“Not my grandfather’s illusion. But that’s not my point. He could do that illusion because he had access to thirty girls. At least two or three were going to be a match for someone in an audience filled with several hundred women. Cheap human labor was the technology of the day. The Warlock is using the cheap technology of our day, raw computation. What’s the percentage of births per year that are identical twins?”

Ailes knows this off the top of his head. “It’s doubled in the last thirty years because of fertility treatments. Thirty to fifty per thousand births on average. Fraternal twins rises to almost one out of ten for mothers in their forties because they’re the ones that use fertility treatment the most. If you just count women who go to fertility clinics, the rate climbs even higher. One out of three births for that group result in twins. Not necessarily identical, but there’s an increase in that too.” Ailes notices my surprise at him having this stat on hand. “My wife is a fertility specialist.”

“So just by looking at birth records and the age of a mother, the Warlock could create a pool of twins. If he compiled a database of every woman over forty who has given birth, he knows that one out of ten of them had twins or triplets. If he cross-references that with death notices in the newspapers, he could create a subset of potential twins split up for adoption. If he had access to other records, like arrests and convictions, or even fertility clinic data, he could find more separated twins. Some of them will be genetically identical.

“The girl we found in Chloe’s grave was her twin sister. The Warlock chose them because they were separated at birth and didn’t know about each other. He wanted a perfect DNA match.”

Ailes takes a moment to think it over. “Low-income parents are more likely to give up twins for adoption. It also skews the percentage of twins who are split up and adopted. There would be tens of thousands of split-up twins out there who never knew.”

“Oh my God!” I almost make him jump out of his chair. “It’s even easier than that! He doesn’t need access to all those records.” I point to the face-matching website. “All he needs to do is look for girls who most closely match and then find out their birth dates! He can get that off of their profiles. He uses the website to find exact matches but with different names. He then compares the birth dates they’ve posted online. You and your twin share DNA, a face and a birthday. Two out of three are probably online whether you realize it or not. All he has to do is send an innocuous e-mail or an @reply to ask if they were adopted and he’s in. He looks for twins first, then checks birth dates!”

Ailes is nodding his head. “He could make a program to do that. Technically, he could limit the first search to all girls born on a specific day and look for matches.” Ailes’s eyes go up as he thinks. “Roughly five thousand girls are born every day. He could canvass tens of thousands of girls in a couple days. It’s a brilliant gimmick. He has the computer sort through millions of images looking for matches. Computationally, it may not have even been possible or realistic a few years ago. Now there are relational databases that specialize in those kinds of queries.”