Mann sighed deeply as the painful memories came flooding back. “When I was seven, my dad lost his job making truck parts at Budd, and things got tight. First he got a job at McDonald’s at Broad and Hunting Park. I still remember the other kids laughing about that. Then he got a job at the car wash on Broad Street, but the manager flew a Confederate flag on his SUV, so that didn’t last either.

“When the landlord came around with a final notice on the rent, my father tried selling the only thing that seemed to move in our neighborhood—crack. My mother begged him to stop. She said we could make it on her waitress job if she just worked a few extra shifts. My dad wouldn’t listen. He just kept telling her he wasn’t going to see his family on the street. For the next fourteen days, he stood on a corner making five hundred dollars a day. On the fifteenth day, they shot him in the back.”

Mann paused as his voice caught in his throat. “At the funeral, my mom told me I was all she had left. She made me promise to go to school. I did, and I found out I was pretty good at it. Got a scholarship to Temple, went to Wharton for my master’s, and threw away all that good education to be a cop. I guess after what happened to my dad, I knew that’s what I wanted to be. I thought maybe, in some small way, I could make a difference for the next little boy whose father was murdered.”

“Did they ever lock up the guy who shot your father?”

Mann shook his head no. “It’s hard to get witnesses at Broad and Butler. They’ve seen dead kids carried out of firebombed houses and witnesses beaten with bats. There were people who wanted to speak up about what happened to my dad, but they were afraid. There’s not a lot of witness protection in the ’hood.”

Coletti was quiet as he contemplated Mann’s words. Then the captain’s door creaked. Coletti and Mann looked up to find Smithson staring at them from the doorway.

“How long have you been standing there?” Coletti asked.

“Long enough,” she said, crossing the room until she was standing in front of Coletti. “I wondered why you didn’t connect Ivan Petrov to this from the beginning. Now I know.” She turned to Mann. “And I guess what happened with your father explains a lot about you, too.”

There was an awkward silence. Coletti tried to lighten the mood. “So what are you going to do now that you know our secrets?”

“This.” Smithson took Coletti’s face in her palms and kissed his cheek.