Page 27 of Her Last Vow

"So somebody else had access to the same information he did."

"Or somebody else had access to information he never even touched." Rachel exhaled, fully aware that she was starting to confuse herself. God, she hated technology. "Either way, we've been looking at this like there's one door into that data. There might be more than one."

Neither of them said much else for the rest of the drive, though Rachel spent most of it running the last twelve hours back through her head, trying to find the place where the theory had gone wrong. They'd built the case against Hartley cleanly. Access, motive, no alibi. It had felt solid enough at 10:40 while standing in his doorway and watching him fold under the weight of it. Now it felt like a shape she'd been too eager to fill in. And she wasn’t ready to admit that they may have jumped the gun with him.

They reached the address Corbin sent over twelve minutes later. The house was small and quaint, sitting on a quiet street with a scatter of patrol cars already parked at odd angles along the curb, lights still turning without their sirens. What stopped Rachel for a second as she climbed out of the car was the ambulance parked directly in the driveway, its back doors open. The crew was standing near it in a way that told her they hadn't been called out here as a formality. But she then recalled what Corbin had told her on the phone, about how the Apogee watch had called for the ambulance when the body’s pulse dropped out.

They found Corbin near the garage entrance, and he waved them through without much preamble. Seeing another garage that was far too similar to the Pike scene made Rachel feel dizzy for a moment. This garage smelled faintly of rubber and sweat. A treadmill faced the front wall and a man lay on black rubber flooring a few feet from it with one arm bent beneath him. His watch caught the light from the garage's overhead fixtures, showing that it was indeed an Apogee watch. As they drew closer, Rachel saw that PEAK ACHIEVED was sitting gold and bright above a timestamp that made Rachel's stomach turn when she leaned in to read it. 11:34 PM. A little more than an hour ago.

Rachel took in the rest of the room before she let herself focus on the body. There were resistance bands on hooks along one wall, a shelf of kettlebells sorted by size, and a folded towel draped over the treadmill's handrail. The whole setup had the same air of discipline she'd seen in Renata Pike's garage. It was a space built by someone who'd made a habit out of pushing their limits and keeping count of the results.

The ME was already crouched near the body, and he glanced up when Rachel crouched across from him. "Same signature," he said, before she'd asked anything. "A small puncture wound to the back of the neck. This time a little closer to the ear, but the same size, the same lack of surrounding bruising. Whoever's doing this has a steady hand and knows exactly what they're doing."

"Cardiac?" Novak asked.

"That's my read, and I'd bet on it holding once the tox comes back. Fast-acting, clean, out of the system before you'd know to look for it. Now, that’s assuming it behaves anything like whatever's in Pike." He shook his head slightly and there was something almost like anger in his eyes. "We still don't have anything definitive off her screen, by the way. Whatever this is, it's not showing up on a standard panel. It's like the drug just vanishes once it's done its job."

“Have you seen anything like it before?” Rachel asked.

“No, not personally, but I do know that there’s stuff like that out there.”

Rachel stood and looked around the garage, the resistance bands hanging in a neat row on the wall, the kettlebells lined up by size. "Whoever's doing this is still out there, and they just killed somebody less than an hour after we thought we had our answer. They can’t have gotten far.”

"Bolder, too," Corbin said, stepping up beside her. "Pike's the first one, and there was time between the notification and the murder. Mott, we don't even have a clean timeline on. This one, though, the notification went off and he was dead inside the hour."

"And you said there’s a built-in function to call an ambulance in a time like this?" Rachel asked.

"Yeah, from what I gather, these newer models come equipped with that function. If your heart rate crosses into a range the app doesn't like and doesn't come back down inside a set window, it pings local emergency services automatically. GPS location, basic vitals, the whole package. But you can send it manually, too, like if you hurt yourself on a run or whatever. Looks like the victim—Aaron Diaz, by the way—triggered his manually just before he died." He nodded to the ambulance outside and said, "The ambulance got here, and the medics found the body just like this."

"And he was already dead?”

“Yeah. I’m guessing whatever they’re injected with takes them out quickly. No more than a minute…probably less.”

Rachel crouched again near the watch, studying the timestamp, running the timeline of the night against everything they knew. Behind her, Corbin shifted his weight, and when she glanced back at him, he had his phone already half out of his jacket pocket.

"Oh," he said, tapping something on his phone, his mouth set into a scowl. "And there's something else you may want to see."

But the way he sighed as he showed them his screen made Rachel pretty sure she didn’t want to see what he had waiting for them at all.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Corbin unlocked his phone and held it out so both of them could see the screen. "Bryce Tanner's been busy during the last four or five hours,” he said. “TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, whatever it's called this week. Same stuff on all three, more or less, just formatted differently for each platform."

Rachel took the phone from him and scrolled. The top post was a video, paused on a thumbnail of Tanner's face mid-sentence. His expression was somewhere between grief and triumph. He'd swapped the fake brick backdrop from his studio for something plainer, a bare wall and softer lighting, like he'd wanted this one to read as more sober than his usual content. She hit play.

"I've been telling you for over a year," Tanner said into the camera, his voice pitched low and steady, with none of the manic energy she remembered from their earlier encounter. "I've been telling you Apogee is a death app, and everybody called me a conspiracy nut, and now we're at three. Three people, dead on their exact peak day. I can't tell you how I know about the third one. I can't tell you who I've been talking to. But I've spoken with certain authorities, and I can tell you this isn't a rumor anymore. This is confirmed. People are dying on schedule, and that company is letting it happen."

The video ran another forty seconds past that, Tanner walking through a loose timeline of Pike and Mott. His tone never rose, and he never broke into the theatrics Rachel had expected. It was the restraint that made it land. He wasn't performing outrage. He sounded like a man who'd rather not be right. It was a reminder of just how good he was at his job.

“Well, that sucks,” Novak said from over her shoulder.

"He's careful," Rachel said, handing the phone back to Corbin. "No names. No details he could get pinned on for interfering with an active investigation. Just enough to keep himself covered and everybody else terrified."

"He's good at this," Novak admitted. "I hate that he's good at this, but he is."

"Convincing, too." Rachel had seen enough of Tanner in person to know the on-camera version wasn't entirely an act. He believed what he was saying, or believed it enough that it read as sincere, and that made it worse. "Delivery like that gets shared by people who'd never watch one of his videos otherwise. He's not selling paranoia. He's selling certainty, and right now certainty is the one thing nobody else in this case can offer."

Corbin scrolled to a different post, this one a screenshot of a trending topic; the phrase Apogee Death App was sitting near the top of a list with a number beside it that had climbed into six figures. "It's not just him anymore,” Corbin said. “Once he posted, it took off on its own. People are sharing his videos, quoting him, running their own theories underneath."