“Yes, but no profile as yet. Unofficially, the MO doesn’t match. The removal of the faces marks it out.”

“Yeah, what about the faces?” It was Joiner again.

“I’m still trying to find out more,” said Wolfe. “Some killers take souvenirs from their victims. There may be some kind of pseudo-religious or sacrificial element to this case. I’m sorry, I’m really not sure yet.”

“You think he could have done something like this before?” said Walter.

Wolfe nodded. “He may have. If he has killed before, then he may have hidden the bodies, and these killings could represent an alteration in a previous pattern of behavior. Maybe, after killing quietly and unobtrusively, he wanted to bring himself to a more public arena. He may have wanted to draw attention to his work. The unsatisfactory nature of these killings, from his point of view, may now cause him to revert to his old pattern. Alternatively, he could recede into a period of dormancy; that’s another possibility.

“But if I was to gamble, I’d say that he’s been planning his next move carefully. He made mistakes this time and I don’t think he achieved the effect he was looking for. The next time, he won’t make any mistakes. The next time, unless you catch him first, he’s really going to make an impact.”

The door of the interrogation room opened and Walter entered with two other men.

“This is Special Agent Ross, FBI, and Detective Barth from Robbery,” said Walter. “Barth was working the Watts case. Agent Ross here deals with organized crime.”

Close up, Ross’s linen suit looked expensive and tailored. Barth, in his JCPenney jacket, looked like a slob by comparison. The two men stood against opposite walls and nodded. When Walter sat, Barth sat as well. Ross remained standing against the wall.

“Anything you’re not telling us here?” Walter asked.

“No,” I said. “You know as much as I do.”

“Agent Ross believes that Sonny Ferrera was behind the killing of Watts and his girlfriend and that you know more than you’re saying.” Ross picked at something on the sleeve of his shirt and dropped it to the floor with a look of distaste. I think it was meant to represent me.

“There was no reason for Sonny to kill Ollie Watts,” I replied. “We’re talking stolen cars and fake license plates here. Ollie wasn’t in a position to scam anything worthwhile from Sonny and he didn’t know enough about Sonny’s activities to take up ten minutes of a jury’s time.”

Ross stirred and moved forward to sit on the edge of the table. “Strange that you should turn up after all this time- what is it? six, seven months?-and suddenly we’re knee deep in corpses,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. He was forty, maybe forty-five, but he looked to be in good condition. His face was heavily lined with wrinkles that didn’t seem like they came from a life of laughter. I’d heard a little about him from Woolrich, after Woolrich left New York to become the feds’ assistant special agent in charge in the New Orleans field office.

There was silence then. Ross tried to stare me out, then looked away in boredom.

“Agent Ross here thinks that you’re holding out on us,” said Walter. “He’d like to sweat you for a while, just in case.” His expression was neutral, his eyes bland. Ross had returned to staring at me.

“Agent Ross is a scary guy. He tries to sweat me, there’s no telling what I’ll confess to.”

“This is not getting us anywhere,” said Ross. “Mr. Parker is obviously not cooperating in any way and I-”

Walter held up a hand, interrupting him. “Maybe you’d both leave us alone for a while, get some coffee or something,” he suggested. Barth shrugged and left. Ross remained seated on the table and looked like he was going to say more, then he stood up abruptly and quickly walked out, closing the door firmly behind him. Walter exhaled deeply, loosened his tie, and opened the top button of his shirt.

“Don’t dump on Ross. He’ll bring a ton of shit down on your head. And on mine.”

“I’ve told you all I know on this,” I said. “Benny Low may know more, but I doubt it.”

“We talked to Benny Low. The way Benny tells it, he didn’t know who the president was until we told him.” He twisted a pen in his hand. “ ‘Hey, it’s just bidness,’ that’s what he said.” It was a pretty fair imitation of one of Benny Low’s verbal quirks. I smiled thinly and the tension in the air dissipated slightly.

“How long you been back?”

“Couple of weeks.”

“What have you been doing?”

What could I tell him? That I wandered the streets, that I visited places where Jennifer, Susan, and I used to go together, that I stared out of the window of my apartment and thought about the man who had killed them and where he might be, that I had taken on the job for Benny Low because I was afraid that, if I did not find some outlet, I would eat the barrel of my gun?

“Not a lot. I plan to look up some old stoolies, see if there’s anything new.”

“There isn’t, not at this end. You got anything?”

“No.”

“I can’t ask you to let it go, but-”

“No, you can’t. Get to it, Walter.”

“This isn’t a good place for you to be right now. You know why.”

“Do I?”

Walter tossed the pen hard on the table. It bounced to the edge and then hung there briefly before dropping to the floor. For a moment I thought he was going to take a swing at me but then the anger went from his eyes.

“We’ll talk about this again.”

“Okay. You going to give me anything?” Among the papers on the table, I could see reports from Ballistics and Firearms. Five hours was a pretty short time in which to get a report. Agent Ross was obviously a man who got what he wanted.

I nodded at the report. “What did Ballistics say about the bullet that took out the shooter?”

“That’s not your concern.”

“Walter, I watched the kid die. The shooter took a pop at me and the bullet went clean through the wall. Someone’s got distinctive taste in weaponry.”

Walter stayed silent.

“No one picks up hardware like that without someone knowing,” I said. “You give me something to go on, maybe I might find out more than you can.”

Walter thought for a minute and then flicked through the papers for the Ballistics report. “We got submachine bullets, five-point-seven millimeters, weighing less than fifty grains.”

I whistled. “That’s a scaled-down rifle round, but fired from a handgun?”

“The bullet is mainly plastic but has a full-metal jacket, so it doesn’t deform on impact. When it hits something- like your shooter-it transfers most of its force. There’s almost no energy when it exits.”

“And the one that hit the wall?”

“Ballistics reckons a muzzle velocity of over two thousand feet per second.”

That was an incredibly fast bullet. A Browning 9 millimeter fires bullets of one hundred ten grains at only eleven hundred feet per second.

“They also reckon that this thing could blow through Kevlar body armor like it was rice paper. At two hundred yards, the thing could penetrate almost fifty layers.” Even a.44 Magnum will only penetrate body armor at very close range.

“But once it hits a soft target…”

“It stops.”

“Is it domestic?”

“No, Ballistics say European. Belgian. They’re talking about something called a Five-seveN-that’s big F, big N, after the manufacturers. It’s a prototype made by FN Herstal for antiterrorist and hostage rescue operations, but this is the first time one has turned up outside national security forces.”

“You contacting the maker?”

“We’ll try, but my guess is we’ll lose it in the middlemen.”

I stood up. “I’ll ask around.”

Walter retrieved his pen and waved it at me like an unhappy schoolteacher lecturing the class wise guy. “Ross still wants your ass.”

I took out a pen and scribbled my cell phone number on the back of Walter’s legal pad.