The walls were covered with a series of dates, each of them written in red lipstick. The mirror to her armoire was broken. The drawers of her dresser were flung open. The satin sheets on her bed were shredded. Written on the wall above her headboard were two gigantic words: I confess.

The scarred metal desks in homicide looked especially worn at 2:15 AM. It was then that the heavy burdens they bore during the day seemed to take their toll. The arguments between the detectives, the interviews with witnesses, paperwork piled high in corners.

All of it existed beneath pale fluorescent light that never seemed to fill up the room. There was always darkness, and that darkness reflected the morbid business that was conducted there.

The names and faces of suspects and victims mingled in a death dance that never seemed to stop. Even when cases were solved, the most egregious never went away. Death was around them all the time, and the dead spoke out from file cabinets and papers, from sketches and jotted notes. They especially spoke out from boxes.

Box cases were the murders that spoke in muffled voices from the paper-filled cartons lined up against the walls. In these files were cases for which detectives had spent years gathering evidence, only to arrive at dead ends. In these files were the victims who’d never been avenged, and every file cried out for one thing: justice.

When Smithson walked in and began going through the files, she knew that justice was near. Somewhere in those manila folders and tattered cardboard boxes, there were men who fit the profile she’d assembled.

She started with Coletti’s old cases, both the solved and the unsolved, and when she opened up the first of the files, she found an incident form 75-48 and a mug shot of Danny Olivieri, who’d been convicted in the shooting death of a fellow mobster. She reviewed the file on a homeless man named Dennis Leland, who’d been convicted in the beating death of another homeless man in a West Philly alley. She read the file on a schizophrenic named Tommy Moses, who was convicted in the murders of two lovers found dead in a movie theater.

Each of the cases was a solid arrest that resulted in a conviction. Then she opened the file for the Confessional Murders.

The incident form 75-48 was fairly straightforward. Written in Coletti’s neat block print, it said that officers arrived to find the first 5292—the code for dead bodies—on the floor of the cathedral’s main sanctuary. The second was close by. The suspect, identified in the report as Father O’Reilly, was on his knees next to the bodies, holding a sawed-off shotgun that had recently been fired. The third body was found near the confessional booth. All three victims appeared to have died from wounds consistent with a shotgun blast.