It’s a dirty, evil, vile trick.

The Warlock turned one girl’s death into a publicity stunt, killing another.

I search the rooftops again for any sign of someone watching. I know he’s long gone, but part of me still has that feeling that I’m being watched. This dark show has only started.

10

OUR JET LEAVES Michigan a little past 4 a.m. When I check my phone there’s a message from my ex-boyfriend. He’s in from New York and wants to know if I want to grab a late dinner.

I send him an e-mail explaining why I couldn’t return his call and tell him maybe next time. Secretly, I’m thankful I didn’t have to turn him down over the phone. Our breakup was long and awkward. A campaign fund-raiser for a New York senator, he seemed like my workaholic match until I caught him reading the CNN closed captioning in the middle of sex. I may not be the most imaginative girl in the bedroom, but I have to draw a line somewhere.

By the time we land, there’s already a meeting scheduled for later that day to fill in the rest of the bureau on what happened. I make it home long enough to get a shower and take a three-hour nap. While I change into something more suitable for the office, I watch the news for the media reaction from yesterday.

What should be a quiet Sunday morning is filled with high-def video of the flames from the body over the iron gates of the cemetery. The fire looks like a stretched-out tornado as it twists into the sky and ends in a dark plume of smoke.

Photos are already popping up online. Some people saying they can see ghastly images and spectral eyes looking down on them. A commentator flicking through different images calls attention to the most striking ones. I have to admit that some of the freeze frames are ominous-looking. No matter what I know about statistics and psychology—you’re bound to get some photos that can be anthropomorphized into faces—it doesn’t change my emotional reaction when I see a dark skeletal image leering at the camera.

I send a quick e-mail to Ailes while I put on my makeup, something I never learned properly until a college roommate showed me how. All I knew up until then was show makeup, designed for bright lights and big theaters. I used to either look like a drag queen or wore none at all. Now I go for a simple not-made-up-unless-you-look-closely style. It takes just as long as anything else.

We’re so image-obsessed, if the Warlock really wanted to mess with us, it would be simple for him to Photoshop an image or digitally manipulate some video and then post it somewhere online. It would be the twenty-first-century way to leave a calling card.

Watching the news replay the video and play up the mystery is frustrating. I keep hearing the phrase “a case that has the FBI baffled” over and over again.