“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.