Angel Killer (24 page)

To walk them through my thought process, I start with a story. I need them to get my point. “When Harry Houdini died, he left behind the plans for what may have been one of his greatest illusions if he performed it, the Flight of Venus. He wanted an illusion that didn’t use cabinets, trapdoors, or anything else that people were using back then. The curtain would rise, revealing two men holding a large plate of glass, like a table. Houdini would help an assistant up onto the glass, have her lie down and then throw a cloth over them that hung a few inches below the edge of the glass. He’d then whip it away and she would be gone. It would have been done in full light. Even with people all around the illusion. It probably would have been his most deceptive effect ever.”

The lobby is filled with people waiting for me to reveal the mystery. I still feel guilty explaining how these methods work. Like I’m a little girl telling my family secrets in school to impress the children I want to make friends with. Revealing the Secret Library.

“The method was simple. My grandfather thinks Houdini got the idea from the old Chess Master illusion. Um, never mind.” I catch myself getting too particular. “The point is, the girl never really disappears. The audience just doesn’t recognize her. One of the men holding the glass sheet is a hollow dummy. When the cloth is covering the assistant and the men, she climbs inside the robes of the dummy. She then walks off the stage holding one end of the glass. In plain sight.” I point to the monitors. “We shouldn’t be looking for the blond girl, or holographic projectors, for that matter. We need to look for a girl, or maybe a guy, leaving the Empire State Building whom we never saw go up it. It could be a wig, glasses, lots of different things. Simple changes can change our perceptions.” As I say this, I think of Damian and his gift for disguise. It unnerves me to think that this is the kind of illusion he could create. Was I right to dismiss him out of hand?

Knoll shakes his head and points a finger at the monitor, paused the moment right after I vanished. “Agent Blackwood, I think we understand that part of the explanation, thank you.” He’s frustrated and impatient. “How the hell did you disappear? We watched you hold out your hands and vanish in a flash. One moment we’re watching you there. The next you’re standing behind us.”

“Agent Knoll, I did it the easy way,” I reply. In any other situation I would have enjoyed the fact that I fooled him.

“The easy way?”

“I walked.”

“Walked?” He raises an eyebrow. I get similar reactions from the others gathered around the monitor.

I point out the window. “There’s a blind spot about five feet in front of the corner. Right under the other camera trained on the other side of the building. The cameras are meant to keep people away from the ledge. Not watch them when they’re nowhere near it.”

I can see he’s agitated by the way I’m explaining the illusion. I need him, and everyone else, to understand each part so the whole thing makes sense. Everyone else is staring at me with folded arms. A room full of cops hates to be fooled. That’s why it’s extra critical I call their attention to everything before I destroy the mystery.

“To get to the blind spot it took less than a second, but I needed a way to distract the camera. So I did this.” I point to the monitor, now back on the live feed, then snap my fingers. The screen flashes white.

The tech at the station lifts his hands from the keyboard as people stare at him. “I didn’t do shit.” He angrily pulls up a window showing IP addresses for the camera feeds.

People turn to me with open mouths. Frustration is turning into anger. I’m not trying to piss them off. “Bear with me a moment, please.”

“Did you jack the system? Use some kind of signal disrupter?” asks the tech.

“No. Nothing like that. I can’t imagine how I’d even do that. I did it the low-tech way.” I point out the observation lobby window to a uniformed NYPD officer smiling back at us. “I asked Officer Malloy to aim a green laser pointer at the camera.” We keep several of them in our field kits.

Out on the observation deck, Malloy flashes the laser through the window and splashes it across our chests, then up at the camera dome, causing the screen to go all white.

“The light is so bright that when it hits the lens it overloads the sensor. Somewhere out there the Warlock was watching through a telescope with a laser aimed right at the camera lens. Or he managed to pre-mount it weeks ago.” I point out to the twinkling lights of the city. “It could be hidden on any of a thousand buildings that are in the line of sight of here. No spray. No hologram. Just a ten-dollar toy. All it took was a second for her to go from the corner to the blind spot. One bright flash.”

“So she’s an accomplice?” says Knoll. I’d already considered and dismissed this.

“I’d bet against it. At least not knowingly. She looks like she’s playing a game, having fun. It’s hard to see her ears, but maybe she has a Bluetooth and he’s giving her instructions. She probably has no idea of what’s going on. The film on the other camera domes is a ruse to give him enough time to kill her so she can’t explain her part in all this. He wants us to be chasing after phantom projectors.”

They still look unconvinced. “All he did was shine a bright light right at the camera lens to make us blink. On the security video, with the low frame rate, it looks like she vanishes. He could see her from the telescope, or be on the phone with her and know when she moved. That’s it. He could have triggered the laser from anywhere by sending the telescope feed to his phone. The point is, two girls. One is dead, while the other, the one who may have unwittingly helped him, might still be alive and in danger.”

The real question is if we can find her in time. Knoll pulls out his phone to check how the search for her is going. I step into the corner and call Ailes to see if he and Gerald have made any progress.

Ailes sounds pessimistic. “We checked the airports. Nobody has been spotted who matches that description. Five international flights already departed. We’ve sent photographs to the other end as well, asking gate personnel to ask passengers if they were at the Empire State Building. But there’s another thing we need to consider, Jessica.”

I know what he’s about to say. I realize my theory that she’s a girl from out of the country whom the Warlock is going to kill when she gets back home is only half right, if at all.

“He may have just sent a car for her and found someplace around here to kill her straight away. She could be dead by now.”

I can’t believe that just yet. My gut tells me she’s still alive, but not for much longer. I look out through the lobby windows at the lights of the city. She could be out there right now with just minutes to live.

A
GIRL’S LIFE IS
on the line. Chloe and Denise were killed before I was on the case; now two more people have already died. That’s too many. It’s got to stop. I can’t just think of myself as a bystander. This may be Knoll’s case, but it’s my responsibility. I’m supposed to be the expert. I have to see through the tricks. I have to be a step ahead of the Warlock.

I shout to one of the techs sitting at a laptop, “Pull up a map of the city!” I trace my fingers down the path from Times Square. He could have been there at the moment the angel fell and then taken Broadway to Thirty-fourth and picked her up in front of the Empire State Building. From there it’s just a few blocks east to the Queens Midtown Tunnel and off Manhattan and to any airport in the area.

Damn it. If he had decided to linger for a while, which he’s done previously, we could have passed him and the girl on our way to Times Square. Just a few hundred feet away from us as we rushed past! I want to throw up. We were so close. This isn’t right. I hate that I’ve taken this long to see through his lies.

Knoll asks the NYPD to find out what camera footage we have of cars near the Empire State Building’s entrances and Times Square around the time she vanished in the hopes that we can put out a highway alert, but it’s been several hours since the descent. He could be out of state with her by now.

Would he be with her? I think about the idea that first struck me, that he’s getting her to leave the city voluntarily. I came up with an airplane because that would get her away the fastest. But flights are delayed all the time and airport lounges are filled with televisions. Many flights, especially international ones, have televisions onboard. The Warlock didn’t waste any time uploading the footage of her on the observation deck. He must know she won’t see it. Either because she was dead or because she was not around a television.

Would he drive her away from the scene of the crime and risk being caught on a camera with her?

No.

After his illusion is in play, he wants to be in a place where he can just watch. Maybe he would use an accomplice, but that still leaves another loose end. The really highly organized killers are solo acts. Or they use people in ways they don’t know. And he likes to be in control.

The warehouse by the cemetery. The hotel in Fort Lauderdale. He needs to be at the scene and take in the aftermath. He was probably there when Claire appeared in the middle of Times Square. Hell, he’s probably on someone’s camera phone.

How could he get the other girl out of the city without anybody noticing? The subways are filled with cameras. Bus stops won’t keep her isolated. A private car or a taxi leaving near the building means a driver with a radio and her in plain sight of the rearview mirror.

He likes things that are automatic. Self-working solutions. Simple.

He wants her in an anonymous place and isolated. But he needs to be able to get to her when he’s ready. Local public transportation is out. She could get off a city bus or a train at any time.

I should be able to figure this out. I’ve spent most of my life traveling on almost every form of transit imaginable; planes, cruise ships, tour buses . . .

A tour bus.

A private tour bus.

A bunch of strangers locked in a box and driven from one spot to another.

“Agent Knoll!” I run over to him. He’s on the observation deck talking to an NYPD captain.

“Yes?” He’s taken aback by my urgency.

The words come out in a rush. “A tour bus. One that leaves here, then heads for somewhere else, like Niagara Falls. Some of them don’t have televisions. And the driver probably won’t turn them on this late at night. Even if she does sees herself, she’s stuck there until they get to the next pit stop. That’s where he will pick her up!”

If the girl from the Empire State Building was following the Warlock’s instructions, maybe against her will or, more likely, not knowing what was really going on, he could get her to run toward the camera, put on a disguise in the blind spot, and then go catch a tour bus nearby right as it leaves. This would isolate her from the aftermath. She’d have no idea what she’d just helped do.

Knoll vigorously nods his head. “Maybe. Maybe.” He looks to the NYPD captain. “Can we get on this? Treat it like an escaped felon and not a kidnapping? Assume she doesn’t want to be found?”

The captain pulls out his radio and sends out an alert to the state police, then the assistant commissioner. He opens the glass door and calls to the techs at the workstation. “Find out what she looked like when she left. ASAP. For now we’ll just send out the photo from the deck camera. Let’s not let this one slip through our fingers.”

Knoll phones the head of the New York field office to start calling all the tour operators and find out if any left within a few blocks shortly after she vanished. I just threw out Niagara Falls as an example. She could be on an overnight bus anywhere. That’s assuming I’m right and she’s not dead already.

The techs scan through the video footage of the visitors as they enter the elevators going down from the deck. Out of ninety people, at least seven women look like they could be her with blond hair.

There are lots of different hairstyles. Some have hats and glasses. Dark hair, red hair, short, long, curly, straight. Put a blond wig on any of them and you could have our girl.

“Which one?” asks the confused tech.

Oh God.

The motherfucker.

I see what he’s done.

The cunning bastard.

All of them.

He arranges for at least half a dozen girls who look alike to be here. But only one has the wig and is told where to stand. The others are there to distract us, to make us chase after taxis, Town Cars, buses, everything.

My voice is almost a shout. “All the girls! Send all the photos! He might have them taking trains, buses, anything that moves. But the tour bus is the one we want. I think that’s where we’ll find the only girl he plans to kill.” I pray I’m right. Being wrong could get someone else murdered.

There’s no telling what the truth is. His illusions involve layers of deceptions that go so deep, there’s no way of knowing what we’ve missed.

I
CALL AILES
to update him on our situation. He and Gerald are trying to make a map of probable stops for the tour buses. Jennifer is going through the images we pulled from the Empire State Building security footage and trying to match them to the database of photos we got from Faceplaced.

Claire Nelson, the girl we think is the fallen angel, was the first one uploaded into the database. The other choices are close enough to fool the security camera. They’re the ones he picked to show up. How he got them to do so we don’t know yet. It probably wouldn’t be hard: a free trip, a contest—anything. Some of them appear to be with friends, so our angel’s double is one of the few who appears to arrive by herself.

Gerald conferences in to tell us about the Warlock’s latest deceit. Minutes before the double vanished, the Warlock sent out a status update on Claire Nelson’s Facebook and Instagram. It was a selfie in front of the Empire State Building.

“On my way to the top!”

The message was meant to be cute and ironic. It’s disturbing because we know who really wrote it.

I go with Knoll and the rest if his team back to the Times Square crime scene. Despite my interjections, I’m still just an adviser. I sit in the back and try to keep my mouth shut. There’s a hierarchy here, and I don’t want to pretend that just because I’ve had some clever insights I get to move to the front of the class. I’ve ruffled enough feathers already. Besides, none of them has been proven correct yet. And if I’m wrong on any of this, I could not only set the case back, people may die.