The Lightning Rule

by Brett Ellen Block

  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.

  FORTY-TWO

  City Hall was closed. Not because of the riots, but because it was Saturday. The building was one of Newark’s crown jewels, a white, wedding-cake-style structure that was more regal than official. It was the last bastion of eminence in a city steadily degenerating into a slum. Emmett cupped his hand to the glass door and looked inside. A watchman was sitting at the front desk doing a crossword puzzle. Holding his badge to the pane, Emmett tapped on the door, prepared to plead his case so the watchman wouldn’t make him wait until Monday to visit the Department of Public Works.

  “You here for the meeting with the mayor?” the watchman asked. His hair was white, his hands gnarled and arthritic. He would have been of absolutely no benefit if ever there were an actual break-in at City Hall.

  “Yes, yes I am.” Emmett couldn’t turn down the free pass.

  “Third floor. Meeting’s already started.”

  “Thanks.”

  The vaulted entrance hall was as palatial as a Greek temple. Cream-colored marble columns fretted the walls, and a dome with a circular window at the center let the sun pour through the ceiling. A sweeping twin spiral staircase shaped like the f-holes on a violin led to the second floor. Emmett climbed the steps, making a show of his departure, then had to hunt for a back stairway. The Department of Public Works was on the bottom floor.

  Since it was Saturday, the corridors were empty and the door was unlocked. The city engineer’s office occupied the first of two small rooms. The second was a storage area. Emmett would have preferred not having to sneak in. He could have used some help sorting through the racks of long, flat drawers containing city maps and blueprints. One set of racks was for the gas lines. Another was for electrical, a third for water, and an entire section was devoted to the lengthy history of Newark’s sewer system.

  The earliest sewer maps dated to the 1880s, and the paper they were hand-printed on had grown tan and silky with age. Skipping drawers allowed Emmett to jump forward in time to the 1920s, when the city’s antiquated scheme of open gutters and runoff ditches was reconfigured into a complex network built to service twenty-two municipalities along the Passaic River, a span of eighty square miles. A few more drawers down and he had leapt forward to the present day. The current maps were so convoluted that he had difficulty deciphering them. From what Emmett could ascertain, household wastewater was funneled into the sewers through twelve-inch pipes, which fed into larger mains called trunk sewers that wove beneath the streets. The system culminated at a treatment facility, labeled pumping station, which was out by Newark Bay. Emmett recognized the place, a forgotten fragment of his childhood emblazoned on the map.

  Growing up, kids had referred to it as “the stink house,” and for good reason. The pumping station was where Newark’s raw sewage was treated. A perpetual funk permeated the marshes surrounding the treatment plant, an area that came to be known as “the dumps.” Undeterred by the smell, each spring many a citizen would make the pilgrimage there to collect mushrooms from the meadows or fish for eels in the bay. Come fall, bird hunters claimed the land as a prized shooting spot. They would retrieve fallen geese from among the vestiges of broken boats that would wash into the shallows after storms. In winter, children went ice-skating on the frozen ponds. Regardless of the season, the breeze off the marshes was tainted with the haze of waste, though it didn’t keep people away. During the summers, Emmett and his brother would head for the dumps and wade into the water, grabbing in vain at fish that were far too fast for them to catch, enjoying themselves too much to be bothered by the smell. Unbeknownst to Emmett, south of the pump station was what the map termed “the Newark shaft,” a cast concrete, pressure tunnel that plunged some three hundred feet down into the bay, like an expressway to hell. Even the diagram was intimidating. All those years, he never knew it was there. He was glad he didn’t.

  Emmett scoured the map until his vision blurred. Finally, he found the portal hatch into the subway. It had been added in the 1930s when the rail system was being constructed. Judging by the map’s key, the hatch connected to a submain that was sizable enough for a man to stand erect in. Unfortunately, the submain connected to several other lines in the sixty-eight-mile circuit of sewers that was linked to virtually every structure in the city, making it impossible for Emmett to identify where Ambrose Webster might have gotten in. According to the map, rainwater from the streets ran through a variety of pipes, some minuscule, some huge, but he couldn’t detect any freestanding entries and was hard-pressed to believe that Webster would climb into a manhole of his own volition. Emmett’s latest revelation was becoming another impediment. He was right back at the beginning yet again.

  Although he knew it was wrong, Emmett took the map. He rolled it tightly to fit under his jacket. Unlike the flashlight on loan from the patrolman that wouldn’t be missed, this was a government document. How he would replace it, Emmett had no clue, however, he needed to study the map more closely without the possibility of being caught. In order not to stir suspicion, he went upstairs to come down.

  “Is the meeting done?” the watchman asked, taking a breather from his crossword.

  “Not quite.”

  “Mayor gonna get us outta this?”

  “He’s trying.”

  “These niggers are screwing everything up. City’s in the crapper. What can you do, huh?”

  “What can you do?” Emmett repeated. The map was slipping from under his arm. A second longer and it would drop.

  “You have a nice afternoon, Officer,” the watchman told him, then he resumed his puzzle.

  A riot was raging through Newark. Having a nice afternoon was not in the cards.

  Emmett stored the map in his trunk and put on the police band to catch the latest. The dispatcher was assigning patrols to certain blocks to clear rooftops of debris so nothing could be dropped over the sides as artillery. Some were even requested to hold their positions to deny snipers from occupying them. The force’s best offense would be a strong defense. As soon as dispatch was finished issuing details, a distress call came in for an officer assist.

  “We got twenty Guardsmen and troopers directing fire at Hayes Homes. Somebody threw a toaster out a window and it hit a state trooper. A freakin’ toaster. Damn near took his ear off. We’re at Hunterdon and Eightee
nth. Send somebody ASAP.”

  Strafing fire was chattering against brick, audible over the radio. Emmett had to get to a phone. The building closest to Hunterdon and Eighteenth was where Ambrose Webster’s grandmother lived.

  He double-parked at a pay phone, but the phone directory was gone, torn out. He dialed Otis Fossum’s number because he remembered it. The line rang once and Fossum answered with an apprehensive, “Hello?”

  “Good. You’re awake.”

  “Even I can’t sleep through gunfire, Mr. Emmett.”

  “Otis, I need to reach that woman who lives by you in Hayes, the lady whose apartment you visited with me. Do you have a telephone directory?”

  “Nope. Got stoled.”

  Emmett wasn’t surprised. That was the projects. Everything from the priceless to the inconsequential was subject to theft.

  “When things calm down, could you go and see if she’s okay?”

  “I dunno. Of all the favors I done fo’ you, this’n is the only one that could get me killed.” There was a pause on the line. “I ain’t sayin’ no, Mr. Emmett. All I’m sayin’ is it’s dangerous. A guy couple floors below me got shot in the arm just standing at his window.”

  “That’s why I want you to check on her. Whenever, Otis. Whenever you can.”

  “I’ll do it, Mr. Emmett. I owe you for losin’ that boy ’a yours anyways. You ever find him?”

  “Yeah, I did. So how about we call it even?”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “Oh, and Otis, I took care of your problem. Once and for all. You don’t have to worry about them anymore.”

  The phone line went quiet again. “Thank you, Mr. Emmett. You’re a…a real nice man.” That was high praise from Fossum. “I’ll call your house. Let you know how the lady is.”