"Yessir?"
"By any chance you pass a restroom on your way down here?"
Chapter 80
"CHARLIE SOMMERS'S OKAY," Sachs called, slipping away her cell phone. "Ron just called."
Rhyme frowned. "I didn't know he wasn't okay."
"Seems he tried to play hero. He was going to shut down the power at the convention center. Ron found him in the basement with a wire and some tools. He was hanging from the ceiling."
"Doing what?"
"I don't know."
"What part of 'stay put' did he have trouble with?"
Sachs shrugged.
"You couldn't've just called him?"
"Didn't have his phone on him. Something about a hundred thousand volts."
Andi Jessen's brother was fine too, though filthy and hungry and furious. He'd been recovered from the back of Logan's white van parked in the alley behind Rhyme's town house. Logan had shared nothing with him and had kept him in the dark--in both senses. Randall Jessen had assumed he'd been kidnapped in some scheme to extort money from his wealthy CEO sister. Randall'd heard nothing of the attacks, and Logan's plan was apparently to electrocute him in Rhyme's basement, as if he'd accidentally touched a hot wire dismantling the switch he'd installed to kill Rhyme. He'd been reunited with his sister, who'd been briefed by Gary Noble about the situation.
Rhyme wondered if she'd respond to the fact that the target of her attacks in the press--the alternative energy world--had been behind the scheme.
Rhyme asked, "And Bob Cavanaugh? The Operations man?"
"McDaniel's guys got him. He was in his office. No resistance. Tons of business records on startup alternative energy companies the conspirators planned to do deals with after they'd taken over Algonquin. The Bureau'll get the other names from his computer and phone records--if he doesn't cooperate."
A green 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 was impossible 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 obviously leading 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."
&nb
sp; "Spring? Yes, you mentioned that."