Page 70 of Reckless Chance

“That means the tree was properly inspected before the show started. That’s good news,” Lowri says.

“So, what went wrong?” I ask.

“Take a look at this next video. It shows what happened about fifteen minutes before the tree was rolled onto the stage.”

A crew member, wearing a blue polo shirt like we saw earlier, slowly walks toward the prop, looking left and right. It’s not the same person who inspected the tree before the show. This person has a different build.

“That’s the person with the baseball cap who we saw in videos right before the other accidents occurred,” Lowri exclaims.

“What are they holding? Can you zoom in?” I ask.

Daniels complies and says, “There’s your answer.”

My jaw drops as I stare at the fuzzy image of a screwdriver.

“As you can see, it appears the platform of the tree was purposefully sabotaged, and this is who did it,” Daniel says, closing the video.

Shit.

I’m seething mad, fists clenching under the conference table.

“Who is the scumbag?”

“That’s still a mystery. We talked to Ron, and he doesn’t recognize the person in the video.”

“Did you run facial recognition?”

“We can’t. The person was careful to hide their face from the cameras.”

“I assume they couldn’t get backstage without being an employee of the Athena. Is that correct?” Lowri asks.

“Not unless someone snuck them in, or they work for one of our outside vendors.”

“How would they have gotten one of the shirts?”

“Those are easy to come by. They keep a stack of clean shirts backstage. The crew members leave their dirty ones to be laundered and grab clean ones each week.”

“So how do you propose we figure out who the killer is?” I ask.

“Everyone who works on the production enters the theater through the same entrance. We’re in the process of pulling the videos for all the days where there were incidents involving this person in the baseball cap. We’ll watch to see when someone matching this description entered the theater and cross-reference their entrance with the employee ID card that was scanned at that time. It’s going to take a few days to go through all the tapes to make sure we have the right person in each video and determine whether they use the same ID each time.

Eventually, this process should lead us to the person who killed Mr. Brentwood. It’s going to take time though. You’d be surprised at how many crew members wear baseball caps. We have to sort through hours of video.”

“Understood. Also pass this info along to Detective Fielder. It will confirm he’s dealing with murder rather than an accident. He also needs to know that this actor—Greyson—may be involved in something more dangerous than a mere money scam.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it. Before I leave, there is one other thing. It’s the red flag I mentioned.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear about anything else but go ahead.”

“You know those two Rossi guys who were hassling one of our employees.”

“Yes, what about them?”

“They were at the performance. They had VIP tickets to meet the performers after the show.”

“How do you know?”

“I had the IT team run a facial recognition program to look for them anywhere on the property in the last month. It’s been running continuously, and this popped up overnight. When we pulled up the video, they were sitting in the VIP section at the performance.”