The Lightning Rule (23 page)

Morning came on like a fever, a hot flush that awakened Emmett from a deep slumber. The bright light made his eyes pound. His shirt was drenched in sweat. When he sat up, his head spun.

“Just ’cause it’s Saturday is no excuse for you to lay in bed all day,” Edward said wryly, sipping coffee and eyeing him from across the living room.

“What time is it?”

“Seven. Here.” Edward wheeled over and gave him his coffee cup. It tasted watery to Emmett, weaker than tea.

“That was all that was left of the coffee grounds,” Mrs. Poole apologized, coming slowly down the stairs. “And I used the last two eggs to make that biscuit mix you brought home. They’re ready, if you’re hungry.” She was holding on to the doorjamb for support. As she walked into the kitchen, her limp was more pronounced than usual.

“I told her we have aspirin in the medicine cabinet,” Edward whispered. “She’s being stubborn. Won’t take it. Been driving me crazy.”

“Who does that sound like?”

Edward took his coffee back as punishment for the remark. “Woke up on the wrong side of the couch, huh? Just get her the pills, will ya?”

Emmett got the aspirin from the bathroom, popped one himself,
and went into the master bedroom to change into clean clothes. Mrs. Poole had made the bed, sheets tucked in to perfection. Her purse lay on the nightstand, propping up a timeworn photograph of a young black serviceman in uniform, her husband before his accident. Though he was gone, Mrs. Poole still slept beside him each night.

“I told him to wait for you to eat, Mr. Emmett. He wouldn’t listen.” She and Edward were seated at the kitchen dinette. She had set a place for him as well as Freddie.

“I’m not one to stand on ceremony. Even if I could.” Edward was judiciously rationing the butter he spread on the warm biscuit.

“Go ahead. Start eating. Freddie probably won’t be up for a while anyway.” Emmett put the bottle of aspirin next to Mrs. Poole’s plate. “Take these. You’re going to need them. He might be a handful today.”

“You mean Freddie, right?” Edward said. “Right?”

Mrs. Poole hid a smile behind her napkin. Because Emmett was suggesting that the pills were for something besides her back, she consented to taking them. “If you insist.”

“I do.”

The biscuits were a consolation for the tasteless coffee. They were delicious. Emmett could have finished his in a single bite.

Edward was stuffing himself and talking with his mouth full. “These are terrific. I mean really terrific.”

Emmett was happy to see his brother’s appetite returning. When Mrs. Poole put the rest of the biscuits aside for Freddie, Edward was actually disappointed.

“The kid’s a midget. He couldn’t eat that many.”

“I have a feeling you wouldn’t leave him
any
if it was up to you.” She wrapped the remaining biscuits in foil.

“Fine. Save ’em for the pip-squeak.” Edward gave up the fight and lit the last cigarette in his pack. “So, Marty, you off into the wild blue yonder again?”

That was where Emmett felt like he was headed, more of the infinite unknown. He had hit a wall with the murder cases. Emmett wasn’t sure what to do, and he had nobody to go to for advice, nobody except Edward.

“Come outside with me for a minute,” he said.

“What for?”

“I have to talk to you about that crabgrass.”

Edward coasted out onto the porch. “Crabgrass. Very subtle. You want the gun back, is that it?”

“No, I have to ask you something. Say I told you there were four dead boys, all stabbed a month apart, one in the heart, one in the abdomen, one in the leg, and one in the neck.”

“I’d say the crime rate’s going up.”

“What if I said they were all missing a single finger—the pinkie, ring, middle, and pointer.”

“Is it a gang thing? Some kind of initiation?”

“I can’t imagine anybody would want to join if it was.”

Laundry hung on the line in the yard. Pillowcases and towels cast square shadows across the sallow lawn. Even the crabgrass was shriveling. The drought would be the death of the entire yard.

Edward tapped his cigarette into an ashtray on the porch railing meditatively. Then his expression changed. An idea had floated to the surface.

“What?” Emmett asked.

His brother took an earnest drag off the cigarette, working himself up as though preparing to pull off a Band-Aid. “One time, these guys came back from the cathouses in Da Nang telling secondhand stories they’d heard from the marines stationed there. Said one of them was showing off, talkin’ big about how many gooks he’d killed. Some guy tried to call the marine’s bluff. So this marine, he took out a string and put it over his head like a necklace. The guys said they thought it was dried flowers, maybe one of them Hawaii things, the whadaya call ’ems, leis. Turned out they were ears, ears cut off the Vietcong, and strung like beads. What you said about the fingers got me thinking of that.”

A cascade of possibilities clicked into place. From the beginning, the severed fingers had seemed deliberate to Emmett, yet he hadn’t been able to puzzle out the purpose for their removal. The notion that they were trophies, the killer’s keepsakes, made a macabre sort of sense.

“Why did that marine kept those ears?”

“Sick as it is, I think he was proud. Wanted to remember what he’d done.”

Somebody wanted to remember Evander Hammond, Julius Dekes, Tyrone Cambell, and Ambrose Webster. What Emmett couldn’t get a fix on was why.

Edward finished his cigarette, having smoked it down to the filter. “No coffee, no food, and I’m outta smokes.”

“I’ll bring you some and more food if I can find it.”

“Sure you don’t want the twenty-two?”

“I won’t need it.”

“Will I?”

“You shouldn’t.” Emmett tried to sound certain, but he hadn’t been certain about anything the last three days.

“Hey Marty.”

“Yeah?”

“Where’s the thumb?”

“What?”

“You said a pinkie, a ring, a middle, and a pointer. Where’s the thumb?”

Emmett mulled that over on the ride to City Hospital. It was nearly eight and the streets were as desolate as if it were dawn. He wound up behind a patrol car at a stoplight. Protruding from each window was the barrel of an M-16, pointed straight up in the air, standing at attention. The department didn’t have that kind of firepower. The riders had to be National Guardsmen. Emmett was stuck in the middle of Bergen Street with nowhere to turn off when the patrol car unexpectedly hit the breaks, compelling him to come to a halt too. Both of the M-16s on the right side lowered, aiming for a bar with handwritten signs in the windows that read soul brother.

Without warning, the riders fired their M-16s. Bullets popped and glass cackled until the bar’s windows were pulverized and the casings were splintered. When the Guardsmen were done, the signs were gone.

“Kennedy ain’t with you now, you nigger bastards,” one of them shouted, and the patrol car cruised onward.

The daily papers and television news were fraught with images of
the Vietnam War. That was thousands of miles away. This was a block in front of him. A surge of mournful awe struck Emmett right down to the marrow. He let the patrol car get a solid lead, then cut onto another road the next opportunity he got.

Outside the hospital, a mass of people were jockeying for position behind an army green truck. A canvas cover arched over the flatbed. Guardsmen were distributing emergency food from the back, doling canned goods into the crop of upraised hands. Since the grocery stores were sold out and few in the projects had freezers, food was becoming scarce, as scarce as it was at Emmett’s own home. Though his household was desperate for food too, Emmett wouldn’t dare get in line.

A woman snatched a box of rice from somebody and a scuffle ensued. Two Guardsmen jumped off the truck to break up the fight. The others continued dispensing provisions. In their fatigues, the Guardsmen seemed identical to Emmett. Distinguishing them from the men who had just shot into a bar without cause would be like picking a single raised arm out of the crowd. There was no discernable difference. Their actions were what set them apart.

Emmett quickly made his way to the morgue. This time, the corridor was lined with gurneys. Sheets were draped across the bodies, stacked two deep. On some, the feet drooped over the sides, paper tags hanging from the big toe. Emmett wondered if the coolers had conked out on Dr. Ufland after all.

“I’m doing the best I can,” the doctor was saying into the telephone. “Yes, sir. I understand, sir.” He hung up with an irritated groan. “Stop calling me every five seconds and maybe I could do my job.”

“Do you have a minute?”

Ufland pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and squinted. “Detective Emmett is it?”

“That’s right. I was here on Thursday.”

“I remember now. That was that slow day,” he said with a rueful roll of his eyes. “You’ll have to forgive me, Detective. I haven’t slept in awhile. Twenty bodies in forty-eight hours tends to make a coroner cranky.”

It wasn’t the coolers that had broken. It was the riot. Three corpses on gurneys awaited autopsy, all males, all black. Buckshot was pep
pered into the flesh of the one closest to Emmett. The skin puckered around the pellets as though they were burrowing ticks. The second man had multiple holes blown through his upper torso. Dried blood was matted on the wounds. Large-caliber gunshots had ripped through the belly of the third victim, mutilating his body beyond recognition.

“High Velocity Double 0 ammunition. Not standard issue to the department. You see why, Detective? Every shell has nine or twelve slugs, each a third of an inch in diameter. Made mincemeat out of him. Anyhow, these three’ll have to take a backseat to this guy.” Doctor Ufland was referring to the body on the slab. He was young, white, with a single bullet hole puncturing his chest. “The police director’s been hounding me to get him finished.”

The face was familiar. It was Patrolman Nolan. Emmett crossed himself and softly said a prayer.

“You know him, Detective?”

“A little.”

“The crew that brought him in said a sniper got him. It was a through and through. He died instantly,” Ufland said, sympathetic.

Emmett regretted being harsh with Nolan the day before at the station. He recalled thinking that the kid wouldn’t make it through the weekend. He hadn’t.

“Is he who you’re here about? Did Director Sloakes send you?” The doctor began to get antsy.

“No, Sloakes didn’t send me. I had some questions for you.”

“As long as you don’t mind if I work while you talk.”

Ufland didn’t wait for an answer. He took a scalpel to Nolan’s sternum and the flesh parted in a solid red stroke. Emmett had to turn away.

“I brought some reports for you to look at.” He fanned out the autopsies from the first three murders. The papers partially blocked his view of Nolan’s body. “I realize you didn’t do these procedures, but I was curious if you saw anything in common with them?”

The doctor gave each a cursory gander, then flipped aside the skin on Nolan’s chest. “All knife wounds. Different points of entry.”

“Is there anything about the points of entry that’s similar?”

“Similar? No. What they have in common is that they’re precise. Here.” He pointed with a bloodied knuckle. “The knife went right between the ribs into the heart. On the second, it hit the liver. The third’s to the femoral artery in the leg. The victims bled out quickly, either internally or externally.”

“Doc, do you remember Ambrose Webster, the kid with the severed leg and the missing finger?”

“You find the finger?”

“Um, not yet, but take a look at the diagrams, at the hands.”

Ufland’s patience was wearing thin. “I see more missing fingers. So?”

“Doesn’t that strike you as peculiar?”

“What strikes me as peculiar is this many dead men in my morgue. I don’t know what’s going on up there. I do know what’s ending up on this table.” Overworked, Dr. Ufland was taking out his frustrations on Emmett. “I see what you’re getting at, and it’s a stretch, to say the least. This connection of a few missing fingers is tenuous. It’s a fluke. People don’t just go around killing Negroes.”

“You’ve got twenty bodies right here in this morgue that say otherwise.”

“Lightning doesn’t strike twice, Detective. It strikes over and over and over in different spots every time. Take my word for it. Better yet, take theirs.” Indignant, he motioned to the collection of corpses. “I’m too busy for fantasies. This is no place for them.”

Nolan lay on the slab in front of Emmett. The young patrolman who had been so excited about being a cop was now a cadaver, a casualty of the riot. Dr. Ufland was right. Newark was no place for fantasies, not anymore.

Emmett sat in his battered car in the hospital’s parking lot, gripping the stack of autopsies as though the answer to what he should do next would somehow be transmitted from the pages to his hands. His hallowed logic had landed him right back where he began—with no leads. He debated whether he should pay Lieutenant Ahern a visit, but his dignity forbade it.

He stuffed the reports into the glove compartment. It was so full the lid wouldn’t close. He had to take everything out to get the files to fit again. The source of the problem was the oversize manila envelope containing the photographs from Ambrose Webster’s crime scene. Emmett had completely forgotten about them.

There were twelve eight-by-tens in total. Because they were taken in the dark subway tunnel with its sooty walls and metallic track, the color snapshots could have been mistaken for black-and-white. The only hues that stood out were those of Webster’s clothes, his yellow T-shirt and faded blue dungarees, speckled with mud. Even the blood from his neck looked gray.

Rafshoon had varied his angles. Some were panoramic, others close-ups. The pictures had a magazine quality. They were crisper and more exacting than the average photo album fare, and the shots appeared
hauntingly posed. Ambrose Webster could have been a prop. The location in the tunnel had struck Emmett as strangely staged and inaccessible. The photographs confirmed that. It was an odd place to dump a body, odd to the point that it didn’t smack of being accidental.

Flipping through the stack of pictures, he was reminded of what Doctor Ufland had said about finding the lost digit for the family’s sake. Emmett studied each print to see if, perhaps, the missing finger was caught on film. The camera’s flash reflected as white on the rails and glimmered on the gravel along the railroad bed. He had to comb every inch of the photos to differentiate the flash from what might be the flesh of a finger. In the top left corner of one of the wide shots, Emmett noticed some sort of opening, a frame for a small door. He couldn’t make it out clearly. If it was some sort of passage, that might have been how the killer disposed of Ambrose Webster’s body. Emmett had to get a closer look, but he wasn’t going back to the train tunnel, not if he didn’t have to. Albert Rafshoon’s studio address was written on a label affixed to the manila envelope.

The photography studio turned out to be Rafshoon’s apartment on the lower floor of a two-family house. Nobody answered at the front door. Given the number of killings in the past two days, Rafshoon might have been away on call. To be certain, Emmett went to the rear and had to negotiate around the junk on the porch to get to the door. Through a window, he could see into Rafshoon’s home. Dirty dishes were jumbled in the kitchen sink, and the table was a haven for a month’s worth of newspapers and mail. Emmett rapped loudly on the glass, then saw motion inside. Albert Rafshoon threw open the door, winded and puffing.

“Sorry to bother you,” Emmett said, badge at the ready.

“Not as sorry as I am. I was in the cellar working and you scared the hell outta me,” Rafshoon panted. He wore a white undershirt, and were it not for his belt, his trousers would have dropped to his ankles. Foregone was the artistry he normally employed for covering his bald spot. His scalp lay bare and beaded with sweat. “Who are you? Whadaya want?”

“I’m Detective Emmett. You took pictures of a crime scene for me on Thursday.”

“You’re gonna have to be more specific than that, pal. Too many dead people this week. I lost count.”

“It was at the Warren Street subway station. Ring a bell?”

“Yeah, sure. A spade with no leg. So much for his career as a ballerina.”

Emmett shot Rafshoon a withering glare.

“What? It was a joke.”

“Well, this isn’t.” Emmett presented the photo. “I need to see what that is,” he said, indicating the corner section of the picture that showed the portal. “Can you blow it up for me?”

Rafshoon examined the image. “I’d have to play with it. Get it in focus. I could do it for you in a week.”

“No. Now.”

“Fat chance. I got six crime scenes ahead ’a you. My dance card’s booked solid.”

Emmett put his foot in the doorway. “It’s important.”

“And my paycheck isn’t?”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?” Emmett pushed into the kitchen, imposing on the man’s physical space. Rafshoon had to tilt his chin up to meet Emmett’s gaze.

“No, you look like you wanna pound me into a pulp. Which is why I wasn’t gonna let you in. You cops are always pushy,” he muttered as he led Emmett through his rat’s nest of an apartment, past miniature mountain ranges of boxes and hoards of books, and down to the cellar.

Red-tinted lightbulbs gave the basement an eerie glow. The walls and windows had been coated with black paint. Basins of soaking photos were arrayed on every available surface while drying pictures hung from string, similar to the laundry on the line in Emmett’s backyard.

“Lemme dig out the shot.” Rafshoon rooted through a tottering stack of four-by-five negatives encased in glassine envelopes. Numbers were scrawled on each with a grease pencil.

“That’s some filing system you’ve got, Albert.”

“Pushy and a smart-ass. A winning combination,” he grumbled, thumbing through the pile. “Ah, here it is.”

“So what’s next?” Emmett wanted to spur the process along. The
chemical fumes felt like a balloon being inflated inside his head. The smell could have given him a hangover.

“Hold your horses. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

No city was ever built in a day, Emmett thought, but it had taken less than three to bring Newark to its knees.

“We gotta put the negative into a holder, then we put the holder in the enlarger, and then we get everything lined up just right.” Rafshoon went step by step as though he was explaining how to bake a pie. He fed the negative into a machine that resembled a drill press, tinkered with some knobs and levers to position it, and switched on a timer. A bright light was projected through the image onto a sheet of paper.

“There she is. Snug as a bug in a rug.” The timer ticked breathlessly. Rafshoon tried to fill the vacuum in the conversation. “You hear that the White Sox signed Aurelio Monteagudo?”

Emmett put a hand on his hip, uninterested.

“Not a baseball fan. Okay.”

The timer halted and the enlarger light clicked off. Rafshoon transferred the blank page to a tray of liquid and swished it from side to side. Slowly, an image began to emerge. Emmett leaned in to get a peek, but Rafshoon snatched the paper with tongs and moved it to another tray.

“Have to put it in the fixing solution,” he said.

Emmett elbowed him aside so he could see what was developing. Sloshing in the solution was the image of the gray tunnel wall. At the center, clear as day, was an access door. Emmett’s elation was overrun by a wriggling sense of fear. He would have to reenter the subway tunnel. He broke for the stairs.

“What about the picture?” Rafshoon was rinsing the print under a stream of water.

“I saw what I needed to see.”

Rafshoon dropped the photo into the water with a splash. “Typical cop.”

Typical was exactly how these murders were meant to seem—another black teenager dead, one of many stabbed over drugs, gang territory, or less, nothing that would arouse concern, nothing out of the norm. The devious precision astonished Emmett.

An alley, an empty lot, and a dead-end street, those were public, neighborhood places that would foster the appearance that the killings were local and personal. But Ambrose Webster had been left deep in a train tunnel, a remote location on city property. It was a break in the pattern. The door in the photograph was the clue Emmett had been longing for, however, the prospect of going into the tunnel alone to investigate had him hyperventilating right up until he parked in front of the Warren Street subway station.

The riots had shut down the entire transit system, including the subway service, further derailing the city. A sign outside said the station was closed until further notice. The entry was locked. Emmett’s stomach caved. To get in, he would have to go through the opening of the train tunnel that was one street over, off Wilsey. He got the flashlight from under the front seat of his car, grateful that he hadn’t returned it to the station house, and started walking.

The New Jersey Institute of Technology dominated the blocks surrounding the subway station. Less a campus than a collection of brick monoliths, the school could have passed for some corporate headquarters. Emmett had always envisioned Edward attending college there, studying to be an engineer or some kind of scientist. He had the brain for it, the talent. Of the two of them, Edward had the most potential. What tripped him up were his own choices. He didn’t have to take a job at Westinghouse just because their father had and he didn’t have to enlist in the army. He could have applied for a scholarship as Emmett did or waited until the draft. Would that have changed the outcome, Emmett would never know. He was sure, however, that his prayers had been answered. That day by the river when Edward came close to drowning, Emmett had begged God to give him his brother back, and God had. Now Edward would be his responsibility for the rest of their lives, proof that prayer worked. It worked better than Emmett expected it to.

As he stood at the yawning mouth of the tunnel, he raked his memory for a prayer to ward off his apprehensions. Nothing came to mind. He took a big breath, as if he was about to dive into a pool, and stepped into the tunnel’s chasm.

The flashlight carved a shallow channel into the gloom, and darkness
closed in behind him. The musty odor of diesel fumes from the trains was as thick as incense. Emmett would have to make it to the station and continue on to get to the point where the access door appeared in the photograph. He was counting on the station lights being lit. They weren’t. The flashlight’s beam shined off of the pale tiles, the concrete platform, and the iron struts between the tracks. It was the halfway mark. Emmett had farther to go.

His pulse was outpacing his footsteps. He could have run—nobody was there to see him—except the restraint required not to run kept the anxiety corked in his ribs. He trained the flashlight on the left side of the tunnel where he had seen the door in the picture. The wall went on and on, uninterrupted, and Emmett began to doubt himself, questioning if the image had been inverted in the developing process. He visualized the actual crime scene, how Ambrose Webster’s head was tipped to the side and how his torso was lumped across the tracks. Emmett realized he had passed the very spot where the body had lain. Then he saw it, a squat, industrial door, as wide as it was tall, inset into the cement. It was like something from a submarine. When he tried the handle, the door opened toward him, releasing a walloping stench. Gagging, Emmett had to step away. The smell confirmed that the door connected to the city’s sewer system.

Once he caught his breath, he shined the flashlight inside. The beam illuminated a narrow corridor. It was an offshoot from a larger pipe some yards in, where water was burbling over mounds of sludge. A pair of grooves were rutted into the mud, running from the main pipe up the shaft to the door where Emmett stood, a clear trail.

Ambrose Webster weighed close to three hundred pounds. How anybody could have carried him anywhere, alive or dead, had been a riddle to Emmett. But Webster hadn’t been carried. He had been dragged on some sort of cart. Lying prone, he would have fit through the scaled-down door, then he could have been rolled off whatever the apparatus was and left on the rails. That was how Webster’s body had gotten on the subway tracks. How he had gotten into the sewers was a different matter.

The smell and the strain on his nerves were becoming too much for
Emmett. Light-headedness was setting in. He ran along the tracks until he burst from the tunnel’s jaw into daylight, choking on the fresh air. Whoever killed Ambrose Webster had braved the vile, claustrophobic sewers. That made him a stronger man than Emmett, and that was as petrifying to him as the tunnel.