Angel Killer (21 page)

“And?”

Ailes has proven he’s earned my trust. “Well, not everything I suspect. I just don’t want to send us off into any wild-goose chases.”

Or expose Damian for the thing he did to protect me.

“If you’re sure it’s not relevant and it’s only speculation, then keep it to yourself. I don’t need to know.” We reach the bottom floor. Before we exit, he turns to me, “On the other hand, you better be damn sure he doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

The thing I’m dying to know, if Damian did it, was under what circumstances he killed my attacker. The coroner’s report said there was a struggle. Bruising on his knuckles and signs that he fought back. The bruising suggests that Damian came at him head-on and not from behind.

Did Damian just try to talk to him and it escalated from there? Was Damian acting in self-defense? The forensic evidence doesn’t dispute that. It also doesn’t say that’s the way it happened either. Damian could even have provoked him into a fight, knowing he was going to kill him. Or Damian could have just arranged it from hundreds of miles away. Anything is possible with him.

By the time I reach the bullpen, I know the right thing for me to do is to cooperate as fully as possible. If someone pushes me about my suspicions, which nobody did, I’ll tell them that I think he may have acted in self-defense in a crime I have no proof he was ever involved in.

Gerald and Jennifer are waiting for us when we walk into the room, with grave expressions on their faces. They’re standing in front of a video projection of an image of Chloe. It’s a photograph of her I haven’t seen before.

“This is Denise Lewis,” says Jennifer. “Same birthday as Chloe, and as you can see, an identical match. She grew up eighty miles away from where Chloe’s body was found. Her family moved to Ohio when she was twelve. She went to Ohio State and majored in biology with an intent to go into veterinary medicine.”

I remember Chloe volunteered at an animal shelter.

Gerald clicks to another image. Denise is on a horse against some sparse rocky mountains. “Six months ago she updated her Facebook status to say she got an internship to work in a village in Mongolia teaching English. She’s made sporadic updates since then. Even uploading photographs.” He shows another photo of her. This one shows her nuzzling a horse by a yurt.

“Nice photo?” He brings up another image. It’s the same exact photograph, but a different girl. This one is Asian. “The Warlock modified these photographs with her image.” He points to the skin on her cheek. “These aren’t Photoshops. He actually rendered the entire image using a 3-D model. The light bounce is perfect. A fake made in two dimensions wouldn’t quite get the shadows right. The only giveaway on this image is that he used a blurring tool with too low of a randomness. I don’t think anybody would catch it unless they knew exactly what they’re looking for.”

Ailes shakes his head. “Do her parents know?”

Jennifer’s face drops. “No. They think she’s still alive. We told Knoll. He’s preparing for what to do next.”

“Goddamn this asshole.” Ailes is visibly shaken.

As with Swanson’s wife, we don’t want the Warlock to know what we’ve learned. If he’s still trying to maintain that Denise is alive, he might stay in contact with them so nobody ever makes the connection.

But what’s his endgame? Tell the families they died overseas? Send back a cigar box filled with ashes?

He could theoretically keep this going for years. If we didn’t realize the twin connection, it’d be one of those unsolved mysteries you see on television. Only one writ large with a baffled FBI in the middle of it all.

“What else?” asks Ailes.

Gerald shows an image filled with hundreds of small photographs. “In the hope that the Warlock uploaded his own photo, we theorized some parameters and found four thousand uploaded images that appear to fit. We’re searching the IP addresses for potential masking, etcetera to look for matches. We’ve also sent them to behavioral analysis. They’re going to run them through VICAP and do a search through the images we collected in Fort Lauderdale of the crowd at the Avenger site.”

If we can tie one of the uploaded photos to someone who was there, that could be a big lead. It’d give us a face to put on the news. It would show we were doing something besides waiting for the next murder.

I walk over to the screen to look at the faces up close. The frames are tightly cropped around their heads. There’s a range of human emotion. Any one of them could be the Warlock. Ailes stands next to me and squints. He’s having the same thought.

“What about the next victim?” I ask. “Do we know which search was done first? Did he look for Chloe’s twin or Denise’s?”

“Chloe,” says Jennifer.

Interesting. That means that he selected Denise because she looked like Chloe. If it were the other way around it would suggest he had nothing to do with the Chloe’s murder. This, on the other hand, suggests he killed both of them and had been planning this several years back.

“What about Swanson? Did he find him after he found the plane?”

“Probably. The logs show a high-resolution image of the original pilot was uploaded eight months ago. He was looking for a match to Kelsford and that’s how he found Swanson.”

Eight months? Assuming he was looking for a match for the pilot because he’d already found the plane in the ocean, that’s at least how long he waited on the discovery of a lifetime. A secret so big that it would change history. But he just kept it to himself. At least it supports the idea that he went looking for a victim to fit the crime and not the other way around. The odds of the other possibility are incomprehensible. It’s some comfort to know he’s not that lucky.

At least now we know his big secret, or at least one of them. The Warlock is looking for lost identical twins or look-alikes of previous deaths. I hope there’s a way to use the data to stop the next killing. Somewhere in the stream of photos is his next victim.

We spend the rest of the day going through the data. Ailes has persuaded the FBI’s computer forensic lab to let him use one of its supercomputers to process the images through the Yearbook system. But it’s not enough. There are too many images and correlations to connect. We’re playing another numbers game, like we did with the code the Warlock planted on our website.

Ailes and the director have been on the phone with the NSA, pleading for them to grant access to one of their unofficial databases. From the sound of the yelling, it doesn’t sound like it’s working.

Sometime past midnight I pass out on a couch in a conference room with my laptop still on my chest after I’d finished a write-up explaining the Warlock’s trick to the working group: He used social networks to find two girls who were lost twins. He murdered one of them almost two years ago, leading to a high-profile investigation. A few months after she’s buried, he digs up her coffin and steals her body, leaving the coffin open with a pipe running down into it so he can place sand or a clue inside later on. He then murders the second girl a week ago. Probably by burying her alive in a nearby location and then moving her body to Chloe’s grave. To throw us off the path he removes Denise’s fingerprints and booby-traps her body to explode into an inferno, destroying most of the physical evidence.

It’s an incredibly complicated trick, but that’s the point. This is killing as performance art. The result is the public thinks a murdered girl came back from the dead and then burst into flames like something out of the Bible. And all of the evidence supports that idea.

Brilliant. Horrifying.

An hour after I fall asleep, Gerald runs into the room and knocks on the door.

I sit up, almost spilling the laptop onto the floor. “What? You find something?”

His face is red. “We got the third victim.”

“That’s great!”

He shakes his head. “No. We’re too late. We think she was just killed twenty minutes ago.”

I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. I want to puke. “What? How?”

Gerald is speechless. “It’s impossible . . .” He motions for me to follow him.

We run across the campus to the operations center. Gerald tries to dry his eyes before we enter the room.

I
T’S PAST 2 A.M.
, but there’s easily a hundred people in the special operations center at Quantico. Many of them look as tired and exhausted as me. This case has become a source of professional pride. The room is a large office floor that’s been retasked for the Warlock case. Everyone is gathered at one end of the room looking at several large video displays on the wall. Gerald and I spot Ailes and work our way over. He’s listening as Knoll waits for somebody to give him an answer on the other end of a phone.

I can’t see the video through the crowd. Too many bodies are blocking the screens. Lots of people are making phone calls and asking questions I can’t quite make out.

Everyone’s expression is somber. It’s the kind of reaction you see here when there’s been a terrorist attack or a national tragedy like a mass shooting. Ailes waves me and Gerald through the throng.

His eyes are red and his voice is low. “We tried, Jessica. Maybe just a little more time and we could have stopped this.” He shakes his head.

“What?” I try to get a look at the screen. Two agents are sipping coffee and blocking the view. I tap one of them on the shoulder. He sees who I am and lets me through.

I turn to Ailes. He shakes his head again.

The image is too much to take in at one glance.

There’s a young girl. Blond hair, maybe between seventeen and nineteen. She’s naked and lying in the middle of a street. Her head is turned sideways and there’s a pool of blood around her.

White feathers surround her. White ones like the one we found in the airplane. Some of them are poking through the skin in her back. They appear to be growing out of her. Like wings.

She looks like an angel.

A fallen angel.

The image changes to a different view. More of the street is visible. Hundreds of people are looking at her lying there. I recognize the intersection. It’s one of the most recognizable ones in the world. I’ve been there a dozen times. I’ve had dinner with Terrence a block away from that very spot.

Times Square.

The Warlock’s latest victim is a dead angel in Times Square.

Another screen shows headlines from websites and television news. The image is self-explanatory. But the headlines spell out what the Warlock wants us to think anyway: An angel has fallen to earth.

Knoll holds the phone to his chest and quiets the room. “NYPD says almost all the bones in her body appear to be broken. There’s an indentation around her head and shoulder—it looks like from a fall. They’re checking the nearby buildings, but it doesn’t seem possible that she could have jumped that far.” He puts the phone to his ear and listens. “They’ve got some cell phone video from witnesses. They’re going to transmit that to us in a few minutes.”

Someone asks if the feathers match the dove feather from the Avenger. Another person says they appear to match visually, but there’s no chance to do physical tests. We haven’t released that feather clue yet to the public in order to prevent a copycat from spoiling the investigation. I don’t know if there’s much point now.

I step closer to the screen. There’s no sense of terror. Almost peaceful. The feathers in her back are carefully placed. They look organic, like they belong there. I imagine that every devoutly religious person who sees this is calling friends, asking if it’s some kind of sign.

Ailes is trying to take it all in like the rest of us. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. As striking as the image is, there’s nothing supernatural about it. The feathers are well-placed, but for all we know, she could have been dropped from a helicopter. There has to be something else there.

Her right hand is curled under her head. It’s clenched in a fist. I call out to Knoll. Maybe he already knows. “What’s in her hand?”

He sets the phone aside for a moment. “One of our New York forensic people is looking at that right now. We’re going to get an image in a moment.”

We all wait for the image on the screen to change. The Warlock has our full attention and that of everyone in Times Square, plus the millions watching the various Internet feeds being streamed for phones. The image of the fallen angel is horrific but captivating. The blood around her body, the white feathers. It’s like something out of the book of Revelation.

“Claire Nelson,” Gerald says to me. “I’m pretty sure that’s her name. I found her photo in the Faceplaced data. We’re trying to contact her family. We knew this an hour ago. If we’d been faster . . .” His voice breaks up.

I try to console him, “Gerald, he already had her then. I don’t know if there’s anything we could have done. The recent victims were killed hours before we found them.”

I tell myself this is true. I cannot bear to think that while I was sleeping on the couch I could have done something to stop this from happening. It’s a horrible thought. If I’d managed to persuade Liam Reynolds sooner before Damian had to step in. If only I’d noticed things that I’m not seeing yet. If I wasn’t distracted by the illusion. I look at the room full of faces. We’re all thinking the same thing. Maybe if I’d worked through my lunch break. Maybe if I’d taken more time to look at the evidence. It’s the way cops see things.

Somebody shouts for everyone to quiet down. “Video coming through!”

We all hush as the image of the girl changes to a frozen frame of video. An Asian girl smiles at the camera. The video plays and she makes a peace sign in front of a huge video wall. A loud noise cuts out the audio and there’s an explosion in the street behind her. It looks like a jet of smoke. Hundreds of feathers float in the air. The person holding the camera zooms through and we can see a grainy image of the angel on the ground. Feathers rain down all around her. The camera jerks upward. The buildings are all brightly lit. There’s nothing but emptiness beyond their glow.

It’s a perfect illusion. It looks like she has fallen from the sky at an incredible speed. The person controlling the playback is rewinding and trying to freeze-frame it to see where she actually came from. It looks as if she just appears out of nowhere. Hopefully we’ll get more video.