Free The Lightning Rule by Brett Ellen Block Page B

“It was my night off. Listen, Doc, I’m flying blind here. This kid was dumped on the train tracks. I don’t have the original crime scene.”
    “I’m not sure how much help I can be. Prior to death, he took a heck of a beating. He had bruises everywhere, a sprained ankle, a chipped tooth. What I thought was interesting was that he had about three pounds of steak in his stomach. Chunks of it. Partially chewed. Thegood stuff. We’re not talking ground chuck. That’s a lot of meat. Even for a guy his size. Maybe he won a supermarket raffle or something.”
    Webster’s address was in the Hayes Home projects across from the Fourth Precinct, where welfare families lived cheek to jowl, often sharing cramped apartments with a second family to cover the cost of rent. In Hayes, a freezer was a status symbol. Women cooked on antiquated coal-or wood-burning stoves because the landlords refused to upgrade, and tenants ate their meals with a can of insect spray within reach. Rats and roaches added to the number of mouths to feed. Emmett doubted that Ambrose Webster would ever have tasted steak, let alone eaten three whole pounds of it.
    “Almost forgot. The leg wasn’t all he was missing.”
    Ufland raised Webster’s left arm, holding the hand aloft. The pointer finger was gone, cleanly cut at the base of the knuckle. The incident in the tunnel with the pigeon had prevented Emmett from noticing. Suddenly, a memory fluttered at the back of his brain, like a note being slid under a door. Before he could grab onto it, the doctor was talking again.
    “It was removed postmortem. Different knife from the throat.”
    Despite the gruesome manner of the murder, the fact that the boy’s finger hadn’t been cut off while he was alive was a small comfort to Emmett.
    “I heard that the guys who kidnapped Sinatra’s son were going to lop off one of his fingers to send it in as proof that they had him,” Ufland said. “Scare Old Blue Eyes into coughing up the cash.”
    “I have a feeling this kid’s family doesn’t fall into Frank Sinatra’s tax bracket. Any chance the finger was sheered off by a train?”
    “This is what train wheels do to tissue.” The doctor twisted the root of Webster’s severed leg toward Emmett. The flesh was mangled, ragged. “The knives that were used on the finger and the neck were sharp, not serrated. And the one that caused the neck wound had to be a big blade. See? There’s a single line all the way around. No switchblade could do this amount of damage in one fell swoop.” He demonstrated, drawing his own finger across his throat. It was too short to bridge the circumference.
    “The angle of the wound is upward. A nifty trick, given how big thiskid is. That would suggest one of two things. The first would be that the boy’s attacker was bigger than him. You’d be looking for a guy pushing seven feet. If that’s the case, I’m glad I’m not in your shoes, Detective.”
    It was a sobering speculation. It was also far-fetched. Other possibilities spun through Emmett’s head. He doubted that Webster would obligingly bend over and allow someone to slit his throat or stand idly by as they stood on a stool in order to kill him.
    “And the second choice?”
    “Door number two: he was leaning forward or backward, affecting the angle of the wound. The degree would depend on where the killer was in relation to the victim.”
    An unwelcome image sprang into Emmett’s mind. “What if he was kneeling and someone came at him from behind? Would that be consistent with this wound.”
    A similar picture must have appeared to the doctor. He grimaced. “Yeah, that would work.”
    Webster’s huge stature belied his actual age. He was just a teenager. The idea of someone so young on the ground with a knife at his throat was deeply unsettling. Emmett’s shins were calloused from all the time he had spent in prayer, and he tried to think of what could have brought Ambrose Webster to his knees.
    “This body