I get the feeling something else is about to hit us there. We’ve been leaking to the media the inferno didn’t leave enough of the body to confirm that it was Chloe. It’s a small public relations victory, but one that’s about to fall out from underneath us as the long burn plays out.

18

A FEW HOURS LATER we’re gathered in a hotel conference room down the strip from the airplane. It’s a hastily arranged operations center put together on the fly.

Knoll’s making a pained face as he holds the phone. He’s listening to the forensic lab report the results on the thumb.

The print is a perfect match for the original pilot of the missing Avenger.

Chisholm and behavioral analysis have been compiling a profile and looking for a historical precedent while others comb the beachfront hotels for suspects. From the look of things as they huddle around their laptops, they’re not having much success.

The Warlock appears to be a black swan. A thing so rare, there’s nothing to compare it to. On the far wall overhead projectors flash images of the cemetery crime scene and the Avenger bomber. The forensic team is talking about doing radiocarbon and chlorine-36 testing on the pilot to prove he was born after World War II, and possibly isotopic testing to determine where he was born.

I was reminded by one of the techs of the fun fact that because the U.S. and Soviet governments freely tested nuclear weapons in the 1950s, different isotopes made it into the food chain and effectively gave us all internal timestamps based on bomb blasts.

We can measure the rate of decay of certain radioactive elements given off in an atomic blast and find them in your teeth and bones from when you consumed said elements at some point.

This approach is made more complicated, however, because of what happened when the bomb squad decided to test the plane for radioactivity in case it was some kind of dirty bomb Trojan horse. That’s how paranoid we are now. The plane had negligible radioactivity, but the pilot was red-hot.

It could be proof that he was tampered with to hide his actual date of birth, or evidence that his body experienced some kind of cosmic trauma from teleporting through time and space.

The Warlock is playing all the angles.

Chisholm motions me over to a table where he’s talking to the head of the Miami field office, Robert Jensen, who we met briefly on the beach. Jensen has neatly combed gray hair and the look of a principal who’s decided he hates children. He gives me a moment’s glance, then turns back to the conversation. Absentmindedly, he pulls a chair out between him and Chisholm for me to sit. I keep my mouth shut until Chisholm asks me a question.

“How’d he do it, Blackwood?”

Again, I’m being put on the spot, frustrating me. “I don’t know.”

Jensen rolls his eyes. “Heck of an expert you got. I don’t have to guess why she’s really here.”