it wasn't Galt. The worker was badly injured and bleeding heavily. As one of the patrolmen hurried toward him to stop the hemorrhaging, Barzan began to shake his head frantically and wail beneath the tape.
At first Sachs assumed he was dying and that death tremors were shaking his body. But as she got 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.
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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.