Page 4 of Her Last Vow

"What?"

"If somebody's doing this on purpose, they'd need access to that data. Not just knowing that Pike or Mott used the app. Knowing in advance, before it happened publicly, that she was about to hit that specific milestone." He pulled the car along the curb behind two Arlington PD units, their lights washing blue and red over the front of a small rental house. "That's not something a stranger could guess at. That's someone inside the company, or someone who hacked their way into being able to see it."

"Or someone the app told directly," Rachel said. "If it predicts the date in advance for the user, maybe it's visible somewhere else too. A dashboard. An internal report. Something like that."

Novak put the car in park and looked past her toward the house, where a garage sat detached at the end of a gravel driveway, its door propped open and lit from inside. "A list of people and the exact date they're supposedly at their healthiest…that’s a very strange sort of hit list.”

Rachel followed his gaze to the garage. A tech in a jacket marked with the county's insignia crouched near the doorway, camera raised. Somewhere past him, just out of sight, Renata Pike was still where she'd fallen.

"I keep coming back to the video," Rachel said, mostly to herself. "She looked so proud of it."

"Yeah." Novak agreed. "That's the part I can't shake either."

They sat for a second longer before either of them reached for the door handle; the quiet in the car felt heavier than it had been since they'd left Richmond. Rachel thought about the freeze frame again, Pike laughing with her hand on the watch, utterly unaware that the number she'd spent three years chasing had already been used against her.

"Let's go see what she can tell us," Rachel said, and opened her door into the cold night.

CHAPTER THREE

Rachel pulled on gloves at the mouth of the garage and stood there for a second before stepping in, letting the space settle into focus the way she always did before she touched anything. The garage had been converted with some care and what looked to be quite a bit of money. Insulated walls, a mini-split unit humming faintly in the corner, black rubber flooring that had been laid in clean, even rows. A tripod stood angled toward the center of the room, phone still mounted on top. The screen was dark now but clearly the source of the video she'd watched in the car. Resistance bands hung from hooks along the far wall in a neat row, organized by color. A weight bench sat a few feet from where Renata Pike lay on her back, one arm bent slightly at her side, the other resting across her stomach. Kettlebells sat in the corner like weird little bits of stage decoration.

"No forced entry," said the Arlington detective, a man named Corbin who'd introduced himself outside. "Side door off the driveway was unlocked, but neighbors say she usually left it that way when she was filming. It was the front door standing open that grabbed the neighbor’s attention. Nothing in here looks disturbed."

“The front door is a weird note,” Novak said. “If she was killed in here, why wouldn’t the killer just go out the garage?”

“Not sure,” Rachel said as she crouched a few feet from the body. She was close enough to look without crowding the tech still working the perimeter with a camera. "Anything taken? Wallet, phone, jewelry?"

"Well, you can see the phone's charging on that shelf,” Corbin said, pointing to where it sat on the tripod. “Her wallet's in her gym bag, cash and cards still in it. There's a watch on the counter that looks expensive and nobody touched it either." Corbin gestured toward it without moving closer. "If this was a robbery, it's the worst robbery I've ever worked."

Rachel studied the position of the body before she said anything else. Pike lay flat, both legs straight, her head turned slightly to the side, hair still damp from what had clearly been a workout. There was no twist to the torso, no indication she'd grabbed at anything on her way down. What Rachel could see of her expression wasn't frozen in anything like panic. If she hadn't known better, she'd have guessed the woman had lay down on her own.

"She didn't fight anything," Rachel said, mostly to herself.

Novak crouched on the other side of the body, working the room with his eyes rather than his hands. "No defensive wounds that I can see. No bruising on the forearms, no broken nails, nothing pulled or knocked over except that water bottle by the bench."

"One water bottle." Rachel looked at it, tipped on its side a few feet from the body, a small dark stain on the rubber flooring beneath it where the water had pooled and mostly dried. "If she collapsed hard, I'd expect more than that. A weight bench, resistance bands hanging on the wall, a mirror right there. If she went down fighting for her balance, something in this room should be knocked loose. And there are a hell of a lot of weapons to choose from and grab.”

The medical examiner worked his way around the scene as well, as a weird dance of procedures and people made their way through the garage. He was kneeling down at Pike's other side with a flashlight angled low across the skin. He'd been quiet since Rachel and Novak arrived, running his hands methodically along the arms and throat, and when he finally spoke, there was a note of genuine unease in it that Rachel had learned over the years not to ignore.

"I want to be honest with you both. Preliminary read here doesn't sit right with me."

"Talk me through it," Rachel said.

"There’s no visible trauma. No ligature marks, no petechiae in the eyes that I can see yet, no obvious sign of asphyxiation. Her skin's not showing the kind of cyanosis I'd expect with a lot of causes." He sat back on his heels, staring at the body. "If I had to guess right now, off initial appearance alone, I'd say it was some sort of sudden cardiac event…like her heart just stopped."

"But…"

"But she's thirty-four and, from what I'm seeing, in about as good physical condition as a human body gets. Low body fat, well-developed cardiac muscle from the feel of her chest wall, no obvious signs of drug use, nothing that jumps out as a risk factor." He shook his head slightly. "Sudden cardiac death happens in athletes, sure, but it's rare, and it's usually tied to an underlying structural issue nobody caught. I'm not ruling it out. I'm saying it's the kind of finding that makes me want a very thorough autopsy before I put anything on paper."

Rachel looked at Pike's face again and thought about the video from six hours earlier—the flush in her cheeks and the way she'd laughed at her own excitement. She’d been a woman who looked, by every visible measure, at the healthiest point of her life.

"Can I look at her neck?" Rachel asked.

The ME angled the flashlight without hesitation, and Rachel leaned in, close enough to see the fine texture of the skin along the collarbone and up toward the jaw. Just below the ear was a small, irregular birthmark, brownish and roughly the size of a dime, faded at the edges. Rachel tilted her head, following the line of it, and stopped when the light caught something else.

A single pinprick mark sat almost directly inside the border of the birthmark. It was small enough that it would have been invisible to a casual glance and easy to miss even under direct light if you weren't looking specifically for it. But she had seen her share of oddities during her career and knew what to look for.

"There," Rachel said, pointing without touching. "Right at the edge of the birthmark."