The Third Rail (26 page)

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 well as the lab's own
experiments with weaponized anthrax. Finally, they would have found the article Lawson clipped from the
Baltimore Sun
, highlighting the lab's missing cache of bioweapons.

All 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 fall. 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 roll of the dice. And the courage to live with the consequences.

A portion of the proceeds from this book is being donated to the Cambodian Children's Fund. If you are interested in learning more about the wonderful work this organization is doing, check out its Web site at
www.cambodianchildrensfund.org
.

On February 4, 1977, four CTA cars came off the rails of Chicago's L and crashed into the street at the corner of Lake and Wabash in Chicago's Loop. Eleven people were killed and pictures of L trains hanging off the tracks were splashed across page one in newspapers across the country. The cause of the accident was eventually determined to be operator error. For a good account of the accident, check out the
Chicago Tribune's
next-day story at
http://chicago-l.org/articles/1977crash1.html
. You might notice that one of the article's authors is a young reporter named David Axelrod, architect of Barack Obama's run for the White House and now a senior adviser to the president.

For those of you interested in the security of U.S. bioresearch facilities, work at the largest such lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland, was suspended in early 2009 because of concerns about the lab's inventory of pathogen samples. For more information,
see
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/.../AR2009020903511.html
. More than 9,000 unaccounted-for samples turned up in various freezers and lockers at the facility, and a criminal investigation was ordered. See the story at
www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/.../AR2009061703271.html
. For more information generally, Google "Fort Detrick disease samples."

"Terror 2000" was the name of an actual Pentagon report, issued in 1993 and never released to the public because the government deemed it too disturbing. Among the scenarios reportedly contemplated: anthrax being released in a subway and commercial airliners being flown into government buildings and the World Trade Center. See
http://old.911digitalarchive.org/crr/documents/985.pdf
.

The problem of fraud and embezzlement in the Catholic church, and specifically at the parish level, is a growing one. For more information, you can check out these links:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/us/05church.html?_r=1
and
http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=22413
.

For those of you who might go looking for a Bucktown coffee shop named Filter, don't bother. It's gone, but not forgotten. For those of you who might find yourself on Southport Avenue looking for an old, broken-down L station, again, don't bother. The city just replaced it with a brand-new one. And, finally, if you go to Chicago's Holy Name Cathedral for the weekday 12:30 mass, it actually begins at 12:10.

Thanks, first of all, to everyone who has bought and read
The Chicago Way
and
The Fifth Floor
. Hope you like this one.

Thanks to my editor, Jordan Pavlin, and to all the folks at Knopf and Vintage/Black Lizard who have provided me with such amazing support. Special thanks to Laura Baratto, Sue Betz, Jason Booher, Bridget Fitzgerald, Erinn Hartman, Jim Kimball, Leslie Levine, Jennifer Marshall, Maria Massey, Claire Bradley Ong, Russell Perreault, Zach Wagman, and Iris Weinstein.

Thanks to David Gernert for being such a great agent and friend. Thanks to Chicago writer Garnett Kilberg Cohen, who also teaches at Columbia College, Chicago, for plowing through a first draft and zeroing in on what was working and, especially, what wasn't.

Thanks to my family and friends for their love and encouragement. A special shout-out to Mal Flanagan. Get better, pal.

Finally, I'd like to remember Jake O'Donnell. I was lucky enough to call him a friend. We miss you, Jake.

That's it. Love you, Mary Frances.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Harvey is the author of two other Michael Kelly books,
The Chicago Way
and
The Fifth Floor
, as well as a journalist and documentary producer. His work has won numerous national and international awards, including multiple Emmy Awards and an Academy Award nomination. Mr. Harvey earned a law degree from Duke University, a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University, and a bachelor's degree in classical languages from Holy Cross College. Additional information can be found at
www.michaelharveybooks.com
.