Page 39 of Her Last Secret

The water waited, still and silent, a grave yet to be filled.

The return to the living room was a march towards finality. He looked down at Natalie, bound and helpless on his couch, her chest rising and falling with frantic energy.

"It's time," he told her.

He offered no further explanation; none was needed. Natalie King would soon get a taste of the pain and horror she had inflicted on that stage in front of those other monsters. His only true regret, aside from running out of time, was that he couldn't drown them all.

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.”

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