Page 36 of Her Last Vow

And it had felt, if she was honest with herself, a little like elegant engineering. It had been no more than redirecting a system under load toward the path of least resistance.

But Dr. Sloan wasn't a data engineer with a grudge she could route attention toward. Sloan had built the thing in the first place. Sloan had a diagnosis his own doctors had missed for months, a body quietly failing in ways traditional medicine hadn't caught until it no longer mattered. And instead of understanding what that proved, he'd decided it meant the whole system was broken. It didn't occur to him that maybe his physicians were the failure, not her model. It didn't occur to him that a man standing on a stage discrediting the only tool that might have caught his own illness in time was the strongest argument for keeping it running.

Of course, he had no idea that she knew about his illness. It made sense. She was pretty sure it was the sole reason he was thinking so irrationally.

She finished the last of the danish and wiped her fingers on the napkin, folding it once before she stood.

It would be simple, in the end. Simpler than any of the others, because nobody would spend more than a day questioning it. A man that sick, that exhausted, collapsing under the stress of a company falling apart around him...well, surely no one would question why he died. Especially not in the days afterward when the news of his diagnosis reached public ears. Nobody would look twice. She had building access at every hour of the day, badge credentials that raised no flags, and a reputation as the one person at Apogee who'd never once given anyone a reason to doubt her.

She picked up her cup and stepped toward the counter to drop it in the bin.

"Have a good one, Tessa," the barista called after her, already turning to the next customer in line.

Tessa Kline lifted a hand without looking back, pushed through the door into the morning light, and started walking toward the office, already thinking through the shape of one last correction.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

The Waffle House off Route 29 wasn't as crowded as Rachel had expected it to be at 8:50 in the morning. In fact, it looked to be little more than just a scattering of regulars and two truckers hunched over plates near the window. She thought the Waffle Houses usually only felt crowded because the smell of frying hash browns and burnt coffee filled the whole place anyway. Rachel had her laptop open on the table, a legal pad beside it covered in her own handwriting, and a mug she'd already refilled twice sitting within easy reach. Novak sat across from her, working through a plate of eggs and bacon like he hadn't eaten in a week.

"You're going to burn a hole through that thing," he said, nodding at her laptop.

"I'm trying to finish this affidavit before Anderson calls asking where it is. If he’s making big moves for this, I need to make sure I get this part done on my end." She scrolled back up to the top of the document, rereading a paragraph she'd already rewritten twice. "Dates, deaths, the connection to the predictions. Keep it factual, keep opinion out of it. That's easy to say. Harder to actually do when four people are dead and I've got fresh, still-evolving opinions about all of it."

"Do you think we even still need the order? After Sloan's little performance and confession this morning?"

Rachel sat back, rubbing at her eyes. "Legally, it's murkier than it sounds. Sloan suspended the feature, not the app. The predictive model's still sitting on Apogee's servers, still holding every peak date it's ever calculated. He can flip that switch back on the second the news cycle moves past him, and there's nothing stopping him from doing exactly that. A court order would take the decision out of his hands entirely. It shuts the door and locks it instead of just closing it for however long he feels like keeping it closed."

"So it's not really about today."

"It's about next week, when everybody's forgotten this happened and Apogee's board starts asking why the flagship feature's been sitting dark for ten days." She took a sip of coffee, grimacing slightly at how cold it had gotten. "And there's also the fact that we've still got a killer we haven't caught. Whether the app's live or not doesn't change what somebody's already capable of doing with the data that's already out there."

Novak forked up another bite of eggs. "Fair. Still feels like we're chasing something that already stopped moving, though."

"That's what's bothering me." Rachel closed the laptop halfway, enough to give herself a break from the screen without losing her place. "I keep going back and forth on Sloan. If he's not our guy, then what he did this morning was the right call. It was probably the only decent thing anybody at that company's done since this started. He took it publicly instead of hiding behind lawyers, and he did it before we forced his hand."

"But if he is our guy…" Novak started.

"If he is, he just handed himself the best alibi money can't buy. A wounded, grieving founder. A secretly dying man who does the noble thing and shuts down his own creation rather than let it hurt anyone else. A jury would want to acquit him out of sheer sentiment before the prosecution even finished its opening statement." She shook her head, more at herself than at Novak. "Either he's the hero of this story or he's about to get away with murder because he understands exactly how to make himself look like the hero. I can't get comfortable on either side of that."

The waitress came by to top off both their mugs without being asked. Rachel murmured a thank-you before Novak had even looked up. He waited until she'd walked off before speaking again.

"So walk me through it," he said. "Not the legal stuff. The other thing you've been chewing on since the parking lot."

“It’s that obvious, huh?”

“Yeah. When you get tired and stressed you’re pretty easy to read. No offense.”

“None taken…I guess.” Rachel turned her mug slowly on the tabletop, watching the coffee shift inside it. "I keep picturing the victims the same way we've been picturing them since Pike. Marked for death, targeted, killed on a schedule because somebody with access wanted them dead on a specific date. But…what if that's backwards. What if the peak date wasn't when they were supposed to die. What if it was the last day they were supposed to be…right?"

"Right, how?"

"Right, as in correct. Accurate. What if the killer isn't picking people to kill, but picking people whose survival past that date proves…I don’t know. Proves something wrong? Mott hits his peak and keeps living, keeps proving the model isn't the finish line it's supposed to be." She leaned forward, elbows on the table now. "What if every one of these deaths isn't a murder built around a deadline, but a correction. Somebody stepping in before a person can live long enough to become evidence that the algorithm failed."

Novak set his fork down slowly. She could tell he didn’t look entirely convinced, but she didn’t blame him. Even to her, as she’d spoken it word by word, it sounded flimsy. "That's a hell of a reframe."

"It changes who we're looking for completely,” she admitted. “If the killer wants people dead just to punish Apogee, or to prove the app's dangerous, that points in one direction. It points toward somebody like Tanner, somebody who hates the company and wants it burned down. But if the killer's trying to keep the model perfect, trying to stop people from living past their peak and disproving it, that's not somebody attacking Apogee." She held his gaze. "That's somebody protecting it. Or, at least, trying to. Somebody who built it, or helped build it, and believes in it so completely that watching it be wrong feels unbearable. Not an enemy of the company. A true believer."

"Okay." Novak drummed his fingers once against the table, thinking it through out loud. "So if that's the read, and Sloan gets up this morning and tells the world the algorithm's a problem, tells everyone he's turning it off because it's hurting people..."