The Lightning Rule by Brett Ellen Block Page A

frickin’ house.”
    Emmett deflected the beam of his light from the body onto the officers. Despite his rank, he no longer had the status to threaten. A glower would have to suffice.
    “Sorry,” they muttered in unison.
    At the abbey, speaking ill to or of the brethren had been frownedupon. In Jesuit terms, that translated to forbidden. The other novices were four years younger than Emmett, and they had come straight from posh Jesuit prep school such as Regis, Fordham, and Xavier in New York. To them, his alma mater, Saint Peter’s, was a backwater, third-rate barn, and the fact that Emmett had arrived at the monastery at the old age of twenty-two made him ripe for recrimination, if not outright, then in furtive stares. Although communication at Saint Andrew’s had been conducted entirely in Latin, most of it clumsy and poorly conjugated, the subtlest insults were trumpeted like curse words. Emmett got them loud and clear, and they became louder in his own mind when he left. That taught him to think before he spoke and not to speak at all without cause.
    “Did you find anything besides the movie pass on him?”
    “A dollar and change and a house key. That was it.”
    The rattle of a distant train welled into the tunnel. The three of them turned. Emmett scouted for an approaching light and the darkness gaped back at him.
    “This route’s shut down, isn’t it?”
    Worry swept across the older patrolman’s face. “They said it was.”
    The margin between the tracks and the wall was negligible. If a train did come through, there was no room for them to step aside. Emmett was fast on his feet, but he doubted he could outrun a subway car.
    “You’d better cross your fingers they were right.”
    He knelt to study the victim. Aside from the bodies of his own parents, this was the second corpse Emmett had ever seen up close. Vernon Young had been lying facedown. That made him easier to look at. Nothing was easy about this body except that the victim’s eyes were closed. Emmett considered that a blessing, for him and the deceased. Tiny brown ants clustered around the victim’s eyelashes and at the edges of his lips. Emmett wanted to dust them away. He didn’t.
    “Where’s all the blood?” the younger patrolman asked. “Shouldn’t there be more blood?”
    Emmett had also noticed the absence of blood. He hadn’t planned to bring it up. He wasn’t there to give a lesson. This being his second homicide, he was in no position to teach the officers anything. “The legwas probably sheared off by a passing train postmortem and the dead don’t bleed.” He left it at that.
    “Oh, okay,” the patrolman said. “That’s some cut on his neck though, ain’t it?”
    Cut was an understatement. The injury to the leg was clearly the result of a train car. The slash across the victim’s throat most certainly was not. Knives usually produced scratches or lines on a body depending on depth. This wound was on a par with the mark an ax would leave in a tree trunk. The position of the body was all that kept the head from unhinging altogether.
    Rivulets of dried blood streamed from the gash, and the front of the victim’s T-shirt was stained brown from a geyser of arterial spray. The T-shirt was a size too small, and the pants, shredded by the train, were thin at the knees, earmarks of hand-me-down clothes. Emmett had gotten his share as a novice. When he received his cassock, it had been donned by countless others. The elbows and sleeves were frayed, and the stains of a million meals were embedded in the fabric even though it had been washed so often that the black cloth had turned an off-putting greenish gray. Novices were issued four pairs of shirts, shorts, and socks each week, purchased from army surplus for little more than a prayer by one of the lay brothers. The victim’s clothes had presumably been bought at the Goodwill for a slightly higher price and were worse for the wear. Mud was streaked across his chest. More