“They’d take us to amusement parks and we’d come to Philly every once in a while to see the sights. Eventually, the city got too dangerous for that.”

She stopped and looked out the window, her eyes becoming moist as she thought back to her time as a child.

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Coletti said.

“No, it’s all right.” She wiped her eyes and turned to him with a forced smile.

“My parents’ marriage got shaky around the time I was twelve. Little arguments became big ones, but they always tried to make up. I guess that got too hard to do after a while, so they stopped trying. By the time the divorce came, nobody was surprised, not even me—the one who believed in fairy tales the most.

“When I got older I left town and moved to California. I guess I was trying to get as far away from the memories as I could. I married a guy in the psychology program at Stanford with the expectation that the marriage would fail, and in less than a year, it did. I stayed out there long enough to finish my doctorate, then I came back home to Dunmore and started my life over, hoping it would be better the second time around.”

“Is it?” Coletti asked.

Smithson glanced at him, her red, tired eyes still moist with tears. “The jury’s still out.”

By nine thirty, when Charlie Mann walked into the church, his head was swimming. The day had been a whirlwind. He’d killed for the first time, been questioned at internal affairs, and learned things about Coletti that he’d never imagined were true.

Now he was standing at the edge of a sanctuary that had become an execution chamber, and the sight of it was surreal. The mere thought of bodies lined up against a pew seemed almost impossible, just like Coletti’s dreams. But as he slowly walked the outside aisle, the bodies came into view. They were contorted and bloody, sacrificed near an altar where prayers had just been uttered.

Mann stood for almost a minute, pondering their final moments. Then his mind drifted to the man he’d shot that morning. Deep down, Mann knew that he was now a killer, too, and he wondered if he was any different from the one they were chasing.

“Charlie!” the commissioner called out.

Mann looked up at Lynch, who was standing about twenty feet away, next to a priest. Then he walked over to the commissioner, who made the introductions.

“Detective Mann, this is Father Douglas,” Lynch said. “He’s the one who saw the killer.”

“I heard the description on the radio on the way here,” Mann said, turning to the priest. “But I’m also interested in what you can tell me about the victims.”