Angel Killer Read online

  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?”

  27

  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 se
cret.”

  “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?”

  “Sure,” Ailes replies seriously.

  “Back then, things were different. My grandfather could travel with a much larger cast than my father or I could. He had thirty chorus girls in the show. Women had less variety in makeup, hairstyles, and clothes. Lots of them wore hats. When people came into the theater, my grandfather would watch from the wings and pick a woman who looked like one of his chorus girls. With thirty girls backstage, we were bound to find at least one woman in the audience who could pass at a distance. If we didn’t have an outfit that matched, our seamstress could make up something close enough. He’d call the woman onstage and an assistant would lead her up the side steps. That’s when we’d switch her for our chorus girl. While the audience is distracted by the machine sparking and making a noise, the usher would bring the woman back to her seat in the dark. The chorus girl would go through a trapdoor and vanish. An instant later the spotlight would reveal the woman from the audience back in her seat. The audience was never the wiser. They didn’t realize the switch happened before the woman even got onstage. She was led back in the darkness with no idea what happened on stage. Afterward, the people around her would teller her she walked into the cabinet and vanished. She’d insist she came right back to her seat. Grandfather would suggest that she’d have no memory of what happened to her, making both accounts fit. It’s not a practical trick to try today, of course.”

  “But what does that have to do with the Warlock if the DNA matches?”

  “Twins.”

  “Twins? You just said no twins,” Ailes seems almost agitated.

  “Not my grandfather’s illusion. But that’s not my point. He could do that illusion because he had access to thirty girls. At least two or three were going to be a match for someone in an audience filled with several hundred women. Cheap human labor was the technology of the day. The Warlock is using the cheap technology of our day, raw computation. What’s the percentage of births per year that are identical twins?”

  Ailes knows this off the top of his head. “It’s doubled in the last thirty years because of fertility treatments. Thirty to fifty per thousand births on average. Fraternal twins rises to almost one out of ten for mothers in their forties because they’re the ones that use fertility treatment the most. If you just count women who go to fertility clinics, the rate climbs even higher. One out of three births for that group result in twins. Not necessarily identical, but there’s an increase in that too.” Ailes notices my surprise at him having this stat on hand. “My wife is a fertility specialist.”

  “So just by looking at birth records and the age of a mother, the Warlock could create a pool of twins. If he compiled a database of every woman over forty who has given birth, he knows that one out of ten of them had twins or triplets. If he cross-references that with death notices in the newspapers, he could create a subset of potential twins split up for adoption. If he had access to other records, like arrests and convictions, or even fertility clinic data, he could find more separated twins. Some of them will be genetically identical.

  “The girl we found in Chloe’s grave was her twin sister. The Warlock chose them because they were separated at birth and didn’t know about each other. He wanted a perfect DNA match.”

  Ailes takes a moment to think it over. “Low-income parents are more likely to give up twins for adoption. It also skews the percentage of twins who are split up and adopted. There would be tens of thousands of split-up twins out there who never knew.”

  “Oh my God!” I almost make him jump out of his chair. “It’s even easier than that! He doesn’t need access to all those records.” I point to the face-matching website. “All he needs to do is look for girls who most closely match and then find out their birth dates! He can get that off of their profiles. He uses the website to find exact matches but with different names. He then compares the birth dates they’ve posted online. You and your twin share DNA, a face and a birthday. Two out of three are probably online whether you realize it or not. All he has to do is send an innocuous e-mail or an @reply to ask if they were adopted and he’s in. He looks for twins first, then checks birth dates!”

  Ailes is nodding his head. “He could make a program to do that. Technically, he could limit the first search to all girls born on a specific day and look for matches.” Ailes’s eyes go up as he thinks. “Roughly five thousand girls are born every day. He could canvass tens of thousands of girls in a couple days. It’s a brilliant gimmick. He has the computer sort through millions of images looking for matches. Computationally, it may not have even been possible or realistic a few years ago. Now there are relational databases that specialize in those kinds of queries.”

  I nod. “If he comes up with several thousand matches he can have an automated system hit them with messages or e-mails from other accounts asking if they were adopted.”

  It’s a scary thought. He could find a large supply of split-up twins who never knew they had a sister or brother. From a forensic point of view, there’s little we could say that would dispute the idea that they’re the same person. The DNA would pass in a court of law. There are other markers, like surface methylation, but we don’t have reliable forensic tests for that.

  “What about Swanson?” asks Ailes.

  “He doesn’t need to be a genetic match. Just an identical appearance. He used the system to find Chloe and her twin by crunching millions of images. That probably took some time. For the original Avenger pilot, all he needed was a similar face. That’s as easy as uploading a photo of the pilot.”

  “Of course,” Ailes agrees. “I’m convinced. But . . .”

  If we can’t prove our twin hypothesis, when word gets out that the girl who burned in the fire is an exact genetic match to Chloe, the Warlock wins. People will think he’s the real thing.

  We can’t let him.

  “You have to let me go to Texas and talk to the owner of Faceplaced. We need to find out what kind of data is amassed on the other side of this screen. We need those server logs. The Warlock used it to find Chloe, her twin, and a physical double for the lost pilot. I’m sure he’s going to want to use this gimmick again. It’s too good. It’s too damn good!”

  Ailes pulls out his phone. “I’ll do you one better. This is critical. I think there’s a jet ready to go. We can have you in Texas in two hours. And if the director doesn’t go for it, then I’ll have Gerald pretend to be him to get you permission.” I think the last part was a joke. I think.

  I slide my laptop into my bag and head for the airfield as the flight gets arranged. We’re close. So much closer than the Warlock realizes.

  28

  AFTER THE JET reaches cruising altitude I call Ailes on the satellite phone. It feels a little weird being on the plane by myself. When I flew back from Fort Lauderdale, I shared it with some forensic people bringing samples ba
ck to Quantico. This feels almost excessive. I tell myself it’s not a waste. The fuel, the pilots, all of the expense is worth it if we can stop the Warlock. That’s to say, this is worth it if I can persuade this programmer to help us out.

  Getting the data from that website is now more critical than ever. I’m convinced the Warlock’s next victim is in there somewhere. The Warlock is too smart to be traced through there. It only takes a minute to download software that essentially makes you invisible online. It’s like a library; even if you don’t know who checked out what books, knowing what books were looked at can tell you a lot.

  “How did the demonstration go with the assistant director?” Ailes had Gerald video conference Breyer masquerading as the head of the FBI

  “He was impressed and disturbed. He knew the NSA and the CIA psy-ops were working on something similar, but he didn’t know how to react when I told him one of his agents put it together from a game console from Toys ‘R’ Us, substituting millions of dollars’ worth of government hardware for something that costs three hundred dollars. He asked Gerald to start working on a way to tell when we’re looking at an altered image; a sock puppet, as Gerald calls them. He thinks he can do it by dissecting the motion algorithm. It won’t tell us if someone is using a different method, but it can spot one similar to ours.”

  Being able to tell electronically if we’re talking to a real person or not is crucial. We may have to track down tens of thousands of people. We have call centers with video conferencing in the FBI where we can do that from if we’re sure we won’t be spoofed by the Warlock.

  Screening this many people in just a few days is a logistical nightmare. Anything we can do to narrow the field would help immensely.

  “What are the other departments up to?” I ask.

  “Right now the big discussion is with Chisholm and behavioral analysis is how this affects the profile of the Warlock. They seem to think this could make him some kind of super-genius hacker. Gerald and I are trying to convince them it doesn’t. There’s a difference between knowing how to use a tool someone else made and being the person who invented it. We don’t even know that he’s made a video puppet. And if he does, all it means so far is that he’s very resourceful. People tend to read too much into skills they don’t have.”