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.