“You heard the same thing as me,” Decker replied. “She thinks the blow was hard enough to daze you but not enough to concuss you; almost like he’d perfected the technique.”

“Crutchfield has perfected a lot of techniques,” Jessie agreed, “including apparently finding me in that bar somehow. Any theories on how that happened?”

Murph stepped forward and spoke. He sounded almost mechanical.

“We think he set up a stakeout location in the area around Central Station, knowing you’d show up at some point. Our guys did a search of buildings around the station and found a whole setup in an unoccupied apartment across from the station’s garage entrance. There was an empty pizza box and several empty soda bottles. His prints were on them. We think he waited and watched from there all day long. He likely noticed our vehicle coming and going throughout the day. It’s not the same make and model as typical unmarked LAPD vehicles, which was a sloppy mistake on our part. We suspect he saw us leave and followed us to the bar.”

“Any plan to remedy that in the future?” she asked, trying not to sound too accusatory.

“We’ve got your officers canvassing the area in shifts. And, on the off chance that he’s set up another stakeout that we don’t find, we plan to use unmarked police vehicles for any future trips so he can’t distinguish among them.”

“That might solve one problem,” Dolan noted. “But it doesn’t explain how he disappeared from a bar on a busy city block without a trace.”

“That alley didn’t have any cameras,” Decker noted. “But both the adjoining streets did. Our team didn’t see anyone leave the area in the outfit you described or who looked like Crutchfield usually does.”

“It’s possible he had other clothes waiting in the alley,” Jessie said, “or something else under that pantsuit. Or he could have…”

She trailed off, hesitant to suggest her other theory.

“What?” Decker asked.

“Knowing him, he may have gotten creative—maybe pulled up a manhole cover and escaped through the sewer. I doubt that kind of thing would bother him.”

“We didn’t check the sewers,” Decker admitted.

“He would have had to be pretty fast before my guys got there,” Murph said. “Even if he planned that ahead of time, it would be tight.”

“We don’t know how long he had,” Jessie reminded him. “I could have been out for seconds or minutes.”

“It was seconds,” Murph said confidently.

“How can you be sure?”

“Because the fog from your breath where he held you against the mirror hadn’t faded when I came in. By the time Dolan arrived, less than fifteen seconds later, it was gone. So from the time he hit your head against the mirror until I burst in was less than that. I probably missed him by the blink of an eye. He would have had less than thirty seconds to get from the window to the closest manhole cover, open it, get in, and close it before Toomey or Collica got there. That’s tight.”