Late last year, Fayçal Ziraoui, a French-Moroccan business consultant, was at his home in the Paris suburbs scrolling through satellite pictures of the Sierra Nevada when he came across an image that startled him. It looked to him like the symbol that the Zodiac killer used on his correspondence a half-century ago. In December, Ziraoui searched satellite images of the Sierra after believing that a postcard and a cipher sent by the Zodiac killer pointed to those coordinates. Ziraoui spent the winter counting down the days until the snow melted, and in mid-May, he flew to San Francisco. It’s a four-hour drive from the Bay Area, the last dozen miles on rough dirt roads blocked at times by the remnants of collapsed trees killed in the 2014 King fire.

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Persons: Fayçal, Constant Méheut, Ziraoui Locations: French, Moroccan, Paris, Sierra Nevada, New York, San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, It’s, Bay