The Lightning Rule by Brett Ellen Block Page B

was caked on his shoes and flecked along the pant leg to the shin. Emmett panned his light across the tunnel floor. All he saw was gravel and dry dirt.
    “We checked for footprints,” the younger patrolman told him. “There were none.”
    “Guy could’ve walked on the wood slats in the center of the tracks.”
    “Or on the rail.”
    “On the rail? That’d be like walking a tightrope. What is he? One of the Flying Wallendas?”
    Emmett allowed the officers to carry on with their conjecture to occupy them. Normally, he would have told them to wait outside. Since he couldn’t tolerate being in the tunnel alone, he would have to tolerate them. He touched the mud on Ambrose Webster’s shoe. It was fresh.
    That summer’s heat wave had brought on a drought. The city was under water restriction. People were barred from washing their cars or running their sprinklers. Water was being rationed the way it would in a desert. Emmett thought of the previous night’s upheaval, the fires and the hoses spraying gallons upon gallons of water into the streets. The victim could have been at the riot. Emmett was more interested in where he went afterward.
    The lack of blood meant that the body had been dumped in the subway tunnel. There were no drag marks leading in from the station. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to bring a victim that large to that exact spot. How they did it, Emmett couldn’t begin to imagine. Why they left him on a train track where his body was bound to be discovered was equally baffling. The mud crusted in the palm and nail beds of the victim’s right hand didn’t make sense either. His being in the vicinity of the Fourth Precinct and the fires might account for his muddy shoes, but the crowd that had surrounded the police station was slinging mud figuratively, not literally.
    The victim’s left hand was tucked under his hip, indicating that he had been dropped without care or that the train that ripped his leg off had dragged him, twisting the body, impossible to tell which. As Emmett bent down to get a better view, a pigeon flew out of the darkness, wings flapping loud as applause. The noise startled him as well as the patrolmen.
    “Stupid bird,” the younger officer said.
    Emmett felt dizzy. His heart was racing. If he didn’t rein in his nerves, he might faint. He put his hand on the ground to steady himself.
    “Before you got here, dispatch radioed to say the photographer’s running late. You wanna hang around, Detective?”
    Newark employed one forensic photographer for all five wards. His name was Albert Rafshoon, and he would have shown up late even if he didn’t have such a broad area to cover. Rafshoon had rolled onto the Vernon Young crime scene an hour and a half behind schedule, waddling under the weight of his equipment, his thinning hair combed over his scalp in the expert swirls of an iced cake. What he lacked in punctuality, he compensated for in thoroughness, getting pictures fromevery conceivable angle. Rafshoon’s shots of Vernon Young were burned into Emmett’s brain more indelibly than the original crime scene. The lagoon of blood surrounding the body reflected the camera’s flash in every image. Had he been anywhere else, Emmett would have held out for the photographer, but the tunnel was breaking him.
    “No, tell Rafshoon to get the pictures to me as quickly as he can.”
    “Will do. Wagon’s here to take this guy to the coroner. Can we bring ’em in?”
    The body no longer interested the patrolmen. The thrill of the location and the severed leg had faded. They’d had enough.
    “Yeah. They can’t touch him until the photographer’s finished. Got that?”
    They answered “Yes, sir” in tandem.
    Heading back, Emmett’s pulse peaked when he saw light shining from the subway station ahead. He was leaning forward as he walked, like a runner nearing a finish line. The younger patrolman climbed onto the platform to confer with the coroner’s men, who were wheeling in