Angel Killer

by Andrew Mayne

  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.

  35

  IT’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 expl
osion 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.

  Knoll calls out from the phone. His boxer face looks sad and confused. “Forensics is sending us a photograph. They say she’s holding on to a ticket. Just a second . . . It’s a ticket to the Empire State Building observation deck.”

  What?

  Knoll puts his hand on the mouthpiece. “The time stamp on the ticket was ten minutes before she fell.”

  The Empire State Building is a mile away. Someone could walk the distance in that time. She certainly couldn’t jump that far. It doesn’t add up. It’s incomplete.

  Ailes feels the same way. “What do you think?”

  There’s more. This is all part of the deception. “Without the ticket, it’s straightforward, I guess. I’m not sure what he wants us to think. It’s just a visual image right now. A mystery inside a mystery, maybe. I don’t think we’ve seen all of it. There’s another part to this.”

  Knoll quiets us down again. “New video coming online. NYPD just got this from security at the Empire State Building. They’re streaming it to us.”

  The screen cuts to a live feed from inside what looks like the security center of the Empire State Building. Several NYPD officers are standing around a monitor while a detective and a security guard roll through recorded video. The person holding the camera brings the lens closer to see what they’re looking at.

  “You getting this, D.C. and Quantico?” asks the detective in New York.

  Knoll confirms over the phone.

  The detective has the security guard play back a video. It’s from a security camera showing the corner of the observation deck. We all crowd in for a closer look. We know something is going to happen. It feels like we’re watching live.

  A blond girl, our angel, is wearing an overcoat. She steps to the edge of the deck by the fence and waves at the camera. She smiles. A bright, big smile. She starts to glow. For a moment the screen is filled with a blurry rainbow. There’s a flash of light and then she’s gone.

  She vanishes in plain sight.

  The time stamp on the video is five seconds before she appears a mile away in the middle of Times Square.

  Five seconds.

  One moment she’s waving to us. Another and she’s an angel falling from heaven.

  Gerald is shaking his head. “That’s faster than the speed of sound.”

  “Wheels up in forty minutes,” shouts Knoll. “I need everyone who is going to New York to be outside and on the shuttle in twenty minutes.”

  I look at Ailes and don’t ask. I tell him. “I’m going.”

  36

  TIMES SQUARE IS a madhouse in the middle of the night. The NYPD has set up screens to block the body from onlookers and shut down the entire block to foot traffic. Not that there’s much point now. What happened has already been photographed and recorded a thousand times over. Late-night cable news programs are playing a clip of the angel’s fall. That’s what they’re calling it on the news. We watched it while we were in the air. Hundreds of camera phone photos of the victim’s naked body are already online. Word about the Empire State Building ticket clutched in her hand and the security camera video still haven’t leaked yet, for what it’s worth.

  Twenty of us took the jet to LaGuardia. With the intersections blocked off by motorcycle cops, I don’t think our driver ever did less than eighty miles an hour. A paranormal feat of its own in NYC. A caravan of FBI Suburbans escorted by police cars with flashing lights rushed us down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and across the Queens Midtown Tunnel in under ten minutes. The trip from the tarmac at Quantico to Times Square was under forty-five minutes. Most of the witnesses are still standing around being interviewed by the FBI, the NYPD and the several dozen news crews that are filling the streets and sidewalks outside the barriers.

  Our driver had to honk at a reporter doing a live feed in the middle of the road so we could get past. Inside the taped-off area, it’s just as much pandemonium. Every law enforcement agency in New York is here. The New York FBI office, the largest division outside of D.C., is out in full force. They’re already canvassing the crowds and have set up a mobile command post a hundred feet from the body. Men with flashlights are on the roofs of buildings searching for clues while helicopters are flying overhead with their spotlights scanning from above.

  Somewhere in the middle of this chaos the Warlock is watching. I know it. This city is the center of the world. Almost a century ago my great-grandfather became a household name just a few blocks away.

  Half of our group has gone to the Empire State Building. Knoll pulled me into the Suburban with him to go look at the body while the scene was still fresh.

  A New York field agent walks us past the barricades and across the street to an opening in the screen around the girl.

  She’s just like the photograph. Amid the already bright lights of Times Square, work lights make the scene feel like day. I can see my own reflection in her blood.

  It was hard to tell from the two-dimensional photograph, but I can clearly make out where part of her face has been caved in from the impact. The asphalt is also dented. It appears as if she hit the ground hard.

  All the evidence makes it seem like she really did fall from a tremendous height. But how is that possible?

  A tech with a portable ultrasound unit is checking her bones as a fingerprint tech clears an area on her outstretched hand. The ultrasound screen shows hundreds of fractures. Her left shoulder is pulverized.

  After taking it in for several minutes, Knoll turns to me. “What do you think, Blackwood?”

  I’m not sure what I think. I can only say the obvious. “It looks like she fell. But I guess the question is where and when?”

  He kneels down to examine the body more closely. “You don’t think here? It’s been planted?”

  “I don’t know. There’s just not enough information. We know what he wants us to think. What happened is a different matter.”

  A local agent introduces the deputy police commissioner to Knoll. Dressed in khakis and a T-shirt under his coat, Floyd Greene looks like he was just pulled out of bed. In his fifties, with gray hair and sharp features, he resembles an Irish cop out of an old movie. He gives me a polite nod before talking to Knoll. “Any observations, Special Agent Knoll?”

  Knoll cranes his head and looks at a helicopter overhead. “No copter was overhead at the time?”

  Greene leans in to say something privately to Knoll. He looks at my FBI ID around my neck again, then includes me. His voice is low, almost a whisper. “We’ve had five surface-to-air missile batteries around this island since 9/11. We’ve got radar that’ll tell us if a mosquito takes a piss in Central Park. Nothing gets past it. We didn’t see a thing.” He nods to the body. “Either our little angel here fell from heaven or someone planted her body here. There’s no way she got here any other way. Radar would tell us.”

  Knoll scratches his head. “Balloon?”

  “Anything big enough to carry a person is going to show up on radar.”

  “What about a train of them?” The words sound stupid as I say them.

  Greene gives me an intense gaze. “Explain?”

  I only think of the idea because he said a balloon would be too big. “Instead of one large one, a few dozen smaller ones all tied to a long rope. Each one no more than a couple feet across.”

  Greene turns to Knoll. “Who is she?”

  “Agent Blackwood is the one we bring in to figu
re this kind of stuff out. Kind of an outside-the-box thinker. Real outside-the-box.” He says the last part matter-of-fact. Nowhere near the skepticism when we first met.

  Greene nods his head. “Oh. I heard of you, now. Well, in the umpteen million meetings I’ve had going through every scary scenario that could happen in this city, nobody ever mentioned the possibility of sneaking in a large object, like a bomb, using a series of low-radar-profile inflatables hooked up like that.”

  My cheeks turn red. “Sorry. Just asking a question.” I feel like I’m ten and interrupted my grandfather in the middle of one of his stories.

  “Don’t be sorry, Agent. I’m paying you a compliment. We try to imagine the unimaginable. Now I got to go yell at somebody for not thinking of that. Hopefully he’ll tell me that our radar would catch it.”

  Knoll rolls the idea around in his head. “You think that’s it?”

  I shake my head. “No. I don’t. I don’t think she fell here. At least not from that high up. I don’t think the Warlock would chance setting off a hidden missile defense system. I was just thinking around things.”

  Knoll makes a kind of grunt. I’m not sure if that means he gets what I’m saying or is just frustrated.

  The girl’s eyes are looking right at me from the reflection in the pool of her blood. It’s as if they’re telling me something.

  We’re missing a clue.

  It’s got to be an obvious thing, like the feather or the sand.

  Oh my God!

  “What?” asks Knoll.

  “Just a second!” I hold up my finger and pull out my phone to call Gerald back in Quantico. He picks up after three rings. “Gerald, you told me the girl’s name. How did we find it out?”

  His voice still sounds hurt. “I found her photo in the database. But she doesn’t have a twin. A lot of close matches. But nobody with the same birth date.”