“And?”

“Perfect match with Chloe McDonald. There’s no contamination. No ambiguity.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The tests say it’s the same girl. They’ve matched it to the samples the medical examiner took. We even found a sample of the original Chloe’s blood in our labs from back when the case first happened and they wanted an outside opinion.”

I’m still suspicious of anything that’s been sitting on a shelf. “What about to the parents?”

“Chloe was adopted. We can’t look for a match there.” I can see Ailes’s mind work. “We’re going to try to find the adoption records to track down the biological mother . . .”

I shake my head. Of course it would have to be they can’t match her to her parents. It’s the way the Warlock works. “It’s the long burn.” I try to calm myself.

Ailes stops typing. “Pardon me?”

I think of an example. “I’m doing a card trick, let’s say, and I need to get something out of my purse. But I know that you’re watching my hands, that you won’t look away from them. You’re ‘burning’ them like I might be a card cheat. So I’ll do something suspicious to distract you. I might put a hand on top of the deck of cards completely covering them and let it fall away like I just took something. You’re going to focus on that hand because you know it’s hot. But while you’re looking at it I can switch the deck of cards with the other in my purse or wherever. You’ll never notice because you’re sure you already caught me. Then boom, I open my fingers and show that my ‘hot’ hand is empty. You’ve been suckered all along. You thought I was stealing one card. I stole them all.”

I stand up and lean on the table. “The Warlock wants us to think he just found a girl who looked like Chloe McDonald at first and then removed her fingerprints to make it hard to identify her. That’s the obvious answer. Why else would he go through all the trouble to hide that? It’s because he wants to postpone the big reveal.”

Ailes is trying to follow. “That it’s the same girl? So what’s the Warlock hiding from us by making us think it wasn’t going to be a match at first? Why make an impossible illusion look less impressive? Where’s the advantage?”

27

I’M TALKING OUT LOUD as I think it through. “He’s trying to hide the obvious answer. At least the one that will lead us to him faster. It’s also the secret that makes his deception harder to disprove in the minds of the public. Remember, he’s not trying to win a court case here. He wants to make history. If he pulls this off, he’ll have fooled the FBI in the most mysterious ways imaginable. That’s why he’s obscuring how complete the illusion is.”

“Explain.”

“The perfect match is too good to be true. If we knew at first we had a DNA match that couldn’t be contested, we’d come straight to the only logical conclusion. Maybe even figure out his method. I know it’s convoluted. But he wanted us to think he was hiding something in his other hand. He needed to distract us from the real secret.”