Page 40 of Her Last Vow

It wasn't words at first, just sound, high and raw, tearing out of Kline in ragged bursts as she thrashed against the floor. One arm flailed back toward Rachel while the other clawed uselessly at the base of the rack. Rachel got a knee into the small of her back and reached for the cuffs at her belt, but Kline bucked hard enough to throw her off balance, still screaming. She yelled something about corrections and thresholds, and how numbers didn't lie. Her whole body was seizing with a strength that had nothing to do with size or training and everything to do with whatever had finally cracked open inside her. It was the equivalent of an adult temper-tantrum, fueled by raw energy and reckless emotion.

"Kline. Kline! Stop fighting me." Rachel pinned one wrist and reached for the other, but Kline twisted free again, nails raking across the back of Rachel's hand hard enough to draw blood. "I don't want to hurt you, but you need to stop."

But Kline didn't stop. If anything, the sound coming out of her climbed higher, less human by the second, something closer to grief than rage, though it hardly mattered which it was with a wrist still slipping out of Rachel's grip. Rachel adjusted her hold and drove her weight down harder than she liked. When Kline's free hand came swinging back toward her face, she caught it and used the momentum of the swing to put Kline's head against the concrete floor. It wasn’t too violent, but it got the job done.

The fight went out of her all at once, her body going slack beneath Rachel's knee. Her screaming dropped into a low, broken moan and her breaths came out hard and ragged.

Rachel got both wrists cuffed behind her before Kline had fully recovered her breath. Her chest was still heaving, tears and mucus streaking her face as she stared up at nothing in particular.

"Get up," Rachel said, hauling her upright by the arm, no gentleness left in her voice for it. Kline came up unsteadily, legs barely holding her, and let herself be walked back down the length of the server room. She didn’t resist any more. Her head hung and her shoulders were slouched. She continued to mutter something under her breath that Rachel didn't try to make out.

By the time they reached the front of the room, Novak had the man with the head injury sitting fully upright against the rack. He was still pressing a wad of fabric against the stabbing victim's side with his free hand. They were both very much out of it, but still alive. He looked up as Rachel came around the last row of servers, Kline stumbling along beside her in cuffs, her face a wreck of tears and smeared makeup.

"EMS is four minutes out," Novak said, taking in the state of both of them. He looked back and forth between Rachel's bleeding hand and Kline's hollowed expression. "You good?"

"I'm fine." Rachel tightened her grip on Kline's arm as the other woman swayed slightly. The last of whatever had driven her moments ago was finally burning itself out. Much like the work she had grieved in the worst possible way, it seemed that Tessa Kline had finally come to the end of herself.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

Three hours later, the Apogee parking lot looked like an entirely different kind of chaos than the one they'd pressed through when the media had first arrived. The ambulances were gone, the crime scene tape had multiplied until it wrapped half the building, and the news vans that had been camped along the curb that morning had multiplied. They were now joined by two more satellite trucks and a knot of reporters doing stand-ups against the glass facade because it made for a better backdrop than the parking lot itself.

Rachel leaned against the hood of their car, arms crossed, watching one of them from a distance while she waited for Novak to finish getting a statement. The reporter she was watching, a woman in a sharp blazer with a microphone bearing a network logo Rachel didn't recognize, stood close enough that snatches of her broadcast carried across the lot in the still afternoon air.

"—sources now confirming the arrest was made not of Apogee's founder, but of the company's own lead engineer, identified as thirty-six-year-old Tessa Kline," the reporter was saying, her voice pitched for drama that the story, in Rachel's opinion, didn't need any help generating. "Investigators say Kline suffered what's being described as a psychological break, apparently believing that Apogee's predictive algorithm was somehow infallible, and that users who lived past their predicted health peak represented a kind of failure she felt compelled to correct. In the span of just over a week, four people are now confirmed dead, with Dr. Elliot Sloan, the visionary founder of Apogee, among the victims, killed just hours after publicly renouncing the very technology he built."

Rachel let her eyes drift back toward the building, toward the glass doors Dr. Elliot Sloan had walked through that morning for what turned out to be the last time. The reporter kept going, something about the company's stock, something about a statement from Apogee's board promising the app itself would continue in some altered form, minus the predictive feature that had made it famous and, in the end, made it lethal. It was strange to hear all of it distilled into two crisp sentences for a camera, the entire shape of the last week folded down into something clean enough for the six o'clock news. A rogue employee. A tragedy. There had not been a boogeyman hiding in anyone's phone, no conspiracy, no hitman climbing out of a screen the way the internet had spent the last day or so insisting. In the end, it had just been a woman who'd stopped being able to tell the difference between a spreadsheet and a person.

"How's he doing?" Rachel asked when Novak finally walked back over.

"Better than he has any right to." Novak glanced back toward the ambulance bay, where the man they'd found bleeding from the head in the server room sat on the open tailgate of a paramedic's rig. There was an ice pack pressed to the side of his skull, and a blanket around his shoulders despite the mild afternoon. "Name's Marcus Feld. He’s a data scientist, been with the company almost two years. He said he was walking through to grab a drive from cold storage when Kline came around the end of the row and just swung on him. No warning, no words first. Said the last thing he remembers clearly is reaching for a laptop bag strap and then waking up on the floor."

"What'd she hit him with?"

"Old hard drive housing, if you can believe it. One of those brick-sized external units, must've weighed four or five pounds. Apparently they keep a shelf of decommissioned equipment back there instead of throwing it out, and she grabbed the nearest heavy thing within reach." Novak shook his head slightly. "Feld said he'd worked next to her for two years. Said she brought him a card and flowers when his father died last spring. Never once seemed off to him, not until today."

“And the stabbing victim?”

“Haven’t heard yet. As you know, they rushed him to the hospital right away, but I haven’t heard anything else. The medics on the scene said he looked like he would make it through. But…you know…Feld said something else that stuck with me." Novak leaned against the car beside her, arms folded, his voice lower now. "He said the strangest part wasn't that Kline attacked him. He said the strangest part was that right before she swung, she looked almost apologetic. Like she was sorry about it, but felt she didn't have another option."

Rachel didn't say anything to that at first. She thought about the grief she’d heard in Kline’s voice in the server room when she’d talked about deletion and sacrilege. It had come off as if Sloan had murdered something living instead of erasing a piece of software. But it wasn't an excuse, and Rachel had no intention of letting it become one—not with four bodies behind them and a fifth hanging in the balance. But it was the kind of detail that stayed with her anyway, the sorry look on the face of a woman about to bring a five-pound hard drive down on a coworker's skull because a set of numbers had convinced her it was necessary.

"She really believed it," Rachel said finally. "Not as an excuse. Not as a defense anybody's going to be able to use for her in a courtroom. But she actually believed the model was something worth protecting at the cost of actual lives. That's the part I keep getting stuck on."

She knew this was right. This job had showed her that more times than she could count. Rachel pushed off the hood of the car, feeling, for the first time in what felt like days, something close to the weight lifting off her shoulders. Kline was in custody, Sloan's death would be worked and charged alongside the rest, and whatever came next belonged to prosecutors and lawyers to decide.

"I’d imagine we’re good to head home,” Rachel said. “Corbin's got this scene handled, and Anderson's not going to need anything else from us tonight that can't wait until morning."

"You’ll get no argument from me. Give me a second, though. I want to make sure Corbin lets us know the fate of the stabbing victim.”

Rachel nodded as she watched Novak walk over to the detective, currently speaking with a reporter.

Rachel pulled her keys from her pocket and rounded toward the driver's side, glancing at him over the roof of the car with the first real smile she'd managed all day. She thought about Paige and Jack at home, fully aware that Paige would drown her in questions about the case. And while the mere thought of that would have concerned her as recently as three days ago, she was both warmed and amused by the fact that now, she was rather looking forward to it.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Rachel woke slowly, which was its own kind of luxury after the toll the Apogee case had taken on her. She’d just enjoyed the deep sort of sleep that you had to come out of in stages instead of all at once. Sunlight was already cutting through the gap in the curtains at an angle that told her it wasn't early anymore. She reached for her phone on the nightstand and squinted at the screen. 7:34, she smiled and then allowed her sleepy mind to also drag the day up. It was Saturday.

She lay there a moment longer, letting the details settle back into place. She’d gotten home the day before around four, and she'd had almost no memory of the drive itself, just the sense of arriving and being pulled gently into the routine of her home. She recalled Jack's arm around her shoulders in the kitchen, Paige asking questions about the case that Rachel had answered in the vaguest terms she could manage—not because she’d wanted to avoid them but because she’d been so damned tired.