Mary had returned in more ways than one. After years of eschewing the beliefs that her father had instilled in her, she’d recently begun reconsidering her faith. When she saw the cross around Mike Coletti’s neck, she wondered why he wore it. Was it just for decoration, or was he like her, searching for answers in a faith he’d all but abandoned?

Now, as she drove along Broad Street, she contemplated the tenets of that faith. There was a heaven and hell, a God and a devil, angels and demons. Good would triumph over evil in the end.

She stopped at a red light and smiled at the quaint simplicity of those beliefs. A man in the next lane saw her and smiled, too. His flirtatious glance reminded her of Coletti, whose eyes spoke volumes from the moment they met.

Mary loved eyes. They said things that mouths never would, and Coletti’s were no exception. Every time they were alone, his eyes filled with lust, then uncertainty, then curiosity, as though he was wondering if there was a future for the two of them.

As the light turned green, Mary Smithson attempted to forget the look in Mike Coletti’s eyes, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t.

At ten forty-five, when he and Coletti left the house at Tenth and Rockland, Mann made two phone calls.

The first was to northwest detectives, the unit that investigates crimes in the fourteenth and thirty-fifth police districts. They told him that the Rockland Street drive-by was the result of a drug dealers’ turf war, thus ruling out Mann’s theory of a neighborhood grudge involving Boran. They said that the men from the nearby Mormon church were away on a weeklong religious retreat, which eliminated them as suspects. The girl’s story of her boyfriend working at the Navy Yard checked out, too, according to a detective who knew him. That negated Mann’s theory of a revenge shooting by a romantic rival.

With the conventional theories in tatters, Mann had little choice but to follow Coletti’s lead and go with what they had: the notes from the killer, the priest’s interpretation of scripture, and the old woman’s stories of angels and gods. The spiritual underpinnings of it all forced a skeptical Mann to consider what Coletti had known all along—that the truth lay somewhere between dreams and reality.

That realization made the investigation personal for Mann, because the old woman and the priest weren’t the only eyewitnesses to see the killer in the moments before and after the shooting. Sandy thought she’d seen him, too, and that’s why Mann made his second call.

He reached Sandy on her cell and asked her to meet them at the spot where she’d seen the man she believed to be the killer. Hesitantly, she agreed.