The Lightning Rule Read online

  “Autopsy was pretty cut-and-dried if you’ll pardon the pun,” the doctor began. “I’d put his age at sixteen, maybe seventeen. He was in perfect health. Strong as an ox. Didn’t need me to tell you that. The laceration to the throat was what killed him, obviously. It was deep, down to the vertebrae. Could’ve taken his head clean off if the neck muscles weren’t so dense.”

  Dr. Ufland wasn’t saying anything Emmett hadn’t intuited. On the ride from his house to the hospital, he had been going over the scant information he had, hashing through various scenarios. Webster could have gotten into a fight that went bad, pissed off the wrong person, or owed somebody money. Emmett didn’t know enough yet to point him in any specific direction.

  “Time of death?”

  “Last night. Between midnight and three.”

  “The riot had already started.”

  “Read about that in the paper,” Ufland said with a shudder. “Were you there?”

  Emmett preferred not to go into it. “It was my night off. Listen, Doc, I’m flying blind here. This kid was dumped on the train tracks. I don’t have the original crime scene.”

  “I’m not sure how much help I can be. Prior to death, he took a heck of a beating. He had bruises everywhere, a sprained ankle, a chipped tooth. What I thought was interesting was that he had about three pounds of steak in his stomach. Chunks of it. Partially chewed. The good stuff. We’re not talking ground chuck. That’s a lot of meat. Even for a guy his size. Maybe he won a supermarket raffle or something.”

  Webster’s address was in the Hayes Home projects across from the Fourth Precinct, where welfare families lived cheek to jowl, often sharing cramped apartments with a second family to cover the cost of rent. In Hayes, a freezer was a status symbol. Women cooked on antiquated coal-or wood-burning stoves because the landlords refused to upgrade, and tenants ate their meals with a can of insect spray within reach. Rats and roaches added to the number of mouths to feed. Emmett doubted that Ambrose Webster would ever have tasted steak, let alone eaten three whole pounds of it.

  “Almost forgot. The leg wasn’t all he was missing.”

  Ufland raised Webster’s left arm, holding the hand aloft. The pointer finger was gone, cleanly cut at the base of the knuckle. The incident in the tunnel with the pigeon had prevented Emmett from noticing. Suddenly, a memory fluttered at the back of his brain, like a note being slid under a door. Before he could grab onto it, the doctor was talking again.

  “It was removed postmortem. Different knife from the throat.”

  Despite the gruesome manner of the murder, the fact that the boy’s finger hadn’t been cut off while he was alive was a small comfort to Emmett.

  “I heard that the guys who kidnapped Sinatra’s son were going to lop off one of his fingers to send it in as proof that they had him,” Ufland said. “Scare Old Blue Eyes into coughing up the cash.”

  “I have a feeling this kid’s family doesn’t fall into Frank Sinatra’s tax bracket. Any chance the finger was sheered off by a train?”

  “This is what train wheels do to tissue.” The doctor twisted the root of Webster’s severed leg toward Emmett. The flesh was mangled, ragged. “The knives that were used on the finger and the neck were sharp, not serrated. And the one that caused the neck wound had to be a big blade. See? There’s a single line all the way around. No switchblade could do this amount of damage in one fell swoop.” He demonstrated, drawing his own finger across his throat. It was too short to bridge the circumference.

  “The angle of the wound is upward. A nifty trick, given how big this kid is. That would suggest one of two things. The first would be that the boy’s attacker was bigger than him. You’d be looking for a guy pushing seven feet. If that’s the case, I’m glad I’m not in your shoes, Detective.”

  It was a sobering speculation. It was also far-fetched. Other possibilities spun through Emmett’s head. He doubted that Webster would obligingly bend over and allow someone to slit his throat or stand idly by as they stood on a stool in order to kill him.

  “And the second choice?”

  “Door number two: he was leaning forward or backward, affecting the angle of the wound. The degree would depend on where the killer was in relation to the victim.”

  An unwelcome image sprang into Emmett’s mind. “What if he was kneeling and someone came at him from behind? Would that be consistent with this wound.”

  A similar picture must have appeared to the doctor. He grimaced. “Yeah, that would work.”

  Webster’s huge stature belied his actual age. He was just a teenager. The idea of someone so young on the ground with a knife at his throat was deeply unsettling. Emmett’s shins were calloused from all the time he had spent in prayer, and he tried to think of what could have brought Ambrose Webster to his knees.

  “This body was in a subway tunnel, right?” Ufland asked. “Must’ve been dark. The finger may still be at the scene. It’d be easy to miss, especially if it rolled away from the body when the train took off his leg. You could go and check.”

  That wasn’t an option Emmett was eager to entertain.

  “If I found the finger, would that tell us anything?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Would be nice to give the boy back to his family with all the pieces.”

  Emmett was ashamed to admit that he hadn’t stopped to consider Ambrose Webster’s family. They might not have even realized he was missing.

  “Are you going to take his personal effects, Detective? Or should I save them for the next of kin?”

  Leaving the effects for the family to collect would get Emmett off the hook, if that was what he wanted. He could avoid any calls or make excuses, claim there were no leads, no evidence to connect anyone to the crime, which at present wasn’t a lie. He could let the Webster file wither and go cold, then investigate Vernon Young’s murder full-time. If he took the boy’s belongings, Emmett would have to deliver them to the family himself. He would have to face them with the news that Ambrose was dead. It would mean he was on the case.

  Dr. Ufland set a brown paper bag containing Ambrose Webster’s personal property on an empty surgical table, as if to remain impartial. “I have to finish this gentleman so I can get to my next customer,” he said. “Glad to have met you, Detective.”

  “Likewise. Thanks, Doc.”

  “You know your way out, right? It can be kind of confusing. An orderly once told me that the builders did that on purpose, so visitors wouldn’t stumble into the morgue by accident. Strange, huh? The things people think of.”

  Emmett knew the way out, his way out. But he couldn’t take it. Because Ambrose Webster hadn’t ended up in the morgue by accident.

  He picked up the paper bag and left.

  NINE

  The dispatcher on the police band frequency sounded bored. Since leaving the hospital, Emmett had been listening to his radio for signs of trouble and heard only the average chatter. The television crews that set up camp on various corners surrounding the Fourth Precinct hadn’t caused quite the commotion originally anticipated, so the responding officers from the Traffic Division were redeployed. Cleanup at the Fourth Precinct had commenced, and extra sanitation workers were called in for assistance. Otherwise, nothing out of the ordinary was going on. That was as foreboding to Emmett as the calm that preceded a storm.

  He parked on Boyd Street, a block between the Hayes Home Housing Projects and the police station. He had the ominous sense that this case was anything but cut-and-dried as the coroner had suggested, and he was intent on talking to Ambrose Webster’s relatives before the rally that evening, before any more trouble could start. Webster’s address was in the building closest to where Emmett parked. He headed, instead, to the apartment building farthest away.

  The Hayes Home Housing Projects was a small city unto itself. Spread over a five-and-a-half-acre hunk of land, its towering tenements and signature smokestack figured prominently into the city’s skyline. Up close, the compound was imposing. His years in the Robbery
Division had brought Emmett to Hayes on too many occasions to count, and he had chased and lost his fair share of suspects until he memorized the project’s layout, its blind spots, pass-throughs, and exits. There was no cover and no place to hide. Anything other than trash that wasn’t nailed down disappeared. The basketball backboards were stripped of their hoops and nets, the benches were missing slats, and even the trees seemed to be short on leaves.

  Because the grounds had more square footage of cement than grass, every noise was magnified. The rhythmic whap whap of a handball game throbbed through the brick ravines that ran between the apartment buildings. It was a familiar sound from Emmett’s past. Handball was a game he had mastered during his stay at Saint Andrew’s on the Hudson. On Thursday afternoons, the regular work assignments were suspended, and novices were given the run of hundreds of wooded acres as well as the softball field and the handball court. Playing had been an escape for him, an opportunity to sweat out the stuffiness of constant prayer and piety. He missed the game. That was all he missed about the monastery.

  Rounding a corner, Emmett came upon a group of teenage boys cheering on two friends pitted against each other in a handball match. They were whipping the rubber ball back and forth at lightning speed. The wall acting as their backboard was part of the building where Emmett needed to go. For them, handball was probably an escape too. Maybe not from prayer or piety, but from everything else. He would have liked to watch them for a while. He thought better of it.

  Emmett walked toward them at an unhurried pace, carrying the paper bag that held Ambrose Webster’s effects. He was practicing a Jesuit exercise known as “custody of the senses,” keeping the body, bearing, and voice under strict control. The dictum had dual purposes. The first was to cultivate a modest composure befitting a priest, the second to prevent the adolescent novitiate from barreling through the abbey hallways shouting their lungs out. The objective was not to exude confidence but rather to emit an air of placidity and self-possession, which would render a person practically invisible. At the moment, custody of the senses came in handy. It had been less than twenty-four hours since the riot, and Emmett preferred that the teenage boys not notice him. He glided smoothly past the teens, undetected, and went directly to a fire door on the side of the building, not the main entrance. When he was there last, the lock had been knocked out. It still wasn’t fixed.

  The fire door opened into a stairwell. From the bottom, the view up the staircase was dizzying. Emmett needed to go to the ninth floor, and the elevator wasn’t an option. When they weren’t out of service, the elevators ran in slow motion and were puddled with urine. The lightbulbs were busted or stolen, forcing passengers to ride in the dark at their own peril. Between nine flights of stairs and the elevator, Emmett chose the stairs.

  The climb should have winded him. He was too preoccupied about being spotted as a cop to pay attention to the burning in his legs or the reek of broken sewage pipes. Health inspectors in charge of enforcing sanitation codes were paid off by the landlords to overlook citations, so the pipes were never fixed, and litter accumulated in every nook and crevice, the trash facilities inadequate for the high number of tenants. The garbage continued to pile up, a testament to perseverance—the landlords’ as well as the tenants’.

  When Emmett got to the ninth floor, two women were chatting in the hallway. They passed the stairwell, then went into separate apartments. Once they were gone, he sped along the graffiti-covered corridor and knocked on the door to an apartment at the end of the hall. Nobody answered. Emmett knocked again, harder. Voices were echoing from the bottom of the stairs, hooting and shouting, toes bounding up the steps. Emmett assumed it was the kids who had been playing handball. He wasn’t afraid of them. He had the badge and the gun. What gave him pause was the possibility of a scuffle breaking out between a policeman and a bunch of black teenagers in the wake of last night’s fireworks.

  At the opposite end of the hallway was another set of stairs. The elevator Emmett had been avoiding was in the middle. If he was going to make a dash for either, he would have to move fast.

  He knocked one last time. The door inched open. Behind it was the forlorn face of Otis Fossum. Emmett had banked on him working nights and sleeping days, as he did when Emmett visited to try and persuade him to come flip through mug shots to see if he recognized Vernon Young’s assailant. Fossum had refused him flat out. Emmett was counting on Otis not to refuse him again.

  “Mr. Emmett,” he said with a drowsy sigh. He was dressed in a cotton robe. A hole dotted the sleeve. “Knew I’d be seeing you sooner or later. I’s just hopin’ it’d be later.”

  “Are you going to invite me inside, Otis?”

  Fossum heard the voices. They were getting closer. Emmett could feel them like wind on his neck.

  “I’m thinkin’ it might not be too good fo’ me if’n I do. Might be worse fo’ you if’n I don’t.” He let Emmett through and shut the door behind him as the teens crested the staircase.

  Otis was thinner than when they first met. His robe hung from his shoulders the way it would from a hanger, the fabric rippling at gusts from an electric fan circulating the hot air. The heat was packed into the tiny apartment as tightly as the furnishings—a pair of armchairs, a sagging sofa, and a kitchen table with a visibly uneven leg that was propped with matchbooks. Tenants paid thirty dollars extra per month on top of their rent for junk furniture that the landlords wouldn’t remove. If the renters got rid of anything, they were billed.

  “I know my manners and I know I should ask you to sid’ down, but part ’a me’s wishin’ you won’t be stayin’ long.”

  “I’m not here about Vernon.”

  “You’re not?” That made Otis more leery.

  “I need a favor.”

  Fossum chewed the inside of his cheek, ruminating. “You did me one, Mr. Emmett. S’pose I owe you for it.”

  Emmett wasn’t insulted that Otis didn’t refer to him as “Detective” or even “Officer.” Coming from him, dropping the title was a sign of respect.

  “I have a new case. It’s a boy from here, from Hayes. His name is Ambrose Webster. Do you know him?”

  “Project’s a big place, and I work nights. Don’t see many folks real regular.”

  Fossum led an inverse existence. He slept when the world was awake and worked while it slept, preferring the privacy that provided. His voice was gravelly from lack of use, his eyes unaccustomed to sunlight. Regular life didn’t suit him. Emmett thought that was why Otis looked so much older than he was. Fighting nature had taken a toll.

  “This boy, he was kil’t?”

  “He was, and it’s important I speak with his family and get some information from them. They may not open the door for a policeman though, especially after what happened yesterday. I wanted to see if you would come with me.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “There is no catch.”

  “I go with you and that’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  It was and it wasn’t. Emmett never had to notify the next of kin before. Vernon Young had no living relatives outside of a sister, who Emmett had tracked to her last forwarding address in St. Louis. When he called, the phone had been disconnected. He sent a letter and received no word back. Ambrose Webster would be his first. Having Otis along wouldn’t guarantee that the family would talk to Emmett, but at least it saved him from having to go alone.

  “I quit that place, the dry cleaner’s,” Fossum told him. “Couldn’t go there after what happened to Vernon. I work fo’ a floor waxing company now. We go into the buildings at night when no one’s ’round. The work’s not hard and you can’t mess up. Sometimes at the dry cleaner’s I’d burn the collars on the shirts. I hated havin’ to tell my boss. That’s what’s nice about this job. Don’t have to give nobody no bad news.”

  Emmett was about to deliver the worst kind of bad news. In all the classes he took at the monastery and the academy, nobody had ever taught him the right way
to tell somebody that their loved one was dead. There was no right way.

  TEN

  Otis Fossum didn’t utter a single syllable until they reached Ambrose Webster’s apartment. He was too nervous to talk.

  “I ain’t done nothing like this befo’.”

  Neither have I, Emmett thought. Saying as much would have sent Fossum running for home.

  “What do I gotta do?”

  “You knock and say you have a policeman with you, that he came to the wrong apartment and that he’s looking for Ambrose Webster. You’ve got to act like nothing’s wrong so they’ll open the door. Understand?”

  Otis nodded solemnly, collecting himself. He took a deep breath and knocked.

  “Who is it?” a female voice demanded.

  Fossum recited his line. “I live, uh, downstairs. This here policeman came to my door by mistake, asking ’bout Ambrose Webster. I told him he lived here.”

  His delivery was rocky, but it did the trick. The locks clanked and the door opened, three chains jangling between the jamb. An elderly black woman stared out at them. Only one eye, half her face, and a slice of her chest were visible between the door and the frame.

  “Where is he? Where’s Ambrose?” All of her toughness had sloughed off.

  “I’m Detective Martin Emmett. Are you his mother, ma’am?”

  “I’m his grandmother. What’s happened?”

  “Would it be all right if I came inside and spoke with you?”

  She hesitated, then undid the chains.

  “Thank you, sir. For your help,” Emmett said to Otis, pretending they weren’t acquainted.

  “That be all, Officer?” Fossum was reluctant to leave.

  “Yes. That’ll be all.”

  Emmett had wanted Otis there for his own selfish reasons. Fossum had played his part. Emmett had to let him go. Mrs. Webster closed the door and relatched the chains.

  The apartment was as small as Fossum’s, though tidier. A framed picture of Jesus hung on the wall, staring benevolently down onto a sofa with a lace doily laid over the back. The plumbing from the floor above had leaked through the ceiling in a brown stain, ensconcing the empty light fixture in a dark halo. In its place, a bare bulb hung from an extension cord. Faulty wiring was rampant in the entire complex. Fuses blew continually. Every month the fire department was called out because of overloaded circuits, one of a multitude of daily hazards faced by the occupants of Hayes Home.