but her face gave away no hint of any emotion. I found it curious, but let it pass. I knew she was tired and surmised that perhaps she was not feeling well.
“Can we watch the videos?” I asked, giving Gabriel an imploring look.
“The room is set up now; we can go in,” Aidan said, gesturing toward the closed door of a nearby conference room—a structure whose size and shape seemed not at all to correspond to the actual footprint of the building.
Once again, I marveled at how the building always seemed to have a conference room available when we needed it. I hoped one day to be shown the spell required for making whole rooms out of nothing, but in the meantime, I enjoyed the trick, and the privacy it offered.
A large flat-screen television was mounted on the wall inside, and there was an iPad, a keyboard, and a tray with a pitcher of water and several glasses. Aidan and Elsa sat down in chairs at the head of the table and began speaking. Gabriel did not join us.
“We believe we’ve reviewed all of the videos that popped up on YouTube in the first two days after the robbery. Here is a montage of what’s out there.”
I cringed as I watched the first images of the car crashing into the building. I remembered how it felt to fall on my shoulder when the car jumped the curb, the pain in my eyes as I tried to peer through the windows of the jewelry store. I watched one video, then the next. My memory of the crime was so much different from the images I was looking at. My recollection was that there were very few people on the street, but as I watched now, I saw that there were actually dozens more than I remembered.
“Did you see me in any of these images?” I asked.
“Surprisingly, no,” Elsa said. “There were smart phones filming the robbery from almost every angle, but so far, you have not shown up in a single frame. It’s almost as if you became invisible.”
“That’s the second time I’ve seemed to become invisible,” I said, remembering Lily’s comments at dinner. “Obviously, that’s impossible, so there must be another explanation.”
The images on the TV continued to whirl by, when suddenly something caught my eye.
“Wait, stop, hold that frame for a moment,” I said, squinting at the face of a man I recognized. “I know him.”
“What do you mean, you know him?” Aidan asked.
I pointed at the screen. “I don’t know him, but I recognize him. I saw him, here, in this building.”
A shot of dread ran up my spine and it wasn’t my own. The collective reaction of the group was grim.
“Where did you see him?” Aidan asked, walking briskly to close the door to the conference room. Elsa followed him, closing the metal blinds in the room completely. I shut my eyes to get the memory straight, so much having happened in the last few days.
“It was here,” I said slowly. “Gabriel and I were having dinner together that night, and I was waiting for him to get his coat. This man was pacing outside Nikola’s office. I remembered him because I thought at the time he looked like a soldier, or an athlete of some kind. He was very tense. He was waiting, and pacing, and then the door opened and he went inside. I mentioned it to Gabriel.”
“What did he say?” Aidan asked, coming to sit next to me.
I massaged my finger against my forehead for a moment as I thought back to our conversation. “He said something like, ‘Yes, Nikola knows a lot of Serbs from the Balkan war and some do look quite grim.’ ”
William, who had been lingering in the back corner of the room, came to stand next to me, placing his hand on my shoulder.
“This man?” he asked. “Did he see you watching him?”
I thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. I was standing in the shadows, waiting for Gabriel. It was only when he arrived that I stepped into the light to greet him and by then, this man had gone inside Nicola’s office.”
The group’s concern was growing more palpable by the second, so I said to no one in particular, “You know, I can feel your worry. Is someone going to tell me what they think this means? Do you think Nikola had something to do with the robbery?”
“We don’t have enough information to make that