I shut the TV off when clips of me onstage with a white tiger start playing. Part of me knows I should call my father and grandfather and tell them not to talk to the media, but I’m really not sure I want that stress right now.

Earlier at the gas station, I’d picked up a tabloid that was floating the theory that the Warlock didn’t actually murder any of his victims. It suggests that he simply found them and arranged for a spectacular memorial. It’s full of holes and insulting to the families. But some people want him to be an antihero who really isn’t hurting anyone.

It reminds me of Hitler worship. The Web is full of idiots trying to spin his evil. It’s bad enough when serial killers get groupies who know they did it and glorify them regardless; it’s worse when less crazy people delude themselves into justifying something they want to believe in. Entire books have been written trying to claim the concentration camps never happened, all so a handful of people who still adhere to National Socialism can point to their most famous icon as a little misguided and not a genocidal monster who has come to represent pure evil.

I stare at the map in front of me as if it will reveal its secrets and the next deception will leap forth. It’s not working. Next to me is a stack of old magic books I brought to thumb through, hoping they will jar my mind.

From time to time my mind drifts to Colorado. I pull up a state map on the computer and search satellite images of the location, as if a clue will pop out at me.

Knoll and Ailes are under the impression that I might be able to see through everything and give them a heads-up to what the deception might be here. I don’t know how. I just got lucky before. The only thing I believe is that this illusion is going to be bigger than the others, and he wants us as witnesses.

Magic is a funny thing. David Copperfield flew twenty feet in the air on a television special and people barely remembered it. Five years later, David Blaine floated six inches off the ground on a magic special that looked like reality television and the world went nuts. The Blaine trick looked real. Copperfield’s looked like an illusion. Blaine never repeated the trick, while you can go see Copperfield float, just as he did on television, every night in Las Vegas.

I flip through the pages of a magic book and stop at a photo of a Chinese magician pulling umbrellas from a box. A few pages later a man and his wife are producing light bulbs by the dozen. Each prop is a theme.

If the Warlock’s crimes are a magic act, I should be able to figure out the theme. The Chloe murder was him raising the dead, bringing someone back from death. The airplane was pulling something out of the past. The angel was him sending someone down from heaven. The best guess is that he’s trying to open up different realms that embody the classical elements, water, air, wind, earth and fire, or just symbolic clues to that effect.