The Heist

green Styrofoam on the floor from whatever had been crushed by the steel door.
    Clarissa stared at the iPhone, then at Nick. “You’re right. Are you saying this isn’t a live feed?”
    “No, it’s live.”
    “Then I don’t understand,” she said.
    “Are you familiar with Harry Potter?” Nick asked.
    “Of course I am,” she said.
    “Then you know about his Cloak of Invisibility,” Nick said, sipping his coffee again and getting a bit of foam in his mustache.
    She smiled. “You think the thief is a wizard?”
    “No, but he was working for one, who is long gone now and ran the whole show from a fake phone-company truck that was parked down the street.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “We drove past it on our way here.” Nick wiped the foam off his mustache with his finger, and wiped his finger on his pants.
    “I meant, how do you know it’s fake?”
    “I didn’t then, but I do now, because of this.” Nick nudged a chunk of Styrofoam with his shoe. “That’s green-colored Styrofoam wrapped in polyester.”
    “Sort of like you and your suit,” Brown said with a grin, glancing at Clarissa to see if he’d scored a point with her. He hadn’t, but he had with the two guards, which was no consolation.
    “What’s so significant about the polyester?” Clarissa asked.
    “Polyester has very low thermal conductivity,” Nick said.
    Clarissa nodded with understanding. “So the thief used the polyester-wrapped board as a wall to block the heat sensors from picking him up as he entered the room.”
    “That’s right.”
    Nick toasted her with his cup, she toasted him back, and Brown grimaced.
    Clarissa regarded the inspector as if seeing him for the first time. Physically he wasn’t much to look at, and after she’d had to explain to him who Aphrodite was, she’d dismissed him as an uneducated, though very likeable, oaf. Now she realized that she’d gotten him all wrong. This guy was no oaf. He was sharp, and comfortable in his own skin. The more he spoke, the more she liked him.
    “I may have missed something, Inspector,” she said, “but what does all of this have to do with why we can’t see the thief in the room?”
    “He’s green,” Nick said.
    “He’s done pretty well for an amateur,” Brown said.
    “I meant, Ed, that he’s
wearing
green. The same color as these heat shields, which brings me back to Harry Potter and his Cloak of Invisibility,” Nick said. “It’s a movie special effect. The wizard behind this crime used the same technique that Hollywood uses to put actors on alien worlds that don’t exist or in the cockpits of fighter jets that aren’t actually in the air. They have the actors perform in front of a green screen and then they use a computer toreplace the green background with something else, a still or moving image. But our wizard did the reverse.”
    “He put the thief and his tools in green,” Clarissa said, getting it now. “The wizard, sitting with a laptop in that fake phone truck outside, tapped into our surveillance camera feeds to replace the thief, and anything else that was green, with video of whatever was behind them, making them appear invisible.”
    Nick nodded. “Then the thief draped a Cloak of Invisibility over the Crimson Teardrop display so he could steal the diamond without being seen.”
    “How did he do that?” Brown asked.
    “He threw a green sheet over it, and the wizard composited a still image of the Crimson Teardrop display over that,” Nick said. “What the guards saw was an empty room and the Crimson Teardrop safely on display.”
    “That’s brilliant,” Clarissa said. “The wizard is a genius.”
    “He’s a complete screwup,” Brown said. “You’re forgetting that we’re out here and the thief is in there with the diamond, ergo the plan didn’t work.”
    “But he came close to pulling it off,” Clarissa said. “You’ve got to give him credit for that.”
    Nick nodded in agreement. “A guy this smart has probably been at this awhile. The FBI might have some idea who he is, assuming the thief isn’t kind enough to tell us. Speaking of which, I’d say it’s time that we met our guest. Can you raise the curtain, please, Ms. Hart?”
    Clarissa walked to a painting on the wall and moved it aside to reveal a hidden keypad.
    Nick looked at the guards. “You two stand aside and keep your weapons in your holsters. We don’t want any accidents.”
    Nick set down his coffee cup and drew his own weapon. He and