“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.