Coletti sat back against the freezer, his mind racing with thirty-one-year-old memories. “I caught that guy,” Coletti said, sounding confused. “I remember because he tried to resist arrest and I had to subdue him. Right after I cuffed him he admitted that he’d raped that little girl. He went to jail for that. I know he appealed, but I thought…”

“You thought wrong,” the voice said. “They let him go quietly on appeal. What you called subduing a suspect, they called coercing a confession. And because of you, that little girl was scarred for life.”

“That’s not my fault,” Coletti said, his eyes darting about as he tried to dig the truth from his memories.

“It is your fault!” the voice shouted. “And now you’re going to pay.”

A figure dashed in front of him, and Coletti took a shot. The figure ran to his left and Coletti took another. The sound of the growling voice began to fill his ears. Coletti tried to look through the darkness to find the source of the sound. Suddenly the figure sprung from the shadows and cracked the two-by-four against his shoulder.

Coletti raised his gun and shot until the magazine was empty. Only then did the angel of death stand up in front of him and level a sawed-off shotgun at his face.

Coletti blinked several times to clear his blurry vision. Between the head injuries and the blood, it was difficult to focus. When finally his vision cleared and he looked up at the truth, Coletti refused to believe what he saw.

“I almost changed my mind about killing you,” Mary Smithson said, abandoning the grating voice that she’d used as the angel of death. “But in the end, I really had no choice.”

Coletti tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. Seeing this woman standing over him, dressed in black, blue eyes filled with simmering hate, his heart broke as his mind recalled what he already knew deep down. He remembered how she’d articulated the killer’s motives and childhood pain. He envisioned the ease with which she’d broken down the prophecy and explained the killer’s war against him.

She watched his face as he digested it all and remembered the lust she’d seen in his eyes. She almost laughed when she saw it replaced by hurt.

“I was that little girl in the cathedral, Mike,” she said, while pointing the gun at him.

“I was the one you let down when you let that rapist walk.”

“That couldn’t have been you,” he said, sounding confused. “The family was named O’Hanlon.”