“He said, ‘My father came over from Naples and people laughed at him because he was different. He just wanted his little piece of America, and there was always somebody trying to keep him in his place. Well, Harry’s different, too. But you’re not gonna do to him what they did to my father. Harry’s not gonna let you, and neither am I.’

“A few of them tried to get loud and the instructors came and broke it up,” the cop said. “Coletti and Harry went their separate ways after that, but nobody bothered Harry again. And even though most of us never said it, we all respected Coletti for standing up the way he did. In fact, we all respect him to this day.”

Mann sat for a few moments, trying to reconcile what he’d just heard with what he’d seen that morning. He couldn’t, so he tried to get the cop to do it for him. “What made Coletti change?”

“He hasn’t changed,” the cop said insistently. “He’s still a loner—he only had one partner that stuck in thirty-one years, and the two of them had some kind of falling out and Coletti started working alone again. But through it all, he always tried to stand up for people. That got him enemies. I think that’s why Coletti never rose through the ranks. He stood up one time too many.”

“Is that why he’s so angry now?”

The cop thought about it for a moment. “There’s more to it than that,” he said. “Coletti’s angry because he wanted to be the guy he was back at the Academy. He wanted to get justice for people who couldn’t get it for themselves, but no matter how hard he tried, he could never get it right. To this day, he’s still trying to make up for it.”

Chapter 4

At six thirty, Coletti pulled out of the hospital parking lot as the suspect’s words reverberated in his head: “He said he knew everything. He said he was the angel o’ death.”

It was only a few blocks to the overpass where the suspect claimed he’d encountered the killer. When Coletti arrived and got out of the car, it was almost like walking into his nightmares.

The air beneath the highway swirled like the breeze from the cathedral, and soft clouds hovered like angels in a stained-glass sky. The pillars beneath the overpass were statues in an unholy sanctuary, and the men who slept there were parishioners in a church of hopelessness.

He watched a scruffy man begging near the traffic signal at the end of the off-ramp, and his mind conjured the image of the priest. He turned and saw three men sleeping beneath the overpass and thought they were the bodies from the cathedral.