The Lightning Rule

by Brett Ellen Block

  All of the windows and walls were tilted, and the floors pitched unevenly. The building’s foundation had gone soft on the right side. Someday soon, the structure would collapse. Emmett said a prayer that “someday” wasn’t that day.

  “Who’s this?” Cyril demanded, getting in Fossum’s face. “Where’s your badge, nigga?”

  A cautionary glance from Emmett silenced him, though he continued to hover close to Otis, straining like a dog at the end of its tether. Across the room, a woman was lying on a love seat, legs swung across the armrest, eyelids drooping. Cigarette burns stippled the seat cushions. The argument Emmett had heard through the door must have been one-sided. The woman was too strung out to stay awake.

  “Are you Freddie Guthrie’s mother, ma’am?”

  “Who wants to know?” she singsonged, a bottle of beer held loosely in her hand.

  “Act right, Lossie. I told you, this is the cops.”

  “I have to speak to your son, Mrs. Guthrie.”

  She hummed to herself and was on the verge of dozing off when Cyril slapped her shin. “Wake up. Tell him what he needs so he can leave.”

  Lossie Guthrie was thin, her eyes sunken and hollow. The silhouette of her ribs pressed through her chest. She had slept in her clothes. “Come again, Officer?” she said.

  “Your son, Freddie. Can you tell me where he is?”

  “You should know.”

  Emmett didn’t understand.

  “Don’t you cops know everything?” She said that as though the answer was a given. “He’s in jail. Got picked up yesterday. He had one phone call. And he called me, his mama,” Lossie boasted, then the beer bottle slipped from her grasp and spilled everywhere. She watched the beer seep across the floor, puzzled. Cyril was about to boil over. He hadn’t thought to get dressed.

  “Did you post his bail, ma’am?”

  “Not on your life,” Cyril growled.

  “Didn’t have the money,” Otis said under his breath.

  That snapped the tether. Cyril lunged at him and grabbed Fossum by the collar. Plaster dust puffed from his shirt. As Cyril cocked his right hand, Emmett kicked him in the back of the knee, dropping him to the floor in a heap. Pain made Cyril curl into a ball. The spilled beer soaked into his boxers.

  Emmett hustled Fossum toward the door. “What happened to you keeping quiet?”

  “I got the not runnin’ part right.”

  “You’re going home now, Otis. And don’t argue with me.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, Mr. Emmett.”

  This time, Fossum wasn’t tempted to glance over his shoulder. Emmett was, though. He stole a final look at Lossie Guthrie. Contrary to what she believed, the police didn’t know everything, not even close. Ambrose Webster had been dead for less than a day and Emmett had no clues, no witnesses, and no leads, and the only person who might have an idea of Webster’s whereabouts was in jail.

  Lossie was humming a lullaby and watching Cyril writhe. Emmett couldn’t tell if the lullaby was for him or for herself. He was positive it wasn’t for her son, Freddie.

  THIRTEEN

  The Fourth Precinct could have passed for a condemned building. With plywood boards covering the ground-floor windows, burn marks on the brick, and last night’s spent ammunition of trash and broken bottles strewn across the sidewalks, the only sign that it was an operating police station were the cops out front.

  Patrolmen stood watch at the entrance, more for effect than any real function. They milled around the steps, smoking, talking, and baking under the vicious sun, their faces and forearms burnt red. A television crew had staked a plot directly across from the precinct, and the cameraman was killing time, tinkering with a tripod while a reporter in a wrinkled summer-weight suit was testing out the best angles. The crew had been on the block for so long that they ceased to interest passersby. Although the protest rally was hours away, the sense that something big was about to take place had diminished, the previous night’s uproar a fading thought.

  Emmett hadn’t intended to return to the station that day, however he needed to get the scoop on Freddie Guthrie’s charges, and something was tapping at his conscience, begging to be remembered, a detail from a case that had recently come through the Records Room. He bypassed the front door and its fence of patrolmen and used his key to the rear.

  The light he usually left on in the Records Room was off, which immediately put him on guard. Somebody had been there. Emmett lurched through the pitch-black basement, brushing against shelves that appeared in his path like phantoms. The darkness was disarming. Blind, he groped the walls for the light switch, then the fluorescent bulbs buzzed to life, stinging his eyes until they could adjust.

  Three new cases were stacked on his desk, ready to be filed. Whoever had delivered them might have shut off the lights, force of habit when exiting a room. Nevertheless, Emmett checked the desk to see if anything had been disturbed. The drawers didn’t appear to have been rifled through. He wrote off the lights to happenstance, hung his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and started in on the top shelf where he had filed the most recent cases.

  The folder Emmett was hunting for was one of the first he had read after his demotion. It had been sent down from Homicide, unsolved. What had welded it into his memory was the fact that the investigating officers were Detectives Larry Hochwald and Nic Serletto, the guy who baited him. Petty as it was, Emmett got a certain satisfaction from the seasoned detectives’ inability to close the case. Their failure put him on equal footing with them, though Serletto and Hochwald weren’t men Emmett would ever consider equals.

  He ceased to feel quite so superior once he had read the report. The details were grim, and guilt over his gloating had Emmett wishing for the culpa beads he wore inside his cassock as a novice. Twice daily at the seminary, before lunch and in the evening, Emmett would stand beside his desk, bend and kiss the floor, then for fifteen minutes he had to recollect his actions and examine his conscience. He and his novitiate cohorts were given tiny notebooks in which to catalog the number and types of transgressions they made, and they were provided a string of culpa beads to be hung vertically on a safety pin by the heart. If a novice indulged in a particular vice, they were to reach into the cassock and move a bead from the top down, tallying their moral conduct. Emmett’s culpa beads were gone, yet he continued to keep a mental count.

  Although he had filed Serletto and Hochwald’s case himself, Emmett couldn’t recall the victim’s name. He had to skim through dozens of others to find it. Most were fraught with unintelligible scrawl or words slanting across the page because someone had fed the paper into the typewriter crookedly. Typing class was compulsory at the academy, but the two-finger method prevailed, and the sound of men pecking at the station’s typewriters could be heard at any hour of the day. The staccato metal clicking of keys, interspersed with the odd swear, had become the precinct’s de facto background music. Sometimes it sifted to the basement through the vents. Not that day.

  A pile was growing at Emmett’s ankles. Displaced folders began sliding across the shelf, pushing the next right into his hands. He instantly recognized the name on the tab: Julius Dekes.

  Clipped to the top sheet of the report was a school photo of a black teenage boy in a striped shirt, his hair grown into an Afro. He was smiling, showcasing the wide gap between his two front teeth. His shoulders were so broad there wasn’t enough room for them in the camera frame.

  Whoever had been in charge of managing the file—be it Serletto or Hochwald—hadn’t typed their portion of the report. It was practically illegible. Deciphering it would take effort. Luckily, the coroner had better handwriting.

  Sixteen-year-old Julius Dekes was discovered in an overgrown empty lot on Sayre Street by a vagrant scrounging for something to pawn. The boy’s body was badly decomposed and showing signs of predation. The autopsy attributed numerous injuries on the teen’s arms and legs to rats. It also blamed them for Dekes’s missing ring finger. When he first read that, Emme
tt had trouble believing a rat would gnaw off an entire digit and ignore the rest. That was the detail that had been thumping in his mind since Dr. Ufland told him about Webster’s severed finger.

  Emmett paged ahead to the line diagram of the human body that was included in every autopsy. On Julius Dekes’s, the ring finger on his left hand had been scribbled out with a pen to indicate that it was gone. Seeing that in black and white gave Emmett a disorienting jolt, similar to when the fluorescent lights had snapped on. He didn’t believe in coincidences. Coincidences weren’t logical, and this coincidence was more than just illogical—it was disturbing. Emmett read on.

  Numerous other slashes and circles dotted the human diagram, displaying a broken wrist, sizable abrasions, and untold rat bites. Cause of death was listed as loss of blood from a stab wound to the liver. The location was marked on the lower abdomen with an X like a treasure map. The weapon was listed as a large knife. Dekes’s height and weight put him over six feet and two hundred pounds, not as large as Ambrose Webster, but close, too close to be coincidence.

  The signature on the coroner’s report was that of Dr. Conrad Aberbrook. Emmett had only met the old man once, standing across a surgical table from him with Vernon Young’s body between them. Aberbrook had retired shortly after that, meaning Julius Dekes’s was one of the final autopsies he performed. The procedure might be fresher in the doctor’s mind or muddled in the haste to ditch the daily grind for the blue skies and golden beaches of Florida. The odds of Aberbrook recollecting Dekes’s autopsy with any clarity were an even split.

  Emmett could get a hold of Aberbrook by telephone if need be. What he would have preferred was to review the case notes. Hitting up Serletto and Hochwald for them promised to be an exercise in futility. Cops guarded their cases as their own private domains. Those two would have made Emmett grovel for the notes and never relinquished them. They would demand to know why he was interested in Dekes and would undoubtedly tell Lieutenant Ahern. Emmett couldn’t allow that. It was too soon. There wasn’t sufficient evidence to link Ambrose Webster’s death to Julius Dekes’s. Their deaths were similar—a missing finger, their age, build, and race. Emmett couldn’t go to the lieutenant with mere similarities, not if he wanted to hold on to the case. The second Ahern sniffed a connection between the murders, he would yank them from Emmett and toss them to Serletto and Hochwald. Emmett couldn’t allow that either.

  Logic told him the cases were connected. The idea appalled and intrigued him, like a riddle he wasn’t certain he wanted the answer to. Earlier that year, the media had been abuzz about the conviction of Henry De Salvo as the Boston Strangler, murderer of thirteen women from 1962 to 1964, and that April, Richard Speck had been sentenced to life in prison for killing eight nurses in Chicago. Those were big city investigations that had terrified the nation, multiple premeditated murders that hinted at a unique, new breed of killer. But Speck and De Salvo targeted women, catching them when they were unaware and helpless. Ambrose Webster and Julius Dekes were anything but helpless. That didn’t weaken Emmett’s logic, however it didn’t provide him with any leads.

  In Robbery Division, Emmett had come across repeat offenders, burglars who stole for a living. Tracking them was often harder than finding the kid who broke into his neighbor’s apartment or the woman who swiped bottles of perfume off store counters. The pros worked at random, and Emmett would be forced to wait until they struck again to pick up their trails. He didn’t want to wait for whoever murdered Ambrose Webster and Julius Dekes to kill again, so he would have to work backward, piecing together what he could from the file he had, which was relatively thin, just the necessary paperwork, along with the crime scene photographs. In the pictures, Dekes’s body lay among trash and thriving weeds, a miserable end to an all too brief existence. Emmett couldn’t permit the sadness of it all to sink in or it would derail him and his logic. He removed the report and stored the empty folder in his desk drawer with the other files that had been delivered so it would seem as if he shelved them, then he rolled the documents regarding Julius Dekes’s murder into his inner breast pocket where his culpa beads would have been.

  Ideally, Emmett would have taken his time to read the report thoroughly, but finding Freddie Guthrie took precedence. The desk sergeant would have the details of Guthrie’s arrest on the police blotter. A trip upstairs, beyond the seclusion of the basement, carried the risk of a run-in with Ahern, albeit remote. The lieutenant rarely deigned to come down from his office unless it was for his lunch break, when he would make a beeline for a cop bar on Belmont Avenue to have a gin and tonic and a sandwich, or when he cut out early to go to the house on Gold Street that had been set up as a gentlemen’s club for off-duty brass, no patrolmen allowed. Liquor and gambling as well as white and black prostitutes were available noon and night. Rumor had it that Ahern would play poker until the wee hours of the morning, and he was a notoriously bad loser, at cards and everything else. It was Emmett who was about to take the biggest gamble. He had two murders now. He had to chance it.

  The precinct’s front desk stood five feet high, a promontory of shellacked wood that was the focal point of the main hall. Presiding from atop it was the desk sergeant. A cigarette poked from the corner of his mouth. The threads of rising smoke caused him to squint his left eye. With his right, he perused that day’s newspaper.

  He acknowledged Emmett by way of a question. “You read this article about last night?” he asked in his distinctively husky voice. “Says, ‘Hundreds of teenagers began forming roaming bands. The youths were rampaging in the blocks surrounding the police station.’ ‘Roaming’ and ‘rampaging.’ Sounds like a movie, like Spartacus or somethin’, doesn’t it? Wonder who they’d get to play me if it was. Humphrey Bogart’d be good.”

  “Humphrey Bogart’s dead,” Emmett told him.

  “I’m just sayin’ he’d be good. So what can I do for you, Detective?”

  “I’m looking for a kid who was booked last night. Name’s Freddie Guthrie. Can you tell me why he was brought in?”

  The sergeant set his cigarette in a full ashtray, dragged over the blotter, and turned the page to the previous day’s arrests. “Says here, ‘Loitering.’”

  “Loitering? When was the last time someone was booked for loitering?”

  A shrug was the sergeant’s best guess. “I’m supposta keep track ’a that?”

  “Who arrested him?”

  “Ionello and Vass. They’re in Auto.”

  “And they made a collar for loitering?”

  “Like I said, I don’t keep track. What I can tell you is that this Guthrie fella ain’t at Central. He’s at Newark Street.”

  “What? Why?”

  The Central Cellblock was a way station for defendants due in court, ten cells for men and six for women, no lights, no toilet seats, and no mattresses, only concrete shelves that served as a bed or a bench. Few people spent longer than a night in Central, and it was designed so that one night would discourage a repeat visit. Compared to Newark Street, which housed four hundred male prisoners, most en route to state penitentiaries, the Central Cellblock was a deluxe hotel. Freddie Guthrie was a minor and shouldn’t have been detained at either facility. His being transferred to Newark Street didn’t bode well.

  “Why was he sent there?”

  “I couldn’t say.” The desk sergeant knew more than he was letting on.

  “Have you ever heard of that happening or don’t you keep track?”

  “Other people’s business. Not mine. You don’t see me asking you why you’re interested in this guy Guthrie, do ya?”

  That was a warning, a shot fired across the bow. The desk sergeant plugged his cigarette back into his mouth and resumed reading his newspaper. His position made him privy to the inner workings of the precinct, like a view inside a clock at the moving parts, however, seeing too much could get a man, even a cop, in trouble. Staying out of other people’s business was sound advice, advice Emmett might be sorry he didn’t take.

/>   FOURTEEN

  The name “Newark Street” was department slang for the Essex County Jail, a boxy building that had the look of a lead safe. At the front of the prison compound was a small, stately house that acted as the entry gate. It was the city’s original jail and had been erected in 1837, a year after Newark incorporated, confirmation that crime was a motivating concern from the earliest days. The house’s brownstone facade and gracious front door gave off an air of affluence and civility, but in the jail beyond, the occupants weren’t affluent, and nothing about the place was civil.

  A mesh cage encased the receiving desk. The heavyset prison guard sitting inside had an electric fan positioned a foot from his face. His uniform pulled across the chest, puckering at the buttons with every breath he took. “Visiting hours is on Monday and Wednesday,” he said flatly.

  Emmett proffered his badge. “I’m here to see Freddie Guthrie.”

  “That kid must be a star. You’re his third visitor today.” The guard retrieved the visitor’s log from a drawer, exasperated at having to move out of the direct path of the fan for even a second. “Sign in please.” Saying “please” was as close to polite as he would venture.

  The last signatures in the log were those of Detectives Ionello and Vass. They had been there an hour ago. Emmett couldn’t ask for details. The guard might get suspicious.

  “I missed the fan club. I was running late. Couldn’t tag along with my buddies. They told you to keep this quiet, right?”

  “I figured it wasn’t a friggin’ conjugal visit. What do I care about some stool pigeon who hot-wired a car or whatever. Let him rot. I’d put him on the third tier with the nut jobs if it was up to me, ’cept your pals said to segregate him ’cause of his age. Said to watch his hands too. He’s a pickpocket, got fast fingers. Came in packing a water pistol, if you can believe it. Pretty dangerous character, huh?”

  Emmett had been hoping for more from the guard. Ionello and Vass must not have shared much because whatever Freddie Guthrie was into involved them too. They had pulled strings to get him locked up in Newark Street. If their aim was to frighten Freddie that badly, they must have been frightened of him.