Wrong Way (Miles Sterling FBI Suspense #10)

PROLOGUE

The small, featureless workspace smelled of solder and hot metal.

It had smelled this way for a while, having worked itself into the walls and the wood of the worktable over time.

He was pretty sure the smell had worked its way into most of his clothes, too.

But he didn't notice it anymore. He'd stopped noticing it weeks ago.

It was also enough to stop a human heart, or char the skin away from muscle tissue. Or both, if handled correctly.

And he had handled it correctly.

The ground wire had been disconnected and capped, isolated inside the housing so that nothing about the transformer's exterior suggested the modification.

To anyone who looked at it, it was an ordinary neon power supply.

You would have to open the housing to see what had been done, and by then it would already be too late to matter.

He set the probe of his voltage tester against the secondary terminal and watched the display climb. The reading was exactly what he expected. He powered it down and sat with it for a moment, one hand resting on the housing, feeling the residual warmth through his palm.

Across the workshop, the opposite wall held everything else.

The map was a standard city and metro area print, the kind available at any gas station.

But his was marked up considerably. Red pins marked locations he had already scouted, fourteen in total, spread across central Austin and into the surrounding areas.

Blue pins marked the ones that were no longer viable, eliminated for various reasons during reconnaissance.

Green pins marked the confirmed sites where the signs were still in operation, still drawing power, still waiting.

He'd drawn connecting lines in pencil between several of the red pins, tracing the most efficient routes between them, calculating travel time at different hours of the day and noting the results in small, neat handwriting in the margins.

He knew which intersections backed up after five o'clock, and which side streets allowed for faster exits.

He also knew which parking lots provided cover and which ones had cameras.

Beside the map, photographs were pinned in a loose grid.

Most were printed on standard letter paper, pulled from websites and social media profiles, from online review platforms and local news features.

He had annotated several of them with notes in the same small handwriting as the map margins, noting schedules and patterns where he had been able to determine them through observation.

The photograph closest to the center of the grid was a woman.

She was in her early forties, with shoulder-length dark hair and a wide, practiced smile.

She was photographed in what appeared to be a reading room, draped fabrics on the walls, a round table with a cloth over it, a single candle visible in the background.

The website he'd taken the photo from described her as a gifted psychic and energy healer, a guide for people seeking clarity and connection.

It listed her rates and hours and included two paragraphs of glowing testimonials from satisfied clients.

He studied the photo for a long moment. The smile was the problem, he had decided.

It was entirely too confident. She wore it like a credential, like proof of something, and the people who sat across from her at that little table with the candle on it took it as exactly that.

Proof. She says she sees something, and they believe it, and the money crosses the table, and she smiles that smile again.

She had no idea what she was emitting. That was always the difficult part to accept, the ones who genuinely didn't know. But ignorance didn't change the physics of it. A live wire didn't know it was dangerous. The current moved regardless.

He turned back to the table and began reviewing his notes.

He had identified her routine over the course of three separate visits to her block, two on weekdays and one on a Saturday, sitting in his car at varying distances.

She opened by nine-thirty most mornings, sometimes earlier, and the sign in her window came on first thing.

It was a large custom piece, a hand-lettered script in pale violet neon that spelled out her name and, beneath it, the word READINGS in smaller letters.

The sign sat directly in the window frame.

The transformer powering it was in the back room, mounted to the wall just inside the door that led from her consultation space to her storage area.

He'd seen the layout through the window on his second visit, when the interior door had been standing open.

He wouldn't need to bring his own equipment to her location. The one already installed would do exactly what was needed…once it had been properly prepared.

He had already sourced the same model. He had already opened it and made the modification and tested it and confirmed the readings. The one on the table in front of him was an exact proof of concept, built to verify his method before he touched the one that was already in her wall.

The swap would take under four minutes.

He capped his voltage tester and set it beside the transformer.

He looked again at the photograph of the woman with the violet neon sign and her practiced, confident smile, and then he looked at the map with its careful pins and penciled routes, and then he looked at the rest of the photographs in their grid.

He wasn't rushed. He had never been rushed.

Each one had been planned this carefully, and each one had gone the way it was supposed to go.

This was because he did not act on impulse or on anger but on understanding.

He understood what he was seeing in these people.

He understood what their presence cost the rest of the world, the drain they created simply by existing in it, drawing attention and energy and belief toward themselves like something fluorescent and false.

The neon was almost poetic, he thought. They had chosen that particular light for themselves, those electric colors in glass tubes, warm and vivid and demanding of attention. They had hung it in their windows like declarations.

He was simply going to let it answer them.

He switched off the lamp over the worktable and sat in the near-dark, the only light coming from the small indicator on a power strip and the faint orange glow of the city that leaked under the door to the alley. He was calm. He was ready. He had been ready for some time.

Tomorrow, he would begin.