“One day, you got tired of hearing it and told me—told everybody, in fact—that our job was to gather evidence and make arrests. It was up to the DA to prove the case and up to juries to determine guilt. If someone went to jail for something they didn’t do, that was on the courts, not us. Back then, you said knowing that helped you to sleep at night.”

Coletti smiled weakly. “It did.”

“So what’s different now?”

Coletti’s smile faded as he looked at Lynch. “Those guys were guilty,” he said softly. “Father O’Reilly isn’t.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because that so-called crazy homeless guy called himself the angel of death.”

“So?”

“When I arrived at the cathedral that day, Father O’Reilly said the murderer called himself the angel of death. That was the only time he used that phrase. He never said it under questioning, he never said it at trial, so the only other person who’d know that phrase would be the killer.”

Lynch stared at Coletti in disbelief. “Are you saying you think the man you helped put on death row for those murders is innocent?”

“No,” Coletti said. “I’m saying I know he is.”

The two men stood there, wondering what the truth about the murders would reveal, and wondering if they really wanted to know.

A moment later, there was a tap at the door. Lynch was still trying to digest what he’d heard. Coletti felt strangely free, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

He squeezed past the commissioner and cracked the door. Mary Smithson’s blue eyes were on the other side.

“They think they found the guy who dropped the note,” she said. “They’re in pursuit.”

Sergeant Sandy Jackson was already in her car, having driven from Rittenhouse Square to answer the art gallery assist.

Police radio had declared the situation under control before she could get there, and she was now on her way back to the ninth district. In many ways, she was glad she’d missed the assist. If she’d seen Coletti face to face, she might’ve said something ugly. Being phony wasn’t her strong suit.

Though Sandy’s sharp tongue was her weakness, her strength was her sixth sense. It was that sense that caused her to notice the man who was running down Market Street as befuddled tourists watched.

Even before the alert tone was broadcast on police radio and the dispatcher described him as the man involved in the art gallery assist, Sandy Jackson knew that something wasn’t right. She skidded to a stop at Fifth and Market.

“Stop!” she yelled, jumping out of her car with her gun drawn.