“Suppose it’s all true?” he asked in a faraway voice. “The angels, the prophecy, everything. I mean, it all fits, doesn’t it? Thirteen hundred thirty-five days between Harley Thompson’s murder and today. Twelve hundred ninety days between Tonya Ivanova’s sacrifice and the abomination in those churches last night. Now all we need is the desolation—the death, the misery, and the pain. Then the whole thing would be complete.”

Neither Mann nor Smithson knew what to say. “Maybe this whole thing is God’s way of punishing me for my mistakes,” Coletti said.

“What mistakes did you make that God would punish?” Mann asked.

“Father O’Reilly’s on death row. David Atwell was murdered in prison. Aleksey Petrov killed himself. A killer’s on the loose who’s responsible for seven murders in the last twenty-four hours alone. And it’s all because of cases I botched.”

“You went with the evidence you had and worked within the system,” Mann said.

“There isn’t a detective in the world that would’ve done anything different.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t bring anybody back, does it?” Coletti asked bitterly.

“Neither does blaming yourself,” Smithson said. “But if we figure out who this killer is and bring him in, maybe we can stop him and his followers before they kill again.”

Mann thought back over everything that had happened over the past day—from the notes to Coletti to the bodies in churches to the dates on Sandy’s walls.

“I don’t think we’ll have a problem bringing him in,” Mann said, staring at Coletti. “I think he wants to be caught, and he wants to be caught by you.”

“What do you mean?” Coletti asked.

“Why would he spend years killing people, then give us the dates of the murders? Why would he put notes on dead bodies and address them to you? Why would he tell me to look at the confessions, knowing they would all point back to you? I’ll tell you why. He’s fighting a war, and you’re the enemy. And the prophecy he chose, the message he mapped out with all those dead bodies, isn’t about the end of the world. It’s about the end of you.”

“But why?” Coletti asked.

“Because his war is a fight between good and evil,” Smithson said, warming to Mann’s theory. “Maybe in this killer’s mind, he’s good, and you’re evil. You might even represent something that hurt him as a child. If that’s the case, this is classic transference. He’s projecting all the evil in his world onto you, and he’s determined to stamp that evil out.”

“So why would he recruit other people to help him to do that? Why not just do it himself?”