Page 20 of Her Last Vow

"I'm not accusing anyone," Rachel said. "Two people are dead on the exact days your model predicted. We have to ask the question. Surely you can understand that."

Kline's jaw tightened, and for a moment she didn't say anything. She just looked between Rachel and Novak like she was recalculating something. When she spoke again, her voice had lost the enthusiasm and spunk she’d been using so far. It had been replaced by something flatter and more formal.

"Fine," she said. "You want to know who has access to individual predictions, and whether anyone on my team has been pulling that data. Right?”

“Yes,” Novak snapped.

“Yeah, okay. I'll go through the export logs myself. Every access request, every download, every query against the model going back as far as the system retains it."

"We'd appreciate that," Rachel said.

"I'm not doing it because I think you're right." Kline's voice had an edge to it now. "I'm doing it because I want this cleared up and away from the press. If there's a leak somewhere in my system, I want to be the one who finds it, not some outside auditor Sloan brings in to make a show of it."

"That's fair," Novak said.

"I'll have something for you by tomorrow." Kline turned back to her monitors, effectively signaling that the conversation was over, though she added one more thing before they reached the door. "Whoever did this, if it really is somebody with access, they didn't get it from sloppy security. I built that system tight. Somebody worked to get around it. Now, if that’s all…”

“It is,” Rachel said. “For now. Thank you.”

They left the lab area and headed back for the elevator. They rode back up and when the doors opened, the sublevel's cool blue light gave way to the warmer glow of the lobby.

"She went from thrilled to furious in about four seconds," Novak said.

"She wasn't expecting such a to-the-point question," Rachel said. "Nobody likes being asked if the people they trust the most might be capable of something like this."

"You think she'll actually pull those logs?"

"I think she will, because she wants to be the one who finds the answer before anyone else does. And, like she said, she’d like to keep it away from the media. I think right now, she’s probably the most reliable asset we have." Rachel pulled out her phone as they crossed the lobby. "But I want more than her logs. I want Sloan's employee files. Every person who's worked on that model team, past and present, anyone who left under bad circumstances."

"You think Tanner's leak and our killer are connected?"

"I think it's worth asking," she said. "Pulling an individual peak date without tripping whatever Kline's got watching that system, that's not something just anyone on the team could do. Somebody figured out how to get in and out clean, for a year, without her catching it until we showed up asking."

"Right,” Novak said. “Tanner's source just wanted the dates as proof. The killer needed it before Pike or Mott posted it themselves. That's tighter. Somebody built a way in, or they're the one feeding Tanner and using him without him knowing it."

"So either it's the same person doing both," Rachel said, "or two people found two different uses for the same hole in the system."

"Either way,” Novak said as they headed out to the parking lot, “it's somebody who knows that model well enough to move through it without leaving anything Kline's already found. And if we can get those employee records, maybe the answer is just waiting there.”

Rachel nodded and grinned as she headed back to the lobby’s front desk. “And I think we may get those records without much hassle,” she said. “It seems they’re really starting to get tired of us.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The office stayed dark except for the glow of three monitors. The rest of the sublevel had gone quiet an hour after the last data scientist had badged out for the night. Nobody questioned the light left burning down here. Nobody questioned much of anything, not when the work got done and the model kept running clean.

The dashboard filled the center screen, rows of names scrolling past in a soft blue font, each one paired with a countdown. Days until peak. Hours, once the window narrowed enough. This was not a view any ordinary employee could reach. It required credentials buried three layers beneath what anyone upstairs understood the system to allow, credentials built quietly over months and never logged the way they should have been.

The scroll stopped on a name from two months back. Holly Greer. The countdown beside it had reached zero and kept going, ticking upward now instead of down, a small red number climbing higher every day since her predicted peak had come and gone. Forty-one days. Forty-one days of Holly Greer walking around out there, alive, disproving the one thing the model existed to prove.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. The peak was not a guess. It was the truth of a body laid bare in data, the exact moment everything converged and then, by definition, began to fall away. A person did not get to simply continue past that point as if the convergence meant nothing. If the model said a body had reached its absolute best and would only decline from there, then living past it without consequence made the model a lie. And the model could not be a lie. Years of work had gone into it. The equations were correct. They had to be correct.

Holly Greer's case had been explained away easily enough once it resolved itself. Performance enhancers, the kind that could shove a body past what its own biology intended, muddied the clean signal the algorithm depended on. That was fine. That was an aberration with a clear cause, not proof of failure. But there were others on this list continuing past their zero mark with nothing to explain it. No drugs. No anomalies. Just people living and working, laughing, posting photos of dinners and vacations—people entirely unaware that they were walking contradictions of a truth that had taken years to build.

Someone had to correct it…but not maliciously. Correction wasn't malice. It was maintenance. If a body was going to fail after its peak, and the model said it would, then the failure simply needed help arriving on schedule. That wasn't murder in any sense that mattered. It was closing a gap between what should happen and what the world, in its carelessness, had allowed to drift.

The cursor moved down through the list, past names with green countdowns still ticking toward their dates, past the handful sitting in red that hadn't been dealt with yet. Renata Pike's name no longer appeared; it was archived now, resolved. Gerald Mott's too. Both of them corrected cleanly, on schedule, exactly the way the model had said they would.

But the list kept growing. New users onboarded every week, new curves modeled, new peaks calculated with the same rigor that had gone into every version before it. Most of them would never need intervention. Most bodies did fail on schedule, the way biology intended. Hearts and vessels and cellular repair systems became run down exactly as the convergence model predicted. It was only the outliers that mattered. Only the ones who threatened the whole structure by refusing to comply.