Angel Killer (16 page)

“I don’t know if it’s practical to do so. Better if we’re just mindful of the fact that he’s doing that.”

“There’s got to be more we can do. More I can do.”

“Jennifer is in Texas trying to talk to the people who run Faceplaced.com and we’re already spread thin here. Thanks to you.” He points his thumb to the conference room across the office where Gerald, the tall, lanky math geek in the skinnier than usual FBI tie, is making wild motions in front of a webcam.

The idea that we can’t even rely on video conferencing potential victims leads to a heated discussion between Ailes and the assistant director about how far we should go in questioning everything we see. On a practical level, trying to canvass this many people, even with local law enforcement, was going to be a challenge. Especially when the Warlock has gone to great lengths to place Swanson outside our reach.

Gerald told Ailes he could do a feasibility test in hours. He ripped apart one of his gaming consoles and hacked together a motion capture device while we sat around and ate lunch.

“We can’t let the Warlock control the case.” I’m dying to get back out into the field. I’d made several hints that I could be useful in Michigan. I don’t know if that’s really true or not, but I hate waiting for something to happen. To me, it seems like there’s more to be learned from Chloe McDonald’s murder, two years ago. I go back and forth on whether or not she was killed by the Warlock or if he just used her murder as an opportunity. There might be more leads back there.

I stare at Ailes’s wall calendar. The Avenger appeared three days ago. There were six full days between the hack and the cemetery. Another six between that and the Avenger. We’re all looking at our watches, counting the remaining days. I’ve got a gut feeling the Warlock may try to surprise us. He doesn’t want us to know his rhythm.

In magic, we use a false expectation of timing to catch people off guard. We do things on the odd count. I pull coins from the air and keep dropping them into a bucket until I steal a champagne bottle from there. I create a rhythm as they hit the bottom of the bucket. Clink, clink, clink, smile. Clink, clink, clink, smile. It’s after the smile, the relaxed moment between the beats, when I do my dirty work. All eyes are on my face. My hand falls to my side and I steal something. We lull you in with a pattern, then get you.

I’ve already made clear that I think the Warlock is going to hit either a day early or a day late. Probably early, while we’re still preparing ourselves in anticipation.

When not being distracted by my own predicament, I’ve been trying to help Ailes’s team in the bullpen sort through all of the image matches for Chloe. The other agents are tracking down the likeliest matches by requesting server records from various social networks and doing soft inquiries into missing persons.

“I think we’ll carefully consider how we deploy our assets. What would you do in Michigan if I can get you out there?” ask Ailes.

Before I can answer him, his laptop makes a ringing sound. “Hold on.” He smiles. “I think it’s for you.” He spins the screen to face me.

I’m looking at an image of myself in the other conference room. Only it’s not me.

I look at Gerald through the window. He grins back at me from his setup. Then I look at the screen; the image is pretty good. With a little bit of digital noise to mimic a bad Internet connection, maybe a better image map to base it on than the photographs of me he got behind my back, and it would totally pass. Gerald spins around in his chair and I watch the virtual version of me do the same. There’s no appreciable delay, at least none that stands out on video conferencing.

He made a pretty convincing 3-D model of me in just a few hours and figured out how to use the gaming consoles motion sensors to animate it in real time. It’s scary to think what the Warlock could have done with years of planning and more resources.

Ailes turns the laptop to look at the virtual me. “Good work, Gerald.”

Gerald’s voice comes though my mouth. “Want me to work on the voice emulator?”

Ailes shakes his head. “I don’t think we need to go that far. How long to make a 3-D map of the director?”

“Twenty for a basic one. He’s bald, so I don’t have to do the hair. The software side is mostly done. All I had to do was just hack it all together.”

“Do it. Let’s schedule a video conference with him in a half hour. Maybe we can get a little more love for our image search. With more horsepower, we might crack this sooner.”

G
ERALD’S DEMONSTRATION HAS
me thinking. Although we don’t know if the Warlock is going to that level of deception to hide his victims’ identities, it’s not worth putting anything past him since we’ve already seen how texts and e-mails fooled Swanson’s wife.

Efforts to trace the messages and calls have led to a firewall of proxy servers. None of them look custom-made. Just off-the-shelf hacks using readily available tools and how Gerald pieced together his impostor software. There was no need to invent anything, just find the tools already out there. They were good enough to get the job done.

The Warlock seems to be very pragmatic. After testing out other image-matching services, Faceplaced.com seems the most likely fit for what he’s using. It has a much superior algorithm and a far more extensive database of images to draw from. Before heading out to Austin, Jennifer did a little snooping to see if she could get the code for the site, but the admin had it locked down tight.

Ailes sees me staring at the screen on my laptop displaying the Faceplaced home page. “What’s on your mind?”

I point to the website. “The hotel room is planted. But this site is the one place we’re sure he’s been at least at some point, and he doesn’t want us to know about it. It’s where he gets some of his magic tricks from, so to speak.”

“Yes. Unfortunately, despite Jennifer’s best efforts to talk to the owner geek to geek, he’s not letting us look at his server logs.”

“I know. But I think we want more than that. We want to see all the searches. We might be able to find out who he’s after next as well as the identity of the woman in the grave. Maybe even set up a little trap.”

Ailes sits back in his chair and shakes his head. “We’ve asked. We’ve hinted at a search warrant. But the probable cause is too thin. It could take weeks. He’s the anti-authority type that would go public if we made any move. And that would be bad. He also told us the searches get purged nightly. But that could be a lie. We need to keep this a secret from the Warlock. Before Jennifer left, all she could manage was a promise from him to not tell anyone we’ve been asking. And it’s a goddamn lot of data. There are thousands of girls that could look like our Chloe. Swanson was a lucky hit.”

The website is important. I don’t know Jennifer at all, other than a brief conversation, but she doesn’t seem like a people person. Of course, I’m kind of aloof myself. But I know how to turn on some personality. “Maybe we don’t need another hacker to convince him?”

“Are you saying Jennifer was the wrong person to send?”

“No. I’m just saying that’s not working. Let’s try a different route. Let me give it a shot. If we can’t get a search warrant, then we need to keep trying. This is our best lead by far.”

“It’s a potential lead. There might be other ways to make the connection between Swanson and the pilot. We don’t know if the Warlock even knows about this website,” replies Ailes.

“He does.” I can’t put my instinct into words.

“Why are you so sure?”

I hesitate. “Remember I told you about the friend who pointed out the website?”

“The guy you ran into at the airport?”

“I didn’t tell you everything about him.”

FOR THE NEXT
half hour I give Ailes the mostly unfiltered backstory of me and Damian. It’s uncomfortable, but someone else needs to know. And I trust him. I’ve only just met him, but he reminds of the kind of father some of my friends had who would ask you how you were doing and mean it.

Ailes thinks everything over, then finally replies, “So you think that if one crazy sees this, others have too?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s one way to put things.”

“And you’re not worried about this Damian character?”

“I think he’s manageable.” That’s a lie. “In any case, the owner of the website is our best lead.”

Ailes takes a moment to think it over. “This guy is a bit of a jerk. Abrasive and insulting. He tried to talk down to Jennifer quite a lot.”

I’m sure that didn’t go over very well with her. “Maybe that’s the problem. She threatens him. She probably knows more about his platform than he does. The only thing he could do was cling to his castle and tell her she couldn’t play inside it. I don’t pretend to be an expert on anything relating to computers. He’ll know that. Possibly I can play to his ego a bit.”

Ailes gets straight to the point. “And bat your eyelashes?”

“If it gets us his cooperation and access to the servers, then yeah. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to act to get someone to get out of the way.” I look at Swanson’s image on the screen. “And it might tell us if he’s choosing the victims to fit the scenarios or the scenarios to suit the victims.”

Knowing how the Warlock selected his victims would be a big break. Did he want to kill the second girl and look for a previous murder to tie her to? Was it the same with Swanson? Did he just happen to look like a pilot missing since 1945? The odds of that being the case are astronomical.

“Yes. Answering that question could make a world of difference.” Ailes’s phone rings.

His face freezes as the voice on the other end repeats something.

“No? They’re sure?” He shakes his head and hangs up. “Ready for this?”

I can’t even begin to imagine what’s about to come out of his mouth anymore.

“The lab did a test of what was left of the body from the cemetery. They used a procedure that’s not even in the journals yet. They finally found some tissue from which they could extract DNA.”

“And?”

“Perfect match with Chloe McDonald. There’s no contamination. No ambiguity.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The tests say it’s the same girl. They’ve matched it to the samples the medical examiner took. We even found a sample of the original Chloe’s blood in our labs from back when the case first happened and they wanted an outside opinion.”

I’m still suspicious of anything that’s been sitting on a shelf. “What about to the parents?”

“Chloe was adopted. We can’t look for a match there.” I can see Ailes’s mind work. “We’re going to try to find the adoption records to track down the biological mother . . .”

I shake my head. Of course it would have to be they can’t match her to her parents. It’s the way the Warlock works. “It’s the long burn.” I try to calm myself.

Ailes stops typing. “Pardon me?”

I think of an example. “I’m doing a card trick, let’s say, and I need to get something out of my purse. But I know that you’re watching my hands, that you won’t look away from them. You’re ‘burning’ them like I might be a card cheat. So I’ll do something suspicious to distract you. I might put a hand on top of the deck of cards completely covering them and let it fall away like I just took something. You’re going to focus on that hand because you know it’s hot. But while you’re looking at it I can switch the deck of cards with the other in my purse or wherever. You’ll never notice because you’re sure you already caught me. Then boom, I open my fingers and show that my ‘hot’ hand is empty. You’ve been suckered all along. You thought I was stealing one card. I stole them all.”

I stand up and lean on the table. “The Warlock wants us to think he just found a girl who looked like Chloe McDonald at first and then removed her fingerprints to make it hard to identify her. That’s the obvious answer. Why else would he go through all the trouble to hide that? It’s because he wants to postpone the big reveal.”

Ailes is trying to follow. “That it’s the same girl? So what’s the Warlock hiding from us by making us think it wasn’t going to be a match at first? Why make an impossible illusion look less impressive? Where’s the advantage?”

I
’
M TALKING OUT LOUD
as I think it through. “He’s trying to hide the obvious answer. At least the one that will lead us to him faster. It’s also the secret that makes his deception harder to disprove in the minds of the public. Remember, he’s not trying to win a court case here. He wants to make history. If he pulls this off, he’ll have fooled the FBI in the most mysterious ways imaginable. That’s why he’s obscuring how complete the illusion is.”

“Explain.”

“The perfect match is too good to be true. If we knew at first we had a DNA match that couldn’t be contested, we’d come straight to the only logical conclusion. Maybe even figure out his method. I know it’s convoluted. But he wanted us to think he was hiding something in his other hand. He needed to distract us from the real secret.”

“Which is?”

I remember Damian’s comment about this being an old family trick. I’d ignored it at the time. Now it makes sense. “My grandfather used to perform an illusion called the Transmitted Woman. He’d call a woman from the audience and have her step into a cabinet that looked like a big metal machine. He’d twist some dials and sparks would shoot out the top. He’d open the door and she would be gone. There’d be an explosion and she would reappear, sitting in the audience.”

“Twins?”

“Not for that illusion. But everyone assumed that. Even though the girl was really from the audience, not a plant. He told people to come back each night and see the effect performed again with a different girl. And he would deliver. Reporters would chase the girl down and follow her around to prove she was a plant that worked for us. But they couldn’t. She wasn’t in on the secret.”

“All right. How?”

I feel funny telling him. This trick has been a family secret for a long time. A few people in the magic community know how it was performed, but it’s never been published anywhere. It’s part of our own Secret Library. “All right. Magic oath time?”