“You need to start keeping your cell phone on,” the FBI agent said. “I’ve been looking for you all morning.”
Not on Mondays. On Mondays, Peter’s cell phone was turned off while he and Liza roamed the city’s neighborhoods.
“Peter put out a fire at a restaurant in Kips Bay this morning,” Liza jumped in. “He was a hero.”
Peter squeezed Liza’s hand. She hadn’t told Garrison the whole story of how he’d lost his temper and accidentally set the restaurant’s kitchen fire, and it made him love her that much more. Garrison acted impressed and slapped him on the shoulder. “Nice going. I realize this is your day off, but I’ve got a situation on my hands and I need your help. Do you mind coming downtown with me for a little while?”
Peter tried to help the law whenever possible. He also tried to have a life with Liza. Right now, the two were colliding. “Where to?”
“Grand Central Station. The police caught a shadow person running through the terminal on a surveillance camera. I want you to have a look, see what you think.”
Peter instinctively touched his shirt, and felt the five-pointed star around his neck. Liza did the same. Their recent encounter with the shadow person was still fresh in their minds.
“What do you think?” he asked Liza.
“By all means, go. Maybe you can catch this thing.”
“You’re welcome to come along.”
She shook her head. They got only one day a week off. Liza used some of that time to talk with her family, whom she regularly stayed in touch with. “I need to talk to CiCi. She’s been having difficulty with one of the routines in the act.”
Liza’s younger sister CiCi had replaced Liza in the family troupe, and Liza continued to coach her whenever possible.
“Tell her I said hi,” Peter said.
“I will. Please be careful. Don’t let that thing kidnap you again.”
They kissed and Liza went inside the brownstone. Garrison tapped his shoulder, and Peter climbed into the passenger seat of the SUV without a word. As he was strapping himself in, the vehicle lurched away from the curb like a wild animal jumping out of a cage.
The fluid human dance of Grand Central was best viewed from the main concourse. A mammoth space framed by high windows, glittering constellations in the ceiling, and a double staircase at either end, it was here that a person could observe the complex patterns made by arriving and departing passengers on the Connecticut and Westchester railroads. During rush hour, it was one of the busiest areas of the city, and one of the loudest. That changed once rush hour ended and the commuters cleared out. Then it became a tourist site, with group tours and lots of pictures being snapped of the famous architecture. Garrison hurried up the staircase on the west side with Peter glued to his side.
“I analyzed the film of the shadow person your smart-mouthed assistant shot,” Garrison said. “You’re not going to believe what I found.”
“His name is Snoop, and he’s my best friend,” Peter said.
“He’s got a bad attitude and is a threat to national security.”
“Just because he can hack your computers doesn’t make him a threat.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
They hurried down a marble hallway. With multiple exits and doors leading to multiple train platforms, it was easy to get lost, and Peter realized he didn’t know where he was.
“I examined the video of the shadow person frame by frame like you suggested,” Garrison went on. “I was able to make out a face.”
“Man or woman?”
“It looks like a woman, but that’s just a guess.”
They stopped at a door marked NYPD-NO ENTRANCE at the hallway’s end, and Garrison rapped loudly.
“I told you-no cops,” Peter said in alarm.
“There aren’t any cops here right now. You’re safe.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
“I sent the video to the NYPD, and asked them to run it against their database of collected images from the past thirty days. The cops have thousands of surveillance cameras in the city, and I figured one of them might have spotted your ghost. Sure enough, I was right. The Grand Central team found the shadow person on a tape, and alerted me.”
“You gave the police the video?” Peter asked. “I’m on it, for Christ’s sake. And so is Liza.”
“I didn’t tell them anything about your involvement, and neither did anyone on my team.”
“The police aren’t stupid. They’ll make the connection.”
“Which is what? That you were visited by a ghost? If they contact you, play dumb.”
There were times when Peter wished he’d never struck a deal with Garrison. The FBI agent didn’t know how to keep a secret, and might someday blow Peter’s cover, and mistakenly tell the world who the young magician really was.
The door swung in, and Special Agent Nan Perry ushered them into a windowless room lined with video screens monitoring the ebb and flow of the terminal concourse. The lighting was muted, and the images popped off the screens. As promised, there were no cops.
Garrison’s team sat at desks facing the screens. Each agent was at a keyboard with an odd-looking joystick. Peter had seen those joysticks before. Back when he was breaking in his act, he’d worked at one of Trump’s lavish casinos in Atlantic City, and had been given a private tour of the casino’s surveillance room, where he’d been shown how cheaters were caught trying to scam the games. The cheaters’ moves were invisible to the naked eye, but they weren’t invisible to the cameras, and they all got caught.
“This looks like a Pelco DX system,” Peter said.
“Who told you about Pelco?” Garrison asked.
“A casino I once worked at. Pelco can search thirty days of video images in a minute. When it comes to catching bad guys, this system is state-of-the-art.”
“I’m impressed,” Garrison said.
“Thanks. So, what did you find?”
Garrison got onto a keyboard and typed in a command.
“Over the past thirty days, the shadow person has been filmed on four different occasions running across Grand Central’s main concourse. I’ll show you the first video we found. Look at screen number three.”
His eyes found screen three on the wall of monitors. A surveillance video began to play. On it, a shadow person ran through the main concourse. It looked like a puff of smoke, and hovered inches above the floor. It moved quickly before disappearing through a street exit. Several people in the concourse saw it pass, shook their heads, and went back to whatever they had been doing, which was how people usually reacted when confronted by a ghost.
The video was short, barely five seconds long. Peter stared at the screen long after it had stopped playing. The shadow person had appeared to be in a hurry. Why?
He shook his head in frustration. He had no earthly idea what any of this meant. The time stamp on the corner of the video caught his eye. It had been shot on Friday night at 11:50.
He shuddered.
The shadow person had been hurrying to reach the Friday night séance at Milly’s apartment on the other side of town, where it had appeared ten minutes later.
“What’s outside the exit I just saw?” he asked.
“A taxi stand,” Garrison replied.
That made sense. The shadow person had taken a taxi. Not in the traditional sense. It had simply hung on the roof and bummed a ride. Ghosts did it all the time.
“May I see the other videos?” Peter said.
Garrison worked his magic on the keyboard. Three videos appeared in rapid succession, shot on the floor of the main concourse. In each, a shadow person could be seen fleeing past. Peter read the time stamps on each video.
The first had been recorded at 1 A.M. on Saturday morning, right around the time the shadow person had invaded his brownstone. The second was from Saturday afternoon, right before the shadow person had disrupted his matinee. The third was from this morning. In each video, the shadow person ran past a newspaper kiosk in the concourse. With the kiosk as a point of reference, the differences were clear.