“Good morning, Commissioner,” the lieutenant said nervously. “Everything okay?”

“I need you to raise Dan 60, Dan 61, and 9A on M band,” Lynch said, the urgency evident in his voice. “Tell them to report to homicide, and tell them to expedite.”

“Yes, Sir.”

As Lynch left the radio room and boarded the elevator, he thought about the phone call he’d just received and knew that if they were going to beat the clock, they’d have to move even faster than he’d anticipated.

He got off the elevator at the first floor, walked through homicide and into the office where Smithson was working.

“We’re having a meeting,” Lynch said to her as he looked at his watch. “Everyone should be here in a few minutes.”

The door opened and Mann walked in. Coletti and Sandy were a few steps behind him.

“Close the door,” Lynch said as they all crammed into the small office.

When they did, he looked around at all of them and delivered the news. “I called you all here because the game has changed. I just got a call from the medical examiner’s office. They’re about to announce that the Phillip Little shooting was a homicide, not a suicide. Toxicology reports showed he died from a heroin overdose and that the gunshot was fired by somebody else after he died. They also found something in his stomach: a handwritten note sealed in a small plastic baggie about the size of a dime bag of marijuana.”

“What did the note say?” Coletti asked.

“It said, ‘We are legion.’”

“I don’t understand,” Coletti said.

“It means we are many,” Charlie said, “and it’s the same thing Phillip told his girlfriend a couple months ago when she saw him for the last time. She said she knew he was on drugs as soon as she looked at him, and that he was rambling about war and legions of angels. Apparently he thought he was part of one of those legions, and he had a friend named Steven who believed he was part of one, too.”

“Where’s this Steven now?” Lynch asked.

“Phillip’s girlfriend told me he was a mechanical engineering major at Drexel and had a co-op job at Boeing,” said Mann. “I had a friend at Drexel check into it. His name is Steven Carrier. He was a few credits from graduating when he dropped out a couple months ago. Nobody’s seen him since.”

“Until today,” Sandy said, almost to herself.

They all looked at her expectantly.

“At first I thought he was just another one of those kids who come here and get strung out on heroin. But something about him made me take a second look. It was a tattoo on his hand—of a burning skull with angel’s wings and ‘Daniel 10’ written underneath.”

“Wait a minute,” Coletti said. “Was the tattoo on his right hand?”

“Yeah.”