Angel Killer (23 page)

The Warlock keeps escalating things. First it was something in a remote location. Next it was a public beach, predawn. Now he’s committing murder in full view of hundreds of people in one of the biggest cities in the world. No one could imagine how big this murder would have become. I’m afraid to think about what happens next.

We’re waiting for the NYPD to set up a remote monitor in the observation deck lobby to show the video from the security system. This is to help us better understand how she vanished. Our FBI team is up on ladders checking the cameras, looking for some kind of electronic trickery. I know they won’t find any. He’s never left behind any obvious proof of his deception. The last thing he wants is physical evidence showing the event was anything less than divine.

The city is a vast jungle of sparkling lights below me. Photos can capture some of the view. But it’s so much more than that. A thousand different sounds float up here. Police cars, squealing bus brakes, the ever-present sound of construction.

I walk over to the spot on the deck outside where the girl vanished, careful not to touch anything. The forensic team has already swept the area for clues, but it’s always good practice to be safe. I look up at the camera that is trained on where she stood. It’s a stubby black box locked inside a plastic dome. There are four cameras watching the outside perimeter. They keep track of tourists as they file out of the metal and glass lobby onto the narrow walkway around the building. Fishhook-shaped barriers curl over the top of the fence, preventing people from climbing over the edge. Over the years it’s been a temptation some found too hard to resist. There were five attempts in three weeks alone in 1947 before they put in the safeguard.

I push my arm between a gap in the metal bars. The distance is too narrow for even a small child to slip through. Knoll sees me and walks over.

“I don’t think you’re going to make it through, Blackwood.”

“You’d be surprised by the tight spaces I used to crawl through,” I reply. Part of being a stage illusionist meant shoving yourself into very small spaces in apparently empty boxes. “Having a six-hundred-pound white tiger only inches away can be a hell of a motivation.”

Knoll’s eyes widen for a moment. “You’re an odd woman.”

“Yes. People keep reminding me.” I don’t think he meant it as a dig. It was just an observation, perhaps a little too accurate for my liking.

“It’s a good quality.” He turns to the security camera. “They keep a pretty good check on who comes out here. They have to go through a screening. Look for parachutes, Uzis, the fun stuff. Unfortunately, they’re not as concerned about people leaving, as long as they don’t do it over the side. We’ll have the videos ready in a second to do a head count. So far, they haven’t found our girl going back into the elevators or the stairs. Of course, if she took the stairs, she could still be walking down them and won’t be too hard to find. Every public inch of this building is under observation from the time you enter to the time you leave.”

I pull away from the ledge. “Is it? No blind spots? The cameras look more concerned with people as they get closer to the edge than if they stick close to the side walls. But there could be cameras I don’t know about.”

“I’ll check again. They might be a little overconfident.”

A field tech leans his head out the door and waves us inside to the table where they’ve set up the monitors. Several dozen NYPD detectives, FBI agents and other officials are already gathered around waiting to watch the high-resolution playback from multiple angles.

The tech seated in front of the playback controls explains that he’s put together a video sequence of the girl up until the point she vanishes. There were ninety other people in the lobby and on the deck, he cautions, making it difficult to follow her at some points.

He starts the video with her entering through the ground-floor lobby by herself. The view is from the high-ceiling looking down on the wide marble floor. The next shot shows her paying for her ticket in cash. We then see her get in line for the elevator. The elevator camera shows her riding to the eighty-sixth floor. Another shot shows her walking across the observation deck lobby and out onto the observation deck. Another camera follows her as she walks around to the opposite side. The last camera catches her as she steps into the corner. We all lean in because we know what happens next.

The girl smiles, then vanishes in a flash of light. After that, she doesn’t reappear on any of the other cameras. She never steps back into the elevator. She never takes the stairs.

She’s gone.

The tech rolls back to the moment she vanishes and replays the video frame-by-frame. Everyone crowds in closer to look for some kind of clue, as if in slow motion the flash of light will reveal her secret.

I’m skeptical. It’s like a magician’s puff of smoke. The flash isn’t an artifact of a miracle. It’s there to hide something.

Behind us, an NYPD detective steps from the elevator and walks behind the table. “So far we’ve tracked down fourteen people who were on the observation deck when it happened. None of them recall seeing the girl.”

“What about the flash of light?” asks Knoll.

“Two of them think they may have seen a really bright camera flash, but nothing for sure.”

Interesting. Everyone was too busy staring down at the city. None of them saw the Warlock’s greatest trick.

One of our agents, a woman with short brown hair and an FBI jacket, rushes in from outside holding the glass dome from a camera. “We may have found something.”

T
HE AGENT HOLDS
up the dome in her gloved hands for us to see. “We noticed a thin film over this. Like a kind of spray. It may be the same kind of material they use on glass to allow you to project images onto its surface.” She pulls out a small flashlight and aims it at the dome. A bright glow appears around the point at which the light passes through.

“She was a projected image? Like a hologram?” asks one of the techs sitting at the table.

Knoll starts giving instructions. “Check all the cameras in the building and be careful about fingerprints. Check with security and the manufacturer to see if this is standard.”

The head NYPD detective gives orders to his subordinates to assist. Agents and field techs fan out to inspect the cameras in the lobby and elevators using the flashlight test. Just a few feet away from me, an FBI agent aims his penlight on the bubble over the camera aimed at the lobby. A glow appears on the surface when he brings the light closer.

The agent holding the first dome nods her head. “Just enough for a bright light, but not enough to be noticed. We should check the cleaning closets in case he slipped the material into the custodial supplies.”

One of the IT techs sitting at the table starts digging into an equipment case. “I can set up a video projector so we can see if that works. Maybe replicate the effect.”

They’re excited to think that they may have figured out his trick.

It’s a wonderful theory.

It’s wrong.

I don’t say anything yet because I don’t know what else they should be doing. People assume magicians use far more sophisticated methods than we usually do. Most of the time the explanations are mundane, nothing like holographic projections and sophisticated lasers. Those elements might be part of a trick, window dressing, but they aren’t the method.

When put on the spot to perform as a young girl, I’d sometimes just take a strand of my own long black hair and use it to make a napkin or a dollar bill float. Against the right background, it was invisible. People thought I was using magnets or wind currents. They never guessed my own body was the gimmick.

The film on the domes theory has enough credibility to make it plausible, but it’s too complicated. To create the image of the girl entering the building and going all the way to the observation deck, the Warlock would need projectors all over the building. It’s the kind of thing out of a movie. It would also betray his methods. It has to be one of his fake-outs.

I ask the woman a question. “What about the dome over the camera that was watching the corner? Did we check that one yet?”

“They’re taking it down now.”

I know exactly where this is going. I hate to be the one about to burst her bubble.

A tech comes in from the deck and sets the globe on the table. We watch as she takes her flashlight out and flashes it on the surface. The beam passes straight through with little reflection. It’s nothing like the other domes we’ve checked.

She tries the light from a different angle to no effect. “I guess he must have wiped it down.”

I shake my head. “I’m sure he never touched it.”

The woman looks at me with a hurt expression. I just took away her moment. I’d feel bad, but this isn’t about egos. There’s no time for politics. It’s about getting to the truth as quickly as we can. The film is just a big time-wasting ruse, typical for the Warlock. The critical proof isn’t there because that’s not how he did the illusion.

The spray decoy is there to buy him time. To convince us that the first girl never existed, that she’s some kind of phantom. He wants time so he can kill the other girl. If she was an accomplice, this stunt wouldn’t serve much of a purpose. It only buys him a few hours if we keep chasing the theory.

His deception took a lot of planning. I think about how I would create this distraction. The spray could have been applied at any time from a hidden sprayer, maybe even by an unwitting accomplice. I doubt we’ll ever find out when it happened or exactly how, probably months ago. It doesn’t matter right now.

The Warlock left this one dome clear to tweak us. After we’ve wasted time and manpower on the theory, he wants us to know that’s not how he did it. He wants us to think he would have done it that way if he were merely a stage conjuror. It fits with his need to make us believe he’s the real thing. I think he hopes we’re going to be sending people all over the building searching for hidden projectors next.

I’ve seen projecting devices as small as a lipstick case for sale in catalogs. Given the fact that forensic techs can spend weeks looking for a bullet hole in a small room, searching the entire Empire State Building for something like that is an almost impossible task. It’s a devious way to tie us up and send us down the wrong track.

Knowing why he did this still leaves the question of how he accomplished the deception.

“Quiet please!” Knoll is holding his phone and motions everyone back to the table. He asks one of the techs if they can get Internet access. The man nods and pulls up a browser. Still on the phone, Knoll relays a link for him to go to.

“It seems the Warlock couldn’t wait for us to release the observation deck footage,” says Knoll. “The news just got ahold of a video uploaded to the Web. It shows the whole thing from someone’s camera phone up here.”

The tech plays the video. Same girl, same effect, different angle. The “miracle” happens in the background as the person taking the video films the city at night.

Knoll calls over to the NYPD detective and the head of the FBI field office. “We need to find out who uploaded that ASAP.”

While we were sitting on the observation deck footage we could control part of the message. We were denying the Warlock his full effect. But he wasn’t going to let that happen. He wants the world to see the entire illusion in all three parts when they wake up. The vanish. The descent. The revelation of the fallen angel. The whole miracle he created before we have a chance to explain it away, assuming we can. He wants us to explain it away with talk about holographic projectors and not have any to show.

We’ll look clueless.

He’ll win.

I get an idea, but it’s just a notion.

I need us to dismiss the phantom-girl concept if we’re going to put all our energy into finding her now. I have to go out on a limb to do it. I’ll probably look like a fool. But I don’t have a choice.

I turn to Knoll. “Mind if I try something?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Better if I just show you. Give me a minute. Can we get a live feed from the camera outside where she vanished?”

The tech at the table nods.

“Just start recording in a minute,” I explain. “It’ll probably look dumb. But I just want to see something.”

I step outside the lobby and walk around the back of the observation deck to the spot where the girl was last seen. I feel like I’m about to make the biggest ass of myself in front of everyone. My grandfather would yell at me for trying something like this without practicing first. Every second counts here.

But this isn’t a show. This could be life and death.

T
WO MINUTES LATER
I walk back into the lobby. Everyone is crowded around the monitors.

“Did it work?” I ask, afraid I made a complete ass of myself.

They spin around to look at me. They’re all shocked.

I guess it did.

Knoll is searching for the words. “You . . . you vanished.” He’s clearly shocked.

I hear someone mutter in the background. “She is a witch.”

My body relaxes, but my mind goes into overdrive. This only means that we have that much less time to save the girl who vanished. She has no idea what happened or what’s coming.

E
VERYONE IS WAITING
for an explanation. I think about the right way to describe what happened. I have to explain this clearly, but I also need them to remember the moment they were fooled. The trouble with telling someone how a trick is done is that after they hear the simple solution they decide the secret really isn’t that big of a deal and assume they were on the verge of figuring it out anyway. Most of the time that’s not the case.

I also need to present it so that they won’t just dismiss what I did as nothing like what the Warlock did once they see the differences. That’s the difficulty with trying to debunk psychics and people who claim they have magical powers. People who secretly want to believe will dismiss any deviations as proof that the psychic is real because you didn’t replicate what they did exactly the same way. I had two minutes to plan my little illusion. The Warlock had years.