by Andrew Mayne
My feminist side hates to acknowledge it, but when some women turn thirty they really do change. Maternal instincts, the urge to nest, go full bore. In a way I kind of hope these feelings will change me and my way of seeing things. Would I have given Terrence another chance? Will I open myself up to other opportunities? Will I let people in?
On some level I deeply understand the desire to turn off the rational part of one’s mind and follow emotion. Sadly, this is also why so many people want to believe the Warlock is real. To them, he’s the proof of the supernatural. He’s evidence that there is such a thing as fate and that God or the universe has a plan for us.
But this is all just a trick. An illusion of mystery. The murdered girl, bleeding on the asphalt below us, is just a prop in the Warlock’s twisted play.
In this moment I think I understand something about him. He’s analytical. He’s logical. He’s not a believer in anything other than himself.
He wants to believe. He envies that ability for others to let go. He wants to embrace emotion and religious belief. He may even have convinced himself on some level that he does believe these things, but deep down he doesn’t. He’s manufacturing evidence because he sees none. God isn’t a living entity for him, so he’s trying to pretend he is God.
It’s an unsettling insight for me. I call myself religious and go to church from time to time, but I know deep down, I’m not really a believer. Although I keep trying.
“Haven’t found the right one?” asks Knoll, breaking me out of my thoughts.
“One?”
“Partner,” he replies, using the politically correct term. Does he think I might be a lesbian? Wouldn’t be the first time.
“Not yet.” I should be thinking about Terrence. He’s probably no more than five miles from here. But when Knoll said “partner,” the person who comes to my mind isn’t one I’d like to admit. It’s Damian.
Forensics is about to move Claire’s body. They’ve picked up the feathers and placed white chalk marks around the ones close to her.
“So how did she get here?” Knoll says, turning his mind back to the present.
I knew this question was coming the moment I saw the still image on the live feed back at Quantico. “She was dumped by one of the cars that passed by. Maybe a hole cut in the trunk.” It’s my only theory at the moment. I know it’s weak. But it’s all I’ve got.
Knoll nods as he tries to puzzle out what I just said.
The glittering lights are surreal. Broadway marquees, corporate logos, giant video screens and, in the middle of it all, a naked angel who appears to have fallen to earth. I shake my head as the news ticker rolls by, describing what just happened. Then I notice something new. They attribute it to “the Angel Killer.”
I ask Knoll, “Angel Killer?”
“Our choice of words. Dr. Chisholm decided it’s time we shifted the narrative away from the Warlock and take control of the message. We’ve never officially called him ‘the Warlock.’ I think this is better.”
I like it a lot. “I agree. It puts a face on the victims. Maybe it adds to the mystery if we call her an angel, but I like the idea of making all the victims angels.” I catch another headline out of the corner of my eye. I try to read it again before it changes.
I turn to Knoll, confused.
His voice is apologetic. “The tabloids decided to run with that. We’ve asked them not to. But it’s too late. I’m sorry. The press got some pretty good photos of you when we arrived here. People have already made the connection.”
There goes any hope of anonymity. There are thousands of people around us in Times Square. It feels as if half of them are looking up at us on our platform. I see the long lenses of professional cameras taking photographs of me. I want to shrink and hide. I know it’s too late. It was too late before I even got here.
The ticker crawls by again. “FBI Agent Hunting Angel Killer Revealed to be Jessica Blackstar. Daughter of the Famous Magic Dynasty. Will the Witch Catch the Warlock?”
So that is how they’re going to describe this game? Me versus him? My stomach wrenches. This is not the kind of attention I wanted, nor the responsibility it puts on me in the eyes of everyone watching.
Directly in front of me, a cable news channel screen just flashes a tour poster of me in leather pants, a diamond bustier, and a twenty-year-old’s idea of a come-hither look.
Knoll watches the screen, then turns to me. “If you want to know what goes on in people’s heads, ask Chisholm. But I’ll tell you this. I’m glad this is out there. Maybe it’s a little embarrassing. But that’s not how people see it.”
I shake my head and pretend to be calmer than I am. “I don’t see how it helps. I’m just an adviser. It detracts from what we’re doing. You’re in charge of this case. Hundreds of people are working their asses off. Putting me up there is just a distraction.”
“Only if you let it be. You’ve got to look at the big picture. People want to believe this guy is real. Sick as he is. They want to think he can bring back the dead, travel through time. Now he wants them to think he can open the door to heaven and yank an angel down from the sky. We’re cops. We can find evidence and try to catch him. But when it comes to helping people see what he’s really doing, he’s winning. I think that’s why we need you out here in front.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re one of the good guys. Forget the witch part. All people see is a good-looking woman from a famous family who gave it up to be a cop. That makes you a hero. And right now we need to remind people of the difference between good and evil when they get caught up in all these bullshit miracles. We got our own magician to take down this asshole.”
He sounds a lot like Ailes. Part of me wonders if he has been talking to Ailes and Chisholm about leaking this to the press. It’s cynical, but I wouldn’t put it past them. The hero stuff sounds a lot like Chisholm’s psy-ops babble.
It’s frustrating. It’s the last thing I want. I’ve had enough of the spotlight. I gave it up for a reason. I just want to help people. People like Claire, Denise, Swanson, and even Elsie.
But then I look down at Claire and realize I’m being selfish. She’d give anything to be where I am. Alive. Maybe Chisholm is right.
Forget about my personal issues coming to the foreground. I need to do what I do best: figure things out.
It’s all about the trick.
The trick . . .
I see how the Warlock set this up.
I know what he did.
“Baking a cake in a spectator’s hat.” I say the words out loud.
“What?” Knoll gives me a confused look.
42
A GOOD MAGIC EFFECT plays upon the things you take for granted. It takes place in a situation in which you think I have little control. We’re sitting in your living room with a deck of cards. I ask you to pick one. I rip off a corner and hand the piece to you. I then take the remainder of your card and set it on fire in the fireplace. After you watch the ashes finish burning I point to the drink in your hand. You notice that one of the ice cubes in your glass has a folded card frozen inside it. It’s the card you picked, minus the corner you’re holding. You’ve been holding the drink all along.
It’s your house, your glass, you even poured the drink. You understand how conceivably I could fold a card and freeze it inside an ice cube, but not how I could have done all of that while we’re sitting on your couch chatting.
Instead of a sealed envelope in a safe standing onstage, I’ve done this in a natural setting. There were no trick boxes or smoke machines. I did this in your environment. Putting a dead girl in the middle of Times Square required the same kind of misdirection as getting that ice cube into your drink. Only the scale was different.
Getting it there also involved something that looked natural. The method reminded me of the trick I just mentioned to Knoll.
I watch the street beyond the barrier blocking the bystanders from the crime scene. Cars pass and try to see what’
s in plain sight. What’s right in front of us? Lots of yellow flashes by.
“A taxi,” I explain. Half the cars here are taxis. If I wanted to be invisible, I’d use a taxi. “Probably a minivan. Hollowed-out floor. There’s an old trick where you’d bake a cake in a spectator’s hat. Never mind. I think that’s what he used. A taxi. Not a hat. Sorry. She was dropped from underneath and then concealed in the middle of the street for a few seconds.”
Knoll looks at the cars on the other side of the barrier. “What about the explosion? People swear they saw her fall. And the dent in the ground?” He points to Claire. “Her face sunk a two-inch hole in the pavement.”
“Are potholes rare in this town? Maybe he used a shape charge. Or he could have made the hole himself a few hours before by soaking the asphalt with gasoline. I made that mistake once trying to fill the lawnmower. That would soften it up.”
I’m about to ask to be lowered down to see another replay of the first tourist video when I notice that it is playing on a loop on one of the monitors in Times Square.
My college media professor would flip his lid at how meta all this is. I’m in the middle of a crime scene, in the middle of one of the most famous tourist spots on the planet, and I’m surrounded by news images of what just happened.
The video shows several cars, most of them taxis, passing in front of the camera. A taxi minivan drives by, and a second later there’s an explosion behind it. White feathers fall to the ground and the camera pans down to discover Claire’s body. It looks like she falls, but we don’t actually see her fall, just the aftermath, an explosion of white.
Knoll is squinting, trying to catch the drop. “I don’t know. The closest cab was at least five yards away. It doesn’t look like she was dumped. People would have thought he ran her over.”
The video is grainy and out of focus. All of the ones we’ve seen so far have been. Nobody was pointing their camera directly at the street while it happened. There are no cars behind that last cab, so we don’t have a witness to tell us what they saw from behind.
This is one of the most public locations in the world. Yet, like a theater stage, nobody is looking where they should be until after the illusion happens. To get past the misdirection I have to think of method. I have to stop for a moment and ask myself how I would do it. Not how he did it.
There are two parts to the deception: dropping her body and then creating the illusion she fell. The feathers in the air could be propelled by an explosion. A small charge could send a bundle into the air where it would explode. Wrapped in black tissue paper, done fast enough, none of the cameras would catch it.
“Did forensics pick up any explosive residue?” I ask.
“No. The NYPD bomb squad was on the scene in minutes. They swabbed everything. Negative.”
I rap my fingernails on the edge of the metal rail and try to visualize the explosion as it looked from where I’m standing. For some of my pyrotechnics, I’d use an air cannon powered by a cylinder of CO2. Obviously, nothing like that was found around her body. The bomb squad would be all over it. Was it hidden somehow?
Most performers paint their little boxes of flash powder or smoke black. Grandfather taught me to always keep a couple of cans of paint on hand to match the color of the stage. This helps them blend in. It hides the fact that the smoke comes from a physical prop. It makes it magical.
What if he hid Claire’s body and the cannon long enough to create a sense of distance? Time can be used to create an illusion. If my empty left hand grasps thin air, then makes a tossing motion toward a glass in my right hand and you hear a clink, it sounds like I made a coin appear. Your brain connects the action with the sound, but the coin was hidden in my right hand all along, holding the glass. If you’d been watching my right hand, you’d notice the fingers were at an odd angle, possibly hiding something. Maybe the Warlock used a kind of camouflage that only needed to work for a few seconds?
I direct Knoll’s attention to what I’m seeing in my head. “Look at the area where she appeared and then the street on either side. Notice that she’s in between two crosswalks? They’re nice and bright while the unpainted street she’s on is dark in comparison. He could have dropped her off behind the cab, but have her covered by some kind of fabric that looks like the asphalt. It only has to be there for a few seconds. In the video it looks like his exhaust is kind of thick too.”
“What happened to the covering?”
“A long roller blind attached to the cab. After the cab goes, say, fifteen feet away, it retracts. Probably has an air cannon at the end of it. That gets pulled into the underside of the taxi. We get our explosive-free explosion and our revelation all at once.”
Knoll scratches his bald head. “Sounds complicated.”
“Imagine if I covered you in a black cloth and threw you out of my moving van onto a dark street in the middle of the night. Only the cloth has a cable running back to the van. After a few yards I yank it back up. If someone is walking their dog, what would it look like?”
“Like I just appeared in the street. But this is a brightly lit intersection. Someone would have noticed . . .”
“Would they? We have thick exhausts, steam grates, almost black asphalt, and a thousand bright objects above us. All the people here are either looking up at the lights or at each other. All of the video we have is amateur footage that wasn’t aimed where we wanted to see.”
Knoll’s eyes look up as he tries to visualize what I’m describing. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I think it’s a better explanation than she fell from heaven. She got here somehow. Besides, the mechanics of this method I mentioned have been used for hundreds of years. If a clockmaker could build this into a mechanical magic trick two hundred years ago, I don’t think the Warlock would have a problem. All the elements for distraction are here.” I think of how we’d use masking tape to map out a stage on the living room floor, marking out curtains, props and where to stand. The Warlock must have done something like this, dry-running the effect hundreds of times. “He only needs a second or two.”
The video replays again on the screen above us. I think Knoll is watching it this time with my explanation in mind. It’s of such low quality it’s hard to tell for certain, but my theory fits the facts. And that’s what we really need now: an explanation. Something consistent with the evidence, which gives us a place to start searching for clues and allows us to say we aren’t fooled.
Knoll is beginning to get the idea. “I guess we need to look for phantom cabs now. He had hours to ditch it. It could be hard.”
My bet is on it being impossible. He’s not going to leave us a piece of evidence that helps us prove how he did it. Part of me wonders if he was even in the cab when it happened. He could have hired a driver and rigged it with remotes. Maybe use an accomplice who has no idea what they’re really doing? Would he want to be in the driver’s seat or somewhere out here watching?
Was he already on his way to kill the girl from the Empire State Building?
43
WE HAVE THEM lower the lift so we can get out and take a walk around Times Square. A young girl, maybe sixteen, too young to be out this late, leans across the police barrier with her camera and shouts to me, “Can I take my picture with you?”
It’s embarrassing. I give Knoll a glance. He steps over to the girl and takes the camera from her. “Agent Blackwood would be happy to.” He motions for me to stand next to her.
I try to smile as he takes the photo. He hands the camera back to the excited girl. She shakes my hand and blurts out, “You’re my hero! Go get this asshole!”
I give her a polite nod and turn to follow Knoll. “That wasn’t what I was hoping for,” I reply, not hiding my frustration for feeling so ridiculous.
“It’s what we need. You’re already a hero in my house.”
Knoll takes a phone call from the state police, then fills me in on the search for the other girls. They stopped seventeen tour buses headed in different dire
ctions on the map. They found two girls who match the description. One of them at a highway rest stop a half hour beyond the Pennsylvania border on her way to Canada.
A thin smile forms on Knoll’s face as he gets the news. “I think we got her.”
KATYA VOLNICK, a pretty blond nineteen-year-old Slovenian girl who can speak about ten words of English, was very upset with the troopers when they stopped her. She was waiting at the rest stop for the man with the contest to give her the next clue in the scavenger hunt she was on, and was angry that they might ruin her free vacation. The police tried to explain to her that she did not want the prize the man was going to give her.
It took them a half hour to find a native speaker of Slovene. Through the interpreter, Katya confirmed that she was the one in the video and following instructions from “Mikhail” via a cell phone that had been provided for her. She still had the wig in her purse.
It was a game for her. Recruited back home by an e-mail, she followed the instructions on the cell phone she was given and got to see New York. All of it for some American reality show or Internet thing, or so she was told. All she cared about was the money she was promised and the free trip to the United States.
KNOLL GIVES US the details in the conference room at the FBI field office in Tribeca. Police tried to stake out the rest stop, but “Mikhail” never showed up.
I kick myself for not thinking of looking for tour buses sooner. We could have caught him if we hadn’t had to stop the bus at the last minute. The troopers did the right thing, but it burns me. The asshole was close. Real close. Knoll and everyone else are jubilant that we caught a break and just saved a life. I guess I am too. But we almost had him. Damn it.