The Lightning Rule by Brett Ellen Block Read Free Book Online

he was shot in the back. Obviously, he had been running from somebody. Emmett was assigned to figure out who. The odd man out in the division, he had no partner, no one to show him the ropes, and murder cases didn’t come with training wheels. Emmett was on his own. Once the crime scene photographer had gotten his shots and the coroner hadtaken the body, Emmett studied the vacant scene to see what Vernon saw: overflowing garbage cans, empty crates from the restaurant next door, and a chain-link fence with dead leaves enmeshed in it, nothing out of the ordinary. It was a discouraging start. Then Emmett noticed a light on inside the dry cleaner’s, so he rapped on the front door.
    The man who appeared at the window was Otis Fossum, and Emmett could instantly tell that he had witnessed Vernon Young’s murder. Fossum was terrified. He was in his forties, thin and lanky, and looked as if he had lived every day twice. At first, he was too rattled to speak. He was steaming collared shirts in a press, mumbling answers to Emmett’s queries, unable to meet his eyes. Emmett tried to earn his trust by telling Fossum about leaving the seminary, making himself vulnerable, careful not to say exactly why he left. He had used the story before. Much as he felt guilty for it, the feeling couldn’t hold a candle to the guilt of actually leaving. His tale convinced Otis to confide what had him frightened.
    Fossum had heard the shot. Through a back window, he had seen two men in the alley. Experience told him one was a cop. His gut said the other was a mobster, giving him double the reason to be scared. Otis guessed that Vernon had stumbled into something he wasn’t supposed to see, and the men had killed him for it. His instincts were correct.
    When Emmett interviewed the patrons and staff from the restaurant next door, one of the diners turned out to be Sal Lucaro, second in command to Ruggiero Caligrassi, a mob boss who ran the entire East Ward and commanded a huge cut of every piece of cargo that came through Port Newark, which alone was a king’s ransom. It was no coincidence that another diner was Frank Giancone, a detective from the Fourth Precinct’s Vice Squad. Their tables were at the opposite ends of the restaurant, however a waitress said she saw the two of them go to the bathroom at about the same time.
    Both men had stuck around the scene, assuming a friendly face from the force would arrive to escort them away, tell them not to worry, and to have a nice night. Emmett wasn’t quite that hospitable. Giancone got anxious and kept fishing for who they knew in common. Emmett simply took his statement, then advised him that he might have to provide hisservice revolver for comparison if the bullet in the body was identified as a .38. That sent Giancone scurrying for the nearest pay phone. Lucaro was harder to shake. His suit and his fingernails bore the same high sheen, and he had a dimple in his chin that seemed as though it was carved in by an awl. When Emmett asked him if he carried a weapon, Lucaro said, “Good Catholics don’t need to carry guns.”
    “Neither do bad ones,” Emmett had responded, convinced to his core that Sal Lucaro was responsible for killing Vernon Young.
    Vernon’s wallet hadn’t been taken, so robbery wasn’t a motive, and there were no signs of an altercation that would have led to violence. Vernon was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time as Otis Fossum had inferred. It turned out Emmett was too.
    What the newspapers ultimately printed about Vernon Young’s death was a single paragraph about him being shot by an unknown assailant and left for dead. Due to an artful smudge of the details, Emmett’s report echoed the article. For him, the irony of being a cop was that it wasn’t that different from being a machinist, like his father. The rewards were for productivity and speed. During his years in Robbery, he stamped out cases, closing them as fast as he could. Most of it was penny-ante