CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Rachel was leaning forward in anticipation, ready to leap out of the car the moment it stopped. Jack was speeding down a four-lane road, headed toward downtown, at a speed that bordered on reckless. They zipped past blurred storefronts and honking cars, a streak of red and blue urgency in the evening dusk. Jack's grip on the steering wheel was firm, his jaw set in grim determination.

For what seemed like the hundredth time, Rachel looked down at her phone and saw that they were practically right on top of Natalie King's phone location.

"Slow down, Jack," she said. "We're almost there. Any moment and…right here!"

But the moment Jack screeched the car to a stop and pulled up alongside a curb in front of an electronics store that was closed for the day, Rachel found the entire situation odd.

"What is it?" Jack said. "Is she in that electronics store? It's after midnight, Rach. They're obviously closed."

"Obviously," she said as she stepped out of the car and onto the quiet street. Nearby streetlamps cast her shadow long, stretched out like dark taffy.

The windows of the electronics store reflected a nearby streetlight, while across the street, the warm glow from a Thai restaurant's CLOSED sign buzzed. Nothing seemed out of place, yet everything felt wrong.

"Here?" Jack questioned, his tone echoing Rachel's internal confusion. He killed the siren, and the silence that followed was jarring.

Rachel surveyed the area with keen, concerned eyes. Her gaze swept over the mundane: a few cars parked along the curb, a closed newsstand, a discarded fast-food cup on the sidewalk. And then her eyes fixed on something that made her heart drop—a public garbage can, unremarkable yet ominous, standing on the sidewalk.

"Jack," she called out, a sense of dread coiling in her stomach. "That's exactly where the ping is coming from."

He joined her side, following her line of sight. "The garbage?"

"I think so."

"Let's check it out." Jack moved toward the bin, his movements deliberate.

Rachel's pulse quickened. This was the kind of fear that clawed at her insides, the kind that came from knowing that what they might find could change everything. She hurried back to the car and retrieved two pair of latex gloves for them. They snapped them on and, together, approached the garbage bin.

Rachel reached into the bin first, pushing aside crumpled receipts and empty fast-food containers stained with grease. Each piece of trash was a potential clue, but they needed to find the phone first, just to make absolutely sure. Jack worked beside her, his eyes frantically taking in every bit of garbage they handled. They dug deeper, sweat beading on their foreheads as the stench of rotting food and damp cardboard filled the air.

"Damn it, there's too much crap in here," Jack muttered, and without warning, he gripped the sides of the can and tipped it over with a grunt. The contents spilled out onto the pavement like the innards of some urban beast, a cascade of refuse tumbling into the light of the streetlamp.

Rachel froze for a heartbeat, her eyes scanning the debris. And then she saw it—a glint of metal among the rubbish. She lunged forward, and her fingers closed around the cold, hard edges of a smartphone. It was covered in a case bearing the leering, maniacal face of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland.

"Got it!" she said as she retrieved it from beside an empty plastic bottle. Jack was immediately at her side, peering over her shoulder at the device in her hands.

They were both silent for a moment as they understood what this could mean. If Natalie's phone was here, discarded like a piece of useless junk, what did that say about Natalie herself?

"Come on," Rachel said, her voice grave and quiet. "We need to get this to the field office. And we need all hands on deck to locate Natalie King as soon as possible."

***

The first-floor conference room was buzzing like a hornet nest when Rachel and Jack arrived. Many of the agents in attendance had clearly been pulled out of bed—the slightly red and bewildered eyes, as well as the unkempt hair on some made that quite clear. Still, they were already at work, with Director Anderson at the helm.

Rachel stood in the doorway for a moment, taking it all in. Anderson saw them enter and came directly over to them. She looked in her element, hurried yet somehow calm and poised.

"This is your show," Anderson said right away. "But we've already assigned a few small teams to tackle the tasks you mention when you were at Rachel Clarke's residence. We've got a few folks working with the theater manager and their secure payment provider. It might take an hour and a half or so, but we think we can get most of the names of the attendees at the theater tonight. The downside to that, though, is that we're being told that roughly ten percent of those who came paid with cash at the box office tonight. So those…well, those are going to slip through the cracks."

"And if this killer is as smart as he seems to be," Rachel said, "he'd be among those who used cash. He'd avoid a digital trail of any kind."

Another agent moved toward them, a younger male agent Rachel had seen around the building but had never worked with. "I'm Agent Marino," he said. "I've got a few agents doing what they can to access the CCTV footage of anything within a five-mile radius of the theater."

"Perfect," Rachel said as she and Jack finally manage to move into the busy room. "And is there anyone working specifically on trying to locate Natalie King?"

"Yes," Anderson said. "Two agents are currently speaking with her boyfriend. He hasn't seen her since this morning and hasn't spoken to her since she texted him just before the performance. Based on the update I got about five minutes ago, it doesn't seem like he's going to be much help. We also have a detective with the local PD heading over to Chesterfield to speak with her mother."

Rachel nodded to a laptop—one of several—on the conference room table. "Is that up for grabs?"

"It is."

"Why?" Jack said. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking we now have potentially four victims, and that means if we can find any sort of link that connects all four of them aside from the fact that they're actresses, we may be able to tie this case up."

As she sat down to the laptop, the cogs in her head spinning wildly, one of the agents in the room spoke up loudly as he ended a call on his phone. "That's the last one," he said. "All public on-stage performances are canceled for the foreseeable future."

All of this together helped Rachel focus, to keep her attention sharp and centered on her current line of thought. As she started dipping back into the digital waters—primarily social media and the city's one small sub-Reddit about the local theater scene—she noted that Jack had latched himself onto Agent Marino, trying to help with acquiring the CCTV footage.

As Rachel hunted and read through articles and posts, she was very aware of the bodies all around her and how they dispersed.. It was a well-oiled machine, each gear spinning into action at Director Anderson's command. But even as it was all delegated, the weight of responsibility clung to her like the humidity from a summer storm.

She knew there had to be something there, something obvious that she was somehow missing. They now had three victims—with a fourth potential one—and nothing solid to tie to them. Yes, they had M.O. in place for the killer, but she needed to find out why he was doing this. More than that, she simply hoped she'd come across a name or a place that linked all four of them.

And then, that's exactly what happened. She saw a name in an article from a local paper written almost two years ago. It was a name she'd seen in at least one of the playbills she and Jack had studied during the case, but it had been a name that had been lost somewhere in the Thank you sections or the Special Guests .

The name was Theodore Barnes. A local art critic, he had something of a specter of fear attached to his name. The article spoke about how Richmond's local theater groups were quickly catching up to other large cities on the East Coast. The one voice of dissent among that opinion, though, had been Theodore Barnes. And in the article, he called out both Rebecca Clarke and Sarah Jennings as being weak links.

The article showed a photo of Theodore Barnes—a man with a smug grin and a critical eye. He looked like a man who rarely smiled, which seemed to be a common descriptor of critics, from what she'd always seen and heard.

Rachel's scrolled and clicked further, delving deeper into the online persona of Barnes. He seemed to revel in the art of critique, his words leaving a trail of deflated dreams in their wake. But more chilling was the revelation that all three victims had been subjected to his harsh reviews. It took visits to three different websites, and the Epicenter Theater Facebook page, but it was there. A pattern began to emerge, an ominous thread weaving through the tapestry of their investigation.

"Got something," Rachel murmured, her intuition flaring like a beacon in the fog of uncertainty.

Jack came over, Anderson in his wake. "Who's this?" Jack asked.

"Theodore Barnes," she said. She was now running a Google search specifically for him. Per usual, social media posts online forums gave her a good indication of the sort of man Barnes was. She explained what she had already uncovered even as she unearthed more. "Looks like he's a bitter theater critic, a failed actor from about a decade ago who made a name for himself by trashing pretty much every single production ever put on in this city."

"A guy like that surely has enemies, right?" Jack asked.

"Yeah. There's speculation that he was even banned from showing up to shows put on by certain directors."

Rachel's fingers paused above the keyboard, the glow of the computer screen painting her face in shades of blue and white.

"Jack," she said, her voice low but insistent. "Theodore Barnes. He could be our guy. He's openly bashed the three victims and held a grudge against the theater scene. And it also looks like he went quiet out of nowhere. No social media posts griping about plays or actors, no articles…nothing. The most recent thing I can find is from almost four months ago."

"Check the database," Anderson suggested.

Rachel wasted no time navigating the criminal database with practiced efficiency. Records flashed before their eyes, an endless stream of faces and names, each with a story that didn't end here. But Theodore Barnes was absent—no criminal record, no mugshots, nothing.

"Dead end?" Jack's question hung between them, tinged with the fatigue of too many hours on the clock.

"Maybe not a dead end, just not the usual kind of suspect." Rachel rubbed at her temple, feeling the strain of the day and fearing the headache that had been tapping at her all day long was going to make its presence known again soon enough—at the worst possible moment. Her gaze slid back to the screen. "We've got his address right here. Wouldn't hurt to pay him a visit."

"Now? This late?"

"Yes. Natalie is missing, and we know this guy has slandered our three victims."

"She's right," Anderson said. "And I don't like the fact that he went quiet all of a sudden."

"Well, what are we waiting for then?" Jack asked.

"You two take the lead," Anderson said. "I'll send a back-up team to tail you."

"Sounds good."

Rachel and Jack hurried out of the conference room fifteen minutes after they'd entered. Behind them, the individual teams continued to work, doing their part to find the killer and make sure he didn't strike again. It was reassuring, to say the least; in her mind, Rachel still saw the gore-streaked brick in Rebecca's home. She couldn't let it happen again.

Outside, the night had grown cold, the city sounds muted as they headed towards their car. They were both tired and Rachel almost felt as if she were simply going through the motions, off to chase another lead that she feared may turn out to be just like the others—a dead end that raised more questions than answers.

But she'd just have to keep compiling it all—questions and leads alike—if that's what it took to find this man, to keep him from killing again.