Free The Lightning Rule by Brett Ellen Block Page A

When?”
    “Two months ago.”
    “Are you the new coroner?”
    “New is a relative term.” He motioned to his balding pate. “How about you? You new to the department?”
    “Like you said, it’s a relative term. I’m Detective Emmett.”
    “Well, Detective, I’m Doctor Ufland. We’ll have to skip the handshake.” He was holding a length of entrail that he had been examining over the sink. He slopped the organ onto a scale. “Who’re you here for?”
    “The deceased’s name is Ambrose Webster.”
    Before leaving his house, Emmett had checked the phonebook listings. The address clipped to the movie pass in the victim’s pocket matched. That alone didn’t confirm that the body in the tunnel had been that of Ambrose Webster. Emmett had a strong suspicion that it was, though. While he should have been grateful for the lead, that the victim wasn’t a John Doe, he couldn’t deny the twinge of disappointment. Something about this murder was off.
    “Is he the one with the severed leg?”
    “That’s him. He was only delivered a couple of hours ago. I was going to ask if you had any idea what time you’d be—”
    “He’s done. I just finished him. It’s been slow today. The kid would still be on the table if it weren’t for this heat. If it doesn’t break soon, my coolers are going to conk out. Trust me, that would be unpleasant.”
    “I’ll take your word for it.”
    Ufland rolled a drawer out from a wall of individual coolers. Ambrose Webster’s naked body lay on a metal tray, his dark skin gleaming. His torso was thickly roped with muscle and unmarred apart from the stitches in the Y incision left from the autopsy and the slash across his neck that arced like a smile. His amputated leg lay beside its mate, the foot facing away, the knee turned out. Vernon Young’s body was completely different in shape and scale, but standing over Webster’s body brought Emmett right back to that day.
    The bullet the former coroner, Dr. Aberbrook, had pulled from Young’s body was a .22, not a .38, a fact that did little to further the case. All it established was that Detective Giancone hadn’t shot Vernon with his service revolver. He very well might have had a second piece. Like many a cop, Emmett himself also carried a .22 in a calf holster.Giancone could have had one too and discarded it. Lucaro was the likelier suspect. While he claimed not to have a weapon, Emmett didn’t believe that a mobster of his distinction went anywhere without one. Emmett had searched the crime scene thoroughly, sifting through crates of rotten food and garbage cans, dirty work that yielded nothing. He never found a gun. Without the murder weapon or Otis Fossum’s cooperation, the case stalled. His reassignment to the Records Room had convinced Emmett that he wouldn’t get another opportunity to jump-start it. Ambrose Webster had changed that. As Emmett stood beside Webster’s corpse, he had to remind himself that the dead boy wasn’t a means to an end.
    “Autopsy was pretty cut-and-dried if you’ll pardon the pun,” the doctor began. “I’d put his age at sixteen, maybe seventeen. He was in perfect health. Strong as an ox. Didn’t need me to tell you that. The laceration to the throat was what killed him, obviously. It was deep, down to the vertebrae. Could’ve taken his head clean off if the neck muscles weren’t so dense.”
    Dr. Ufland wasn’t saying anything Emmett hadn’t intuited. On the ride from his house to the hospital, he had been going over the scant information he had, hashing through various scenarios. Webster could have gotten into a fight that went bad, pissed off the wrong person, or owed somebody money. Emmett didn’t know enough yet to point him in any specific direction.
    “Time of death?”
    “Last night. Between midnight and three.”
    “The riot had already started.”
    “Read about that in the paper,” Ufland said with a shudder. “Were you there?”
    Emmett preferred not to go into it.