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.