I notice the way Special Agent Shannon says the last words. There’s a moment of hesitation there. He meant them to sound forceful, but they weren’t. He has a sense of doubt about everything. This can’t be the same girl, but it’s gnawing away at him.

Obviously this is just some sick game the killer is playing. However, I get the feeling that something about it unsettles Shannon more than usual. Guys like Shannon tend to like straight-up, predictable crimes. Bank robberies, kidnapping for money, a murder of passion. It’s the kind where the motives are the most alien that give them stress.

I suspect because it’s easier to think about things when you can imagine yourself doing them. We can all fantasize about the perfect caper, like how we’d pull off the perfect bank robbery. But to try to understand the motivations of someone who is just plain disturbed is much more difficult and stressful. There’s no predictability there. We don’t want to see any part of ourselves in people capable of that.

We want to hunt monsters, not be them.

Danielle speaks up. “What kind of forensic evidence do we have that it’s the same girl?”

Shannon walks us over to the edge of the white screen. “Blood tests. We’re trying to do a hair sample too. As I mentioned, the parents confirmed it was her. There are even scars in the same spots where Chloe was stabbed. They had no doubt.”

“What about fingerprints?” asks Danielle.

“Well, that’s a little complicated. You’ll see in a second.” He nods to a deputy who waves us through a gap. “When we found her, the first thing the examiner did was take a core temperature and measure elasticity and other signs of necrosis. This girl died less than twenty-four hours ago.”

A field technician is taking photographs of the scene. I blink from the light of the flash. As my pupils dilate, the body of Chloe McDonald comes into focus.

Danielle gasps. I’m sure I do as well. It’s not the dead body that unsettles us, it’s the look on her face. Mouth open, eyes wide. It’s a look of sheer terror frozen in time.

This is the gut reaction Ailes wanted me to have. I think of him as a sadist for not warning me. He had to have known. I’m sure on his desk or on his computer screen was a photograph of the crime scene. But he didn’t show it to me. He didn’t prepare me for this.

He wanted me to see what the Warlock wanted us to see. This wasn’t watching from the wings, this was sitting in the front row. The reaction is visceral.

6

CHLOE MCDONALD’S FACE is filled with horror. It’s an expression of agonizing fear because her body is still half buried in the ground from which she appears to have emerged. Her fingernails are a bloody mess, and deep furrows in the grass where it looks like she tried to claw her way free of the earth are still visible. Her burial dress is in dirty tatters, torn to expose her left breast and a red scar presumably from where she had been knifed two years prior. Her skin still has the pink sheen of the living.