“Do you have the crime scene photos location-mapped on the DIVS computer?” Every time we take a photograph we record the position and angle and then upload it into the computer to make a virtual crime scene in 3-D we can go back to later on. For outdoor crime scenes, it’s useful to plug in GPS data so you can see where everything is in relation to the world. The position of a body in a ravine can tell you the direction in which someone walked down it. Sometimes that can lead right to one house out of a hundred and narrow your search for clues like hair and fibers.

“Yeah. I’m pulling it up now. What do you need?” I can tell he’s tired, but like me, he’s eager to chase down whatever clues we can.

“Looking at it from overhead, can you extend a virtual line from the victim’s eyes into the horizon?” I ask.

“One second. Let me create a vector at her eyes. What’s our margin of error, given the angle?”

I don’t know how precisely the Warlock was able to drop the body. This experiment could be way off or have nothing to do with this at all. “I don’t know. Is there some other way to make it fuzzy?”

“If you have other data points, yeah. We can approximate it.”

Other data points. I think about the push pins in the missing person’s map back in the Tribeca office. “What about the GPS coordinates of the other two murders?”

“Maybe . . . I see if anything fits nicely.”

“Imagine there are five points and we know three of them. And they’re either the same distance as New York and Fort Lauderdale or the cemetery and Fort Lauderdale.” I hope I have my geometry right.

“Got it.”

I can hear him type away at the keyboard faster than I can even think of letters. I have no idea where Ailes found Gerald. I get the impression he snatched him out of some genius startup company. The relationship feels like a professor to a prized grad student.

“Huh. That’s spooky. I think I got the pattern and the angle right.”

“Gerald, what is it?” My heart begins to pound and I get that tingle on my body.

There’s a long pause. “Let me just text you the photo.”

Knoll watches over my shoulder as the image loads onto my screen. “Holy shit.”

No kidding.

If we follow where she’s looking and assume there are five locations, she’s looking at the bottom of a star.

It’s a pentagram.

One of the most occult symbols there is. The Warlock is etching one across the United States. The Sumerians used it, so did the ancient Chinese. For the Greeks it was a symbol of the creation of the cosmos. In early Christianity it symbolized the five wounds of Christ. Turning it upside-down made the symbol into a satanic symbol. It’s not just any pattern; it’s the pattern of all patterns. And right in front of us.