Michael Harvey - The Third Rail

The second shot I pul ed was of Hubert Russel, moments after they’d cut him down. The rope was stil twisted around his neck, and there was a smal tattoo, a yel ow star, on the side of his throat. I remembered it from the first time I met him, minding his own business at the Cook County Bureau of Land Records, thinking his life was just beginning.

I turned Hubert’s picture facedown and walked myself and my glass over to the front windows. The sparrow was back, hopping back and forth on its branch, eyeing me with a distinct measure of disdain. I cracked the closest window, and the bird took off. I opened it some more and felt the bleak fingers of a winter sun on my face. I breathed deep, let the cold air chil my lungs, and thought about Rachel, wondered if my phone would ever ring. Then I looked down the street. The black car was there, same spot as yesterday. I had run the tag, wasn’t surprised when it came back to the archdiocese. They seemed to enjoy watching me watch them. Or maybe they had nothing better to do. I didn’t know if the city’s holy men were involved in Hubert’s death. Every instinct told me no. So I believed. Guess that’s why they cal it faith. As for the blood on their hands from thirty years past, I’d leave that for Judgment Day and a higher authority. Until then, the men in col ars would live under the thumb of Chicago’s mayor. And that seemed purgatory enough for any man.

I shut the window and finished my drink. Then I found my coat and headed for the door. The weather had softened and the streets in my neighborhood were crowded, blessedly so. I walked up and down them until, final y, I disappeared into the forgiving crush.

The evidence room sits in the basement of Area 4 on Chicago’s West Side. Tucked up high on a shelf, about halfway down the length of the room, is a cardboard box sealed with evidence tape. Inside it are a sheaf of pages, dried and crusted with blood, found in the subway under Katherine Lawson’s body.

No one ever gave the pages a close read. Everyone, it seems, had a reason not to. The federal government was too arrogant. The city of Chicago, too complacent. And Michael Kel y, too angry.

If anyone had taken a look, they would have first discovered the material Lawson had copied from the “Terror 2000” binder Jim Doherty had with him when he died. A reading of the highlighted passages would have revealed Doherty’s focus on what the Pentagon cal ed the “subway scenario”: the introduction of lightbulbs fil ed with weaponized anthrax into a major urban subway system. Anyone reading farther would have discovered Katherine Lawson’s own notes, detailing the background of Jim Doherty’s accomplice, Robert Robles, including his two-year stint at Fort Detrick in Maryland, as wel as the lab’s own experiments with weaponized anthrax. Final y, they would have found the article Lawson clipped from the Baltimore Sun, highlighting the lab’s missing cache of bioweapons. Al of this could have been gleaned from Katherine Lawson’s notes. If anyone had bothered to look. Instead, the whole troublesome problem was stuffed into an evidence box and buried. Meanwhile, a few miles away, along a run of track close to where Lawson’s body was discovered, two lightbulbs rattled and hummed in their sockets, growing looser by the day and with the rumble of every passing CTA train. No one could predict when one or both bulbs would fal. No one knew for sure what was inside. Or what wasn’t. Like most everything else, it was mostly a flick of the wrist, a rol of the dice. And the courage to live with the consequences.