The electrician’s shout had quieted the room so that her partner’s voice from the speaker was clear as he replied, “Look, Margie, the meters show the juice came from the emergency generator. Nobody could’ve gimmicked ’em with us working here, so it was a short. And for god’s sake, what else could’ve done it? Bloody lightning?”
“Crime Service,” Lacey said to the woman. “I need to ask you some questions.”
“Oh, god,” she murmured. Her flesh had lost all resiliency and gone gray in the blaze of the glow strips above. “Oh. . . .” Everyone in the room was staring at her and the investigator. “Will they—” she began and choked back her own words. Looking up at Lacey with a sudden fatalistic calm she started over. “Will you put Jim and me under the Psycomp for this? Will you wipe us?”
“You’d better tell me what happened,” Lacey said neutrally.
She shrugged and stood, towering over him. The hand phone made a premonitory squawk and she cut it off. “They hired Jim and me—Coeltrans did—hired us to cross-connect the elevator. It—” almost without pausing, she drew a rubber glove onto her right hand and gestured with two fingers—”runs up cog rails in the verticals, these rods. Two of the rails are hot, insulated from the outer surface of the pole but feeding juice through the gears themselves to the motor in the cage floor.”
Lacey leaned forward for a better look at the slots in the inner faces of the chrome supports. “Get back from there!” the woman snapped. “I got one deader on my conscience already today!”
Lacey blinked at her without emotion. “Go on,” he said.
“We were supposed to set up a current path in the other two rails, too,” she said, wiping her face with a sleeve. “Separate service from an emergency generator, a failsafe in case something went wrong with city power. We punched the lines through by section but we kept the circuit shut down except for testing at night after the building closed. There were bubbles in the insulation, so until we got ’em out we couldn’t charge the line when anybody was around. In case, in case . . .” She nodded toward the corpse though she refused to look at it again. The technicians were now fitting the body into a pressure-sealed bag to be carried down to the street. “We’d got all the shorts out of it, we thought, but we weren’t quite done testing. Guess I left the switch on last night but it seemed safe—we were touching the posts, touching them, Jim and me just before this guy . . . went.”
“Why run a generator circuit to an elevator?” Lacey asked. He was watching the electrician’s face.
“Why does anybody want an elevator at all?” she replied. The fear was gone, replaced by a dawning curiosity. “It was for the boss himself, Wilhoit. You know, he’s a regular guy? Last night he—oh god!”
All of the fat woman’s confidence suddenly disappeared. If she had been gray when Lacey first spoke, she was white now with memory. “He was watching us last night when we ran the tests, moving the cage up and down. Talked to us some—hell, he was the boss, we couldn’t tell him he couldn’t hang around when we were working. Nice guy. But when we were packing up, he grabbed rails three and four—the new circuit, you see? Took one in each hand and I thought, ‘Thank god we’ve got all the bugs out’. But we hadn’t, you see? Just for some reason the line didn’t short then, waited till this afternoon and got this stiff instead of, instead of . . .”
“I want you to find that short for me,” Lacey said, “you and your partner. He’s in the building too?”
“Down in the basement,” the woman said with a nod. “We were redding up when the floor manager called and said somebody’d died.” Her open face suddenly coalesced into a frown. “Look, you trust us to check this out?”
“I don’t need a Psycomp to tell if somebody’s lying to me,” Lacey said. “You stay straight with me, like you’ve been so far, and you’ll come out of it all right.”