“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.