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“You’ll find people dressed as handymen entering his apartment,” she explains. “Not unusual… unless you never submitted a maintenance request and weren’t even home. This must be when they planted the plans.”

Bowman seems skeptical. “You don’t think criminals would be careful around doorbell cameras?”

“They absolutely would be,” Scarlett says. “This footage didn’t come from her doorbell camera, which they covered up. Mrs. Atkinson installed a camera in her holiday door wreath. That, they didn’t know about.”

I smirk. So Mrs. Atkinson had been listening to me drone on about security tips.

After we got the update about Arnold being arrested, Bowman uncuffed me and offered a curt “Sorry ’bout that.” The whole me-going-down-for-crimes-I-didn’t-commit thing is getting really old.

“Long story short,” she says, “there’s still a bomb, and we lost Hawk. He shook the tail.”

Just when we took a big step forward, we somehow ended up back at square one.

I write Arnold’s latest riddle into my notepad.

How’d you like to spend Christmas staying up late?

And then waking up tomorrow with nothing to celebrate?

And now you need to let me go.

Because if you don’t, the bombs will blow.

“If it’s a song, I haven’t heard it,” I say, tapping my pen against the paper, rearranging words and humming them to see if it’ll remind me of anything. It doesn’t.

“Me neither, but it’s gotta be,” Scarlett says. “Maybe it’s a deep cut.”

“As good as you guys have been at puzzling these riddles out, there’s a little something called Google,” Bird says, typing the riddle into his laptop. “The words how’d you like to spend Christmas are part of a song called ‘Christmas Island.’ Those aren’t the exact lyrics, but a mash-up of them.”

“Is there a Bing Crosby version?” I ask.

Bird nods. “With the Andrews Sisters.”

This must be the song Arnold’s referencing. But what does it mean?

“Christmas island,” Scarlett murmurs. “Like in reference to Hawaii? Or Manhattan?”

Island. Stay up late. Celebrate.

I grab the riddle we received after the ornament roll.

You must make it to midnight,

I’ll not have it any other way,

Or else a landmark will ignite.

“We have bomb squads searching the most high-risk landmarks in the city,” Bowman says.

The Plaza Hotel itself has officially been designated as a landmark, so technically, the bomb could be here, too. In a room, in the basement, in the lobby, on the roof.

Nelly, Todd, and Holly meet us in the room. “People are starting to leave, and no one’s been named Santa of the Year,” Todd says, wringing his hands nervously. “The fiftieth Santa Claus Con can’t end this way. What’s going on?”

It’s well past midnight. At this point, everyone’s working overtime on what is now officially Christmas Eve.

“We need to shut this thing down,” Bowman says unem- pathetically.

Nelly does a double take. “Shut it down? Absolutely not—”