“All right,” she echoed. “All right, then wait thirty seconds and I may have an answer for you.” She knelt at the base of an elevator support with a multi-windowed instrument in her hands. Holding it against the pole, she ran a dial across its scale and then used a pair of insulated pliers to bridge the two segments of handrail the victim had been holding when he died. The spark was fat and blue and snapped like a pistol shot.
“One’ll get you ten that’s it,” the electrician said matter of factly. She began to put her tools away. The current had eaten a chip out of the nose of the pliers. “Inside the chrome plate, each rod’s filled with Dorafeen. It’s easy stuff to use, you inject it like grease and let it set. It’s hard, it’s strong, and it’s a hell of a good insulator usually. But if you trip a block of Dorafeen with a magnetic field of whatever the block’s loading frequency is, you can get it to conduct like so much copper.”
She gestured with her chin. “That’s where the whole company started—Citizen Wilhoit came up with a process using Dorafeen to chop high-current DC into AC to run through transformers to step it down. Anyhow, we bored the columns for our power lines, then ran a bare aluminum cable through them. No need to insulate since there was a centimeter of Dorafeen all around the wire. Except we never thought that if the right—wrong—frequency magnetic field was generated right alongside it . . . well, you saw what it did to the pliers when I’d primed it with my tester.”
“But it’s just a temporary conductor?” Lacey asked.
“Sure, depends on the mass and a lot of other things,” the woman said with a shrug. “A couple seconds for this block, milliseconds for the wafers they use in power stations. I wouldn’t have believed that a microgauss field could trip that whole rod, but . . . that’s the only way the accident could’ve happened. Some coil with just the right number of windings, laid against the column and switched on while the elevator was being used.”
Lacey’s tongue touched his lips. “I’ll call you if I need anything more,” he said to the fat woman, dismissing her. Her face smoothed in relief and she began to roll her tool chest toward the stairs. Raising his voice to cut through the whispering, Lacey addressed the whole room: “All right, who’s the highest official on this floor right now?” Answering murmurs were too confused to be intelligible, but a hundred faces turned and triangulated on a plump little man, one of those still seated at his desk.
Lacey grinned so that his teeth glinted. His neck scar was tense and stiff and crawled beneath his skin. “Let the rest of ’em go, Corporal,” he called to the chief of the uniformed patrol. “You and your boys can blast too. I’ll just talk to this citizen a moment about what happened.”
The red-capped police stepped aside and began filing up to their car, precipitating a rush of civilians down the single staircase lest the agent change his mind. The seated man watched Lacey approach with the intentness of a rabbit awaiting a black-snake. Like Lacey, he was dressed in gray, but in a muted solid instead of the tiger stripes that blurred the agent’s outline. His beard matched his suit in color, a short, smooth arc that seemed a little incongruous beneath the baldly pink skull.
“Good afternoon, Citizen,” Lacey said. “Your name and position, please?” He could have gotten the information as quickly through his computer link, but the opening question, the first thrust into his subject’s persona, was a needed part of this interrogation.
“I’m Lewis Ashby and I, I assure you that I have far more to do than concern myself with, ah, drivers,” the plump man said. His voice was generally steady, his tones rotund—but his eyes would not meet Lacey’s.
“You knew Silvers, then?” Lacey prodded gently. “Knew he was a driver?” He and Ashby were about of a height, but the investigator was standing and dominating the clerk physically. He had let his overblouse fall open so that the holstered needle stunner was visible at the level of the civilian’s face.