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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 do
es. At Hanover Street. On the north side."
He pictured T.J. Colfax, the woman with the thin fingers and long nails, about to die.
