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 directions 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.

After the briefing I call Ailes with the news. He’d been sleeping on a couch in the bullpen waiting for an update. I can’t remember when I had a full night’s rest either. I look like a zombie in the reflection as the tinted window exaggerates the circles under my eyes.

“That’s great news. But you sound angry, Jessica,” he tells me.