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.