“The killer said that he’d cut off a man’s finger while he slept on a park bench, and sliced a child’s leg at a playground.”

Coletti and Smithson looked at each other, knowing that they now had something to go on. A second later, the door flew open.

“I hate to interrupt,” said the captain from C Block. “Homicide’s been trying to reach you, Detective Coletti. Three people were gunned down in a church. The killer left a note addressed to you.”

It was nine o’clock when Commissioner Lynch got the call. As he listened to the homicide captain recount what he’d heard from the priest who’d witnessed the killings, his blood ran cold. The killer not only matched the description Coletti had shared with him. He called himself the angel of death.

When Lynch disconnected the call, he turned to his wife, who sat next to him on the couch. She knew before he spoke that he wouldn’t be staying through the end of the Bette Davis movie they were watching. Over the years, she’d come to understand that this was part of the territory.

“I’ll be back,” he said as he kissed her on the forehead.

“That’s what you always say when you’re about to cheat on me,” she said with a smile.

Lynch kissed his wife again before heading off to yet another in the line of calamities that had taken him away from home over the course of his career.

He still remembered going back to the East Bridge housing projects, where he’d grown up, to solve the case of his friend’s missing child. He remembered watching another police commissioner die in a battle between a man of faith and a man of the streets. He remembered chasing a beautiful killer after the mayor was murdered—and risking his marriage and career to chase her again.

Through it all, Jocelyn had been there, urging him on, lifting him up, and if need be, cursing him out. She was the constant in his life, and now that he was settled into the role of commissioner, neither of them was sure where his career would take him. They were certain of one thing, however. They knew that they loved each other. With a killer tearing apart the city he’d been charged with protecting, Kevin Lynch wasn’t sure that love was enough.

He grabbed his cell phone as he left the house and called the governor’s chief of staff on his BlackBerry. The chief of staff said that the governor had decided to err on the side of caution. Based on the questions raised by Coletti and the similarities between the Confessional Murders and the latest round of killings, a stay of execution would be in place by morning.