“Good. There’s an old factory at the corner of Stillman and Oxford,” the angel said. “Be there in exactly one hour.”

Steven didn’t nod. He didn’t respond at all. He simply waited, knowing that the angel understood his responses even before he spoke them. If he just waited, Steven would receive the reassurance that he needed. The angel would never disappoint.

“What is it, Steven?” the angel asked.

Steven breathed deeply and tried to gather his thoughts. In a war he was unafraid to fight, in a place he was anxious to go, for a cause that was worth his life, he wanted nothing more than to join the final battle. But even in his drug-addled mind, Steven knew that if he stepped outside and tried to go the seven and a half blocks to Stillman and Oxford, he’d be apprehended before he could reach his destination.

“I’ll need power to get there,” Steven said in a sheepish voice. “If you give me the power you promised, I can get there.”

“The power isn’t given, it’s earned,” the angel said. “Find a way to get there, win the final battle, and prove you’re worthy. Then you’ll have all the power you want.”

The line went dead. Steven sat still, the numbness from the drugs replaced by grim determination.

He walked across the room and picked up his jacket and the sawed-off shotgun. He reached into his pocket, retrieved his shells, and began loading them into his weapon.

Somehow, he would make it those seven and a half blocks. Then he would finally make it to heaven.

By one thirty, 30th Street Station was a madhouse. Trains were backed up. Amtrak police with dogs and rifles were patrolling the station and platforms. Sandwich and coffee shops were closed. Commuters were afraid, and it was all because of an angel.

With outstretched wings and stony expression, the bronze Angel of Resurrection was a tribute to war dead and a symbol of protection for travelers passing through Philadelphia’s ornately appointed train station. Today, that depiction of the archangel Michael lifting a fallen soldier, flanked by Greco-Roman columns stretching nearly a hundred feet from floor to ceiling, was surrounded by crime scene tape, and the dead man at the statue’s base was not about to be swept up to heaven.

When Mann pulled up at the train station and ran inside, Coletti and Lynch were entering from the other end. Between them were ninth district patrol officers, Amtrak police, and cops from SEPTA, the local transportation authority.

All of them were focused on the sight that both repulsed and fascinated everyone who saw it: a duffle bag propped up against the angel statue with a dead body crammed inside.

“How long has it been here?” Lynch asked a captain from the Amtrak police.