Suddenly, the man reached up to pull down his hat. Then he pivoted and walked quickly to his left, rounding the corner at Locust Street as Sandy got out of the car. She dashed to the corner and looked down the street. The man was gone.

She was about to go back to her car when she saw a tall, husky officer walking toward her from the other end of the block.

“Harris!” she said, jogging toward him. “Where did that guy go?”

“What guy?”

“The guy in black,” she said, her eyes darting to and fro. “He just came around the corner. He was a skinny white guy with blue eyes.”

The cop looked at her with a puzzled expression. “He was coming right at you!” she said in an exasperated tone.

“I didn’t see anybody, Sarge. You sure he came down Locust?”

She was about to press the issue, but she thought better of it. “Never mind,” she said, grabbing her radio off her shoulder.

“This is 9A,” she said, speaking into her handset. “Any units spotting a thin white male with blue eyes, wearing a black outfit and a large black hat, he’s wanted for investigation. He was last seen going east on Locust from Twenty-first about one minute ago.”

The dispatcher put the description out over police radio’s central band, but no one heard it in Logan. That was too bad. They could’ve used it there.

It was eight fifteen and evening mass at Our Lady of Sorrows was coming to an end. Kannitha, Chavy, and Boran Seng were in attendance, praying with their neighbors for an end to the bloodshed in their neighborhood.

The Broad Street church, with its soaring spires and grand stone arches, had always served as the perfect house of prayer.

But on an evening when a drive-by shooting had occurred just after they’d left Rockland Street, the Sengs saw the church as a shelter. Not just from the bullets that had sprayed their street, but from the poignant memories of their homeland.

The two women, Kannitha and Chavy, had lived through Pol Pot’s killing fields in 1970s Cambodia. They’d seen cities emptied out by the Khmer Rouge and people forced to leave their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They’d seen daughters raped, fathers shot dead, and sons marched off to be dumped in mass graves. In short, they’d seen hell on earth.