Naomi lifted her eyes to the four blown-up surveillance photos that tiled the wall behind the rifle. Each featured a face in close-up, and each face had a letter Magic Markered across it.
A middle-aged man in what looked like a Venetian piazza: J.
What appeared to be a homeless man in a malclass="underline" C.
A handsome guy smoking a cigarette in a parking lot: L.
And the last, a photo of a man in his sixties, this one without a letter scrawled across the head. A square face, weathered and handsome, with a well-practiced squint.
The staging of the rifle and photos made clear: This wasn’t an aborted assassination attempt. It was a message.
But to whom?
Naomi flicked a hand at the photographs with the weird markings. “How ’bout those?”
“Those are sterile, too. We managed to digitally capture the faces beneath the markings and run them through facial recognition. Nothing. These people? They don’t exist. Except for him.” The agent pointed at the man in the unmarked photo. “Former station chief with the Agency, mostly through the seventies and early eighties. His personnel record gets hazy after that. His name’s Jack Johns.”
“Where is he?” Naomi asked.
“Went missing about six months ago, just vanished off the map.” The agent scratched his neck. “Maybe these are photos of past victims of the shooter.”
Naomi tried the theory on, found it ill-fitting. “You pull any prints from the pictures?”
“No. They’re clean.”
“Did you dust the backs?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You pulled the photos off the wall and put them back up?”
“They’re taped, so we lifted them to dust the backs.”
“You dust the tape itself?”
“We did. Along with everything else in the apartment.”
“There isn’t anything else in this apartment.”
“Doorknobs, countertops, toilet flusher.” The agent retrieved a handkerchief from a back pocket and wiped his nose. “There’s not a single print here. The guy’s a ghost.”
She gestured at the photos. “What’s with the letters?”
“I don’t know,” the agent said. “But there’s one more.”
“One more what?”
“Letter.”
“Where?”
He waved Naomi over to the rifle. The bolt had been manipulated back, revealing the round in the chamber. A single letter had been etched into it.
X.
“We found it like that,” the agent said. “X marks the spot.” He gave a nervous laugh that sounded like a giggle.
Naomi looked from the round to the photos on the wall and back to the round. “It’s not a mark,” she said. “It’s a signature.”
“Why do you think that?” the agent asked. “Doesn’t it make more sense that it’s the name of the target? Ye olde ‘bullet with your name on it’?”
“X stands for the unknown. President Bennett isn’t X. He’s the best-known human on the planet.”
“After Kim Kardashian,” the agent said.
“After Kim Kardashian,” Naomi conceded. She studied the scrawled letters covering the faces in three of the four photos. “So the would-be shooter is in on the same side as the men in these photographs. If my theory is right.”
The agent shrugged. “I wouldn’t bet against a Templeton.”
“Then you’d lose a good percentage of the time.” She met his gaze, which had grown nervous, shifty. “I need your ideas. Not your deference.”
He nodded.
She moved on. “I was told PD had a run-in with a suspicious party on E Street after the rifle was spotted.”
“Yes, ma’am. Five officers.”
“When can I interview them?”
“Right now, if you’d like. Micelli just brought them up, has them waiting in the hall.”
She nodded and stepped out of the apartment.
The cops were huddled up by the elevator — a female plainclothes officer and four men. They turned as Naomi approached. She drew up short, taking in their ragged appearance.
The big rookie’s front teeth were chipped. One of the uniforms had a broken nose, bruises already coming up beneath his eyes. The other had swelling that stretched down one cheek and across his neck.
After introductions were made, Naomi said, “What’s with the red blotch?”
“Matcha green tea,” the officer said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The cop with the incipient black eyes stepped in. “Look, he got the better of us, okay?”
“And it looks like you caught the worst of it.” Naomi tilted her head back, appraising the nose. “Jesus. At least it’s a clean break.”
At this the man scowled a little.
Naomi turned her attention to the veteran cop and the woman. “Seems like you two got off okay.”
The woman shrugged. “I did get knocked down pretty hard. When Kryzanski was kicked into me.”
Naomi said, “Lucky you didn’t crack your head.”
“I think the attacker…” The female cop cleared her throat.
“What’s that?”
“I think he cradled my head on the way down.”
Naomi nodded and then nodded again, unsure what to make of that. “Romantic,” she said. A closer look showed the female officer to have red-rimmed eyes. Naomi decided not to ask about that at the moment. Instead she said, “How ’bout you tell me how this all kicked off.”
“The guy threatened us,” Kryzanski said.
“Well,” the woman said, “he didn’t really threaten us. More like he told us what was gonna happen.”
The cop with the slight facial burn added morosely, “And then it did.”
Naomi chewed the inside of her cheek. “What did he say precisely?”
They told her.
Naomi said, “Huh.”
They all stared at one another for longer than was comfortable. Though the incident had occurred nearly two hours ago, the cops still looked glazed. Regarding them now, the word that popped into Naomi’s head was “shell-shocked.”
She lifted her hand to help form her next question but then dropped it. They stared some more. “So he just went ahead and did all that? When you were expecting it?”
“Well, not exactly like that,” Kryzanski said. “Before he … went … he said … He said the slide on my Glock was out of battery.”
“Was it?” Naomi asked.
“No.”
She grimaced. “Did you check?”
He hesitated, then gave a faint nod.
“Then what?”
“I don’t remember much after that.”
“Is it fair to assume that’s when the flying-table sequence started?” Naomi asked.
The female officer said, “I believe that’s fair to say, yes.”
“What’d he look like?” Naomi asked. “This guy?”
“Average height, average build,” the female cop said. “Regular features. He had a baseball cap pulled low, so it was hard to tell.”
“But you three were right there within a few meters of him in a well-lit restaurant.”
“I don’t know.” The cop shook her head. “He looked like a guy. Like anyone.” She was staring at the floor, still shaking her head. “He looked like anyone.”
One of the forensics agents stuck his head out of 705 and called in a shout-whisper up the hall, “Agent Templeton?”
His tone sounded sufficiently alarmed that Naomi hustled back to the crime scene, vowing to get a full debrief from the cops later. The din of clamoring voices inside 705 rose as she neared. She came into the room to find a man in a suit plucking the photographs off the wall.
“Who the hell is he?” she said. “Who are you?”