Page 40 of Her Last Secret

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.

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