“Don’t knock it ’til you try it,” Coletti said as he placed a can on the plate and reached into his pocket for salt and pepper packets.

As the spaghetti began to simmer, he added his secret ingredient—a packet of liquid garlic from Papa John’s pizza.

“Sure you don’t want some?” Coletti asked while emptying the concoction into a scarred plastic Tupperware bowl.

Mann’s nose wrinkled as the smell of it assaulted his senses. “How can you be Italian and mess up spaghetti?”

Coletti dug into the mushy mess with a plastic fork from Wendy’s. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said as he jammed the fork into his mouth.

Mann shook his head before going through the folders. The first contained a picture of the Confessional Murders in the blood-spattered cathedral. The second contained a picture of a dead man in a bathroom. The third contained a picture of a body on steps, its face frozen in agony. The fourth looked like a gangland hit, and the fifth contained a picture of a woman on a kitchen table with a hole in her chest and candles surrounding her body.

“These are gruesome,” Mann said, going back through the folders again. “Three of them have nothing to do with these murders, but two of them match the dates on Sandy’s walls.”

Coletti put down the spaghetti and rounded the desk. “Which ones?”

“The Confessional Murders and this one,” Mann said, pointing to the incident report from the Petrov case.

Coletti looked like he’d seen a ghost when he saw the three-and-a-half-year-old pictures. There was no more joking, no more playfulness, only a face filled with regret.

Slowly, he shuffled back to his seat and flopped down, as though the weight of the world was on his shoulders.

“I’d almost forgotten about the Petrov case,” Coletti said, his voice mournful.

“Maybe I just didn’t want to remember.”

Mann looked down at the file and quickly scanned some of the court transcripts. “It looks like an open-and-shut case,” he said. “You had footprints at the scene, a confession, a record of domestic violence—”

“I had fifteen people who said the guy was somewhere else when it happened,” Coletti said. “I had his cousin telling everyone I was trying to railroad him.”

“Were you?”

Coletti paused. He bit his fingernails. He looked at everything in the room to avoid Mann’s eyes. “You know, Charlie, when I started in homicide, you couldn’t kill someone and get away with it in Philadelphia,” he said wistfully. “We had a ninety-five-percent closure rate. Now, it’s a little more than half that. Know why? We’ve got a thousand rules and the criminals don’t have any. It’s like fighting with one hand tied behind your back.”

“We still have to get it right,” Mann said.