The Lightning Rule (15 page)

Getting into the Fourth Precinct was more difficult that morning than it had been yesterday with a mob of protesters outside. Out front, state troopers in full garb—light blue shirtsleeves and dark blue pants with yellow stripes on the sides—were lined up awaiting radio cars to patrol in. In the rear, a formation of officers was guarding the cruisers as they fueled up. Emmett elected for the front door because the troopers wouldn’t recognize him.

The station’s entrance hall was carpeted with glass. The boards on the windows made the hall dusky despite the lights. No one was around, not even the desk sergeant.

Emergency twelve-hour shifts went from eight a.m. to eight p.m. and eight p.m. to eight a.m., splitting the day. They were long hours, especially for detectives. Patrolmen usually worked five days on, two days off. Detectives often worked a day less. The end of the second shift was approaching, and Emmett was relying on those long hours to have emptied out the Homicide squad room.

“Hey, Detective.” Patrolman Nolan was bounding down the staircase as he was going up, happy for a familiar face. “You get a load ’a those state troopers outside? Talk about calling in the cavalry? I wish I
had a camera. Wasn’t it nuts last night? We had ourselves a genuine riot. Everybody—”

Emmett cut him off. “Officer, is your shift over?”

“No, sir.”

“Where were you assigned?”

“Back of the building, sir. To pump gas. I had to go to the john.”

“If you were assigned there, why are you standing here talking to me?”

“Understood, sir.” Browbeaten, Nolan ambled off.

Emmett had to be blunt. The narrow wedge of time when the station was deserted was his best shot at getting in and out unobserved. He would apologize to Nolan later.

Though the sun had only recently risen, the third floor was already agonizingly hot. Split by the stairs, the top floor was chopped into two cramped squad rooms, one for Vice, one for Homicide. Emmett slunk past his division’s door, prepared to dart into the men’s room if anyone was inside. All of the desks were empty, including his old desk, which was now home to the coffeemaker. He hadn’t been welcome when he was transferred to Homicide and he still wasn’t, so Emmett had no qualms about sneaking in when the squad room was unguarded.

Any of the four detectives could have been sitting on the murder case he was after. He had to start with somebody. He chose Serletto.

His desk was in the corner, facing the door. That way he could see who was coming and going. In a room full of cops, Serletto was too suspicious to put his back to an entry. His desktop was covered with paper coffee cups and unfinished reports. Emmett picked through the dog-eared piles, then dug into the drawers. Racing spreads and candy wrappers were mashed in among the cases. Shoved at the bottom in an envelope was Serletto’s diploma from the academy, stashed like an incriminating secret. Nowhere among the clutter did Emmett see any mention of a missing finger.

Hochwald’s desk was pristine compared to his partner’s and virtually empty. In the top drawer sat a single pencil and a string of paper clips linked together, the sort of thing someone assembled out of boredom.
Of the two of them, Hochwald was the brawn. Serletto did the talking and, apparently, all the paperwork. Emmett didn’t trouble with the rest of Hochwald’s desk. If the guy didn’t have a single notepad, he wouldn’t have held on to a file.

The other detectives’ desks were relatively clean, which gave Emmett an idea. Overflow of active and pending cases was stored in the squad’s standing filing cabinet until due to go to the Records Room. He rolled open the cabinet’s top drawer and paged through the folders, skipping any with female names. Evander Hammond’s body was discovered in April, Julius Dekes’s in May, and Ambrose Webster’s in July. If the killer was staying true to form, the report Emmett was searching for would have been posted in June. The files weren’t packed together as tightly as they were in the basement, yet the number of murders was greater than Emmett had foreseen. That was bad for him, though not nearly as bad as it was for the victims and their families.

From outside the squad room came muffled voices, getting louder. People were coming up the steps. Emmett shut the drawer and positioned himself in the middle of the room so he wasn’t near any desk in particular. The voices passed, going across the hall to Vice. Emmett realized he had been holding his breath. He exhaled and embarked on the next drawer.

The room was stuffy and he was sweating. His fingertips were sticking to the folders. He would have removed his jacket, but the seconds that would have taken were too precious. Diagrams speckled with wounds flicked by, a gruesome comic strip of the same man murdered by various methods. Some were shot, some strangled, and many stabbed. None were absent a finger. Emmett began to doubt his theory. Then, from the back of the drawer, came the autopsy of Tyrone Cambell, a seventeen-year-old whose body was spotted by a sanitation crew. The teenager had been rolled behind a row of garbage cans on a dead-end street, and he had a stab wound to his right inner thigh. On his autopsy report, the middle finger on his left hand was circled in pen.

Cambell’s file restored Emmett’s faith in his theory and shook it simultaneously. He had been so busy trying to prove his hypothesis correct that he hadn’t given much thought to the killer or why these boys
had been killed. In his haste, Emmett had forgotten about the quality of his thinking.
Give me a reason.
That was what the Jesuit priests from college would have demanded from him. He was new to the logic of murder, but in his experience with robberies, some thieves had predilections for certain items such as vintage records, teddy bears, or picture frames with the owner’s photos still in them, a quirk that made them easier to pursue. Perhaps this killer had his own predilection for a type of victim and for hacking off their fingers. Beyond that supposition, there was little quality to Emmett’s thinking. He had no evidence as to who the killer might be. Maybe Cambell’s file would change that. After Ambrose Webster, Tyrone Cambell was the most recent victim. His case was a month old, not recent by Homicide’s standards, but it was all Emmett had to go on.

He removed Cambell’s report from the folder, closed the cabinet, and made for the door, shoving the file under his jacket. The pages got stuck on his gun holster. He was disentangling them when someone said, “Got an itch you can’t scratch, Emmett?”

Detective Nic Serletto was standing at the threshold to the squad room, smiling under his thick mustache. The top button of his dress shirt was open. His tie was knotted loosely. Behind him stood Detective Larry Hochwald. He had fifty pounds on Serletto, though only a few inches, and his prominent brow branded him with a perpetual glower. Emmett hadn’t heard them coming. They had walked up with the others who went into Vice.

“Look who it is, Larry,” Serletto chimed.

“I’m lookin’.”

“Haven’t seen you since Jesus was a boy, Marty. You been hiding down in Records through this whole riot?”

“Not quite.”

“You back from the boonies for good? We’ll have to move the coffeepot.”

“No, I was hoping to catch the lieutenant.”

“Catch ’im at what?” Serletto smirked at his own lame joke. “Seems like you was on your way out.”

“I’ve been here for fifteen minutes. He didn’t show.”

“I coulda sworn I seen Ahern around here somewhere. Oh well. He’s a busy guy.”

Serletto was gabbing away amiably as a distraction while Hochwald scanned the room for anything amiss. It was a well-rehearsed routine. Cops lied for a living. Coercion was their stock and trade. Except Serletto and Hochwald couldn’t come on as strong with Emmett as they would a suspect. Serletto watered down his approach, swapping the typical bluster and bravado for buddy-buddy cordiality that couldn’t have been further from kind.

“We miss ya, Marty. No hard feelings, right? We should have a drink. Catch up.”

“Yeah, we’ll have to do that some time.” Emmett accepted the invitation as he crossed between the men and out of the squad room toward the stairway.

“Thought you were waiting on the lieutenant?” Hochwald said.

“Just tell him I stopped by.”

“Ay, what are we?” Serletto hollered. “Ahern’s secretaries?”

Emmett clamped the Tyrone Cambell file under his arm so it wouldn’t slide out from beneath his jacket, and said with a smile, “You don’t have the legs for it.”

The station’s front door was in Emmett’s sights. He was almost in the clear. Then the desk sergeant stopped him.

“Hey, Detective. You got a delivery yesterday.” The sergeant had just come on shift. He was lighting a cigarette.

“A delivery?”

“I had a patrolman put it on your desk in Records.”

“Thanks.”

“You ever get a hold of that guy you were after?” he asked offhandedly, waving out the match. “What’s-his-name? Guthrie?”

The desk sergeant was going against his own advice. He was snooping. With everybody outside gearing up for patrols, they were alone, and he was exploiting the privacy. Something was up. Either Ionello and Vass had learned that Emmett sprung Freddie or the sergeant was doing some digging on their behalf.

“It was the wrong guy. My mistake.”

Trusting that the sergeant wouldn’t mention his interest in Freddie to the arresting officers was Emmett’s real mistake. Given the havoc of the riot, he thought such a minor detail would have escaped inquiry. He was wrong.

Emmett went down to the basement to see what the delivery was.
Sitting on his desk was a wide manila envelope. Sitting at his desk was Lieutenant Ahern.

“I ran into your new pal, Nolan. He said he bumped into you, so I came down to check on how your case was going, and low and behold, you weren’t here.”

“Funny. I was upstairs looking for you, Lieutenant.”

“I see you got your crime scene pictures from the subway tunnel.” He drummed the manila envelope with his fingers. “What’s the deal on your dead body?”

Folded under Emmett’s jacket was verification of the connection between Ambrose Webster’s murder and three others. As he was contemplating the right words to explain, Emmett noticed that the desk drawer where he kept his clock was ajar. That was not how he left it.

“I’ve got a name and an address. Things are going fine.” He tried to brush off the topic.

“Any suspects?”

“Not yet.”

“Any witnesses?”

“None.”

“What about the kid’s friends? You talked to them?”

“The victim was a bit of a loner,” he lied.

“That’s not the definition of ‘going fine.’” Ahern leaned back in Emmett’s chair, making himself at home.

“The body was dumped on the train tracks and the victim’s guardian hadn’t seen him since the previous evening. There’s not much to work with.”

“It’s a damn shame how these kids are running wild nowadays.”

This was no simple platitude. Emmett could sense where Ahern was headed. It made his pulse race.

“Say you want to get a hold of a particular kid,” the lieutenant said, “but you can’t find ’em. The mother doesn’t know where he’s at. What do you do?”

Ahern was talking about Freddie. Sal Lucaro must have contacted him, furthering the misunderstanding that Freddie was the witness in
Vernon Young’s murder. Emmett heaved the lieutenant out of his seat by his lapels.

“Do you have any idea what they did to my brother? Do you?”

Lieutenant Ahern leveled a blasé gaze on Emmett. “This temper of yours keeps getting you in hot water, Detective.”

“Did you send them to my house?”

The addresses of policemen were confidential. The only way Lucaro could have gotten his was from someone in the department.

“Did you?”

Ahern lowered his eyes to his lapels, indicating that he would talk once Emmett released him, which he did.

“No, I wouldn’t send them to your home, Martin. That wasn’t me. But they were getting impatient. You can put me off. Not them.” The lieutenant smoothed his jacket and strode toward the door. “You give me that name, I make a phone call and this all ends.”

Emmett wouldn’t budge or blink or even breathe.

“No? Well, it can’t be Julius Dekes.” Ahern glanced at the desk. “’Cause that nigger’s dead. Your filing’s getting sloppy. There was no report in the folder.”

The lieutenant had been spying on him. He was probably the one who had turned off the lights the other night. Emmett couldn’t feel betrayed because he had never trusted the lieutenant, but he was surprised by how low Ahern had stooped.

“Maybe you should help me look for it,” Emmett proposed. “You seem to have a knack for finding things.”

That got a rise out of the lieutenant and he retaliated. “Do you wanna know why Director Sloakes moved you into Homicide? He pegged you for a patsy. College degree. Dropped out of the priesthood. He figured you for a head case if you couldn’t hack it in the church or at some regular job. Sloakes said you’d flip, get on the payroll, or you’d wash out, the perfect candidate to take the fall in the papers if he ever needed that someday.”

Emmett was reeling. Ahern’s spite stung, though not as badly as the truth.

“I believe that day’s coming real soon, Detective,” the lieutenant said, then he left.

The basement was silent. Emmett’s clock was no longer ticking. He hadn’t been around to wind it and the clock had stopped. He opened the drawer and turned the key until it wouldn’t turn anymore. That was all he could do to put time between him and the inevitable.

The sun was up, but Meers would not have known it if it weren’t for his watch. There were no windows in the pen and only one door. Immense industrial pipes protruded from the ceiling of the subterranean room, and the floor was made of dirt, so the scent of earth was strong, laced with a whiff of sulfur and the reek of sewage. A ten-foot-square iron cage of Meers’s own construction abutted the pen’s far wall. In the glare of the room’s lone light, a bare high-wattage bulb, he was examining Calvin Timmons, asleep in the cage.

Pacing its perimeter, Meers surveyed his new pet. Calvin bore no open wounds or abrasions that required tending, which was a relief. Meers had taken the utmost care in conveying the boy so as not to cause him harm. He had used a set of harnesses to get Calvin from the trunk of the Cadillac onto a padded rolling dolly and into the cage. Meers fashioned the twin harnesses himself, his being the smaller of the two. The thick leather straps would thread over his shoulders, across his chest, and behind his back where he connected his harness with a carabiner clamp and sturdy rope to its mate, worn by the unconscious Calvin. As slight of build as Meers was, the harnesses allowed him to pull great loads. He could haul his pets with relative ease as long as he had the dolly to reduce friction.

The dolly was ideal on flat surfaces, inferior on rugged terrains. That was where a sled’s rails prevailed. Meers had gotten his from a toy store. Crafted to be fast on slopes and take bumps, the sled was light. He could easily carry it with him for when it was time to clean up. He had made mistakes in the past, left messes that sullied his game. Over the last weeks, Meers had honed his skills, perfecting the routine with the harnesses and the sled. He had the technique down pat.

Then Ambrose Webster spoiled everything. Meers had wrenched his shoulder freighting him into the subway tunnel. The injury continued to ache. That aggravated him. And that was why Meers treated himself to another pet. This time, the boy was quick. The extra effort would earn out.

Meers usually rationed one per month, careful not to arouse suspicion. Patience was fundamental, as was planning, yet he felt shortchanged. Webster was a disaster. He was too scared to leave the cage when Meers raised the pulley, sliding the rear wall up like a tiger trap and providing him an exit. The rear wall of the cage was positioned to open onto an access hatch. Meers had removed the hatch door, exposing a gaping hole that connected to the city’s sewer system. The warren of tunnels that lay beyond the door was his hunting ground.

He had discovered the secret door as a teenager, thanks in part to his father. After years of overseeing the zinc mines in Franklin, the company Eli Meers worked for, New Jersey Zinc and Iron, transferred him to be a foreman at the refinery in Newark. The refining plant operated out of a behemoth warehouse the size of a hollowed-out mountain, spanning acres of land bounded by Brill and Chapel streets and the Passaic River, making it an island unto itself. Raw ore was transported to the refinery from the mines on trains or barges by the tons. Three hundred men labored around the clock seven days a week smelting the virgin zinc into metals and oxides, and reducing iron ore to pig iron for making castings. It was dirty, strenuous work that kicked black soot into the air and created a stench that got embedded into clothes, hair, and skin. Workers would finish each day at the refinery with their coveralls as filthy as if they’d been in the mines themselves.

Although the transfer entailed better pay, Meers’s father had taken
it grudgingly. He abhorred big cities, Newark in particular, and hated having to leave rural Sussex County where they lived. Eli Meers preferred the wide open spaces of the country and taught his son to appreciate the bounty nature had to offer. The day Lazlo turned seven, his father put a .22 rimfire rifle in his hands and took him out to learn how to hunt squirrel.

“If you can hunt a squirrel, you can hunt anything,” he had told Lazlo as they crossed a marsh into a hardwood stand in the predawn light. “Squirrels got the sharpest eyes, and they hear everything. Can’t even sneak up on a dead ’un unless you know how to move just so.”

From that day forward, his father trained him. Lazlo was taught how to walk Indian-style, to pass through a forest without making a sound and to traverse tinder-dry leaves as deftly as balancing on a tightrope. He practiced focusing his eyes without fixing on any individual spot in order to take advantage of his peripheral vision. That gave him the ability to sense every twitch of motion in a full 180-degree field of view. His father disapproved of sights and scopes for rifles. They cost too much, and a skilled hunter wouldn’t have to rely on them. Skill was the very thing that separated the hunter from his prey.

Before they moved, Lazlo and his father would hunt every morning. He improved at a rapid pace, to the point where he could distinguish the clatter of acorn hulls falling from the forest’s leaf canopy and the
whooshing
the squirrels made when jumping from tree to tree, a sound he would later come to hear as regularly as his own heartbeat. Lazlo got so good that he could pick off a gray squirrel on a beech branch from fifty yards, put a bullet through its head with a solid cartridge and not destroy any of the meat. Some of his fondest memories were of he and his father going home as the sun rose with rings of squirrels swinging from their belts like coattails.

Mastering how to clean the kill was almost as important as hunting. With squirrels, it was as simple as slipping off a sock, and his father had shown Lazlo the best methods for paring off the pockets of fat that would taint the taste. A two-inch slice from a folding blade across the squirrel’s hips and the skin stripped right off. The head, feet, and tail were severed, the body cut into pieces, rinsed in cold water, and set in
the icebox to chill. His father canned, pickled, dried, or smoked whatever they caught, and he had a special recipe for cooking squirrel with vinegar, salt, and cracker crumbs. It was Lazlo’s favorite meal.

There were squirrels in Newark too, traipsing over telephone wires and scaling windowsills, yet Lazlo and his father certainly couldn’t hunt them in the city. Lazlo was eleven when they moved, and every day, he missed the vastness of the countryside. When he contracted polio, his father blamed the infection on the city, the congestion, all of the different races that crowded it. He blamed Newark for making his son lame and fragile. And he blamed Lazlo for being weak enough to fall ill. His company paid Lazlo’s medical bills, but after ten months in the iron lung, Eli Meers took his son out of the hospital despite the doctor’s protests.

“If you’re meant to live, boy, then you will” was what he said.

Lazlo did live. However, he couldn’t gain weight no matter what his father fed him, and his left arm was permanently maimed from the elbow down. The hand had limited feeling, a feeble grip. Because two hands were necessary to hold a rifle, Lazlo couldn’t hunt with a gun anymore. Of all the side effects from polio, that was the worst. His father would leave him in their rented apartment a few blocks from the refinery and return to Franklin on his days off to hunt alone, abandoning Lazlo to his own devices.

With little money, Lazlo had only one place he could go: the public library. It was warm in the winters, cool in the summers, and he could linger there for hours in the silence, reading whichever books he pleased, far from his father’s indifference and the torment of his classmates, who teased him mercilessly about his ailments. Better still, he could take books home for free, as many as he could carry. He read rapaciously, devouring novels and history texts on a gamut of topics. His favorites were guides on hunting, especially those about big game. Lazlo imagined himself alongside the men in the books, stalking Kodiac bears in Alaska or rhinos in the Africa bush. He could practically feel the snow crunching underfoot or the sun shimmering on the plains. In his mind, Lazlo could still hunt.

His father left him to his books. He ignored him and barely acknowledged his existence even when, as a teen, Lazlo would limp to the plant on foot to deliver food to the men working the late shift. Collecting pails from the neighborhood wives and bringing them to the zinc works earned Lazlo two cents per pail. He had devised a method of stringing the handles on twine and slinging them around his neck, enabling him to cart a dozen at a time. The garland of pails full of sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, and thermoses of coffee clanged like cans tied to a car bumper, which embarrassed his father so badly that he would retreat to the foreman’s office to avoid seeing his son doling out the food. For Lazlo, that was a slight improvement over being ignored, and the money he received slowly amassed into an ample trust, funds he would eventually put toward his new hobby.

One day, after his deliveries, Lazlo’s father ordered him to go into the storeroom behind the foreman’s office to retrieve a ream of paper, mainly to get him out of sight. Lazlo had never been in the storeroom before. Boxes teetered in towers taller than him, and the shelves wobbled as though the dankness and lack of light had forcible weight. It was no place for someone his size. While struggling to heave the ream off a rickety shelf into his good arm, something in the dim light caught Lazlo’s eye: a set of stairs leading below ground level. He put aside the paper and followed the stairway down to an anteroom carved into the earth, an unfinished afterthought built to allow access to the massive pipes that fed in from the refinery floor to the sewer system. Between the blast furnaces, the slime catches, and the electrolytic baths for heap leaching, wastewater accumulated from the zinc works by the hundreds of gallons per hour and was siphoned into the sewers to run off into the Passaic River. The pipes plugged directly into a main sewer hatch the size of a door, and Lazlo could hear the water frothing and seething and racing through the tunnel behind the hatch. Because the pipes were active, he never entered the door, but he dreamed of what lay behind it, an underground world all his own.

Underground was where Lazlo Meers felt most at home. In his youth, before the polio, his father had frequently taken him into the
zinc mines. They would traverse the tunnels, inspecting the miners’ progress, the bright light of their carbide lamps blazing into an ocean of blackness. Lazlo didn’t fear the tight, dark quarters, quite the opposite. He found solace in the narrow mine shafts, where his small frame was perfectly in scale. There in the womb of the earth, he was safe.

When, years later in the early 1960s, New Jersey Zinc and Iron finally went out of business, as had many industries in the city, Meers read about its closure in the newspaper and visited the lot. The gigantic refinery sat vacant. The vats and furnaces and dross kettles were gone, sold for scrap, their parts melted down in similar blast furnaces and kettles somewhere else. The plant was empty apart from the echo of birds nesting in the crossbeams and the abrasive odor of sulfur dioxide that remained, intractable as the building’s girders.

Vandals had broken some of the vent windows at the roofline, letting in rays of light. Otherwise, devoid of electricity, the refinery was dark. Just the way Meers liked it. He went directly to the room under the old foreman’s office and found that the pipes leading to the sewer had been capped. The entrance to the tunnel was open wide. His secret maze was waiting for him. That was how it started.

Darkness yawned from the entrance now, spliced by the cage bars. The pulley door was trussed, well out of reach from Calvin Timmons, who lay sleeping on the mattress in the middle of the cage, beneath which Meers had installed a plush shag carpet cut to fit the bounds. Beside the mattress was a quart carton of whole milk as well as a paper plate covered in aluminum foil holding a half-dozen scrambled eggs and a pound of bacon. Meers didn’t supply utensils. They could be used against him. When he become more proficient, he would consider providing them to add to the challenge, though not yet. He needed more practice.

That was what Calvin was for.