Page 5 of Her Last Vow

The ME leaned in further, angling the flashlight until the mark caught the light properly. He went quiet for a moment, then reached for a small magnifying loupe from his kit and held it over the spot.

"That's a puncture," he said finally. "Recent. No surrounding bruising to speak of, which tells me whoever did it either had a steady hand or she wasn't moving when it happened."

"Could be medical," Novak offered. "Insulin, something like that."

"It could be a lot of things until we run tox," the ME said. "But I'll tell you, if I hadn't had a reason to go looking, I'd have written this up as a natural cardiac event and never seen it."

Rachel stood and stepped back, looking at the room as a whole again, running the geometry of it in her head. The garage had a single door off the driveway and the interior door into the main house, both accounted for. There was no window large enough for entry beyond the small one along the back wall, curtained and, from what she could see, undisturbed. If someone had come in through the driveway door while Pike was toweling off after her workout, she'd have had her back to it. A single approach, a fast injection, and a woman in peak physical condition would have gone down with almost no resistance if whatever was in that needle worked fast enough.

"Whoever did this knew this room," Rachel said. "They knew the door would be unlocked. They knew she filmed in here at night. And they knew exactly where to put the needle so whatever they were using would work quickly.”

"That's not opportunistic," Novak said.

"No. It's not." Rachel walked the perimeter of the room slowly, eyes tracking along the baseboards, the underside of the weight bench, the corner where the mini-split sat. Nothing else caught her eye, though she had no real idea of what she was looking for. She came back around to the counter along the side wall, where a scatter of items sat undisturbed: a rolled towel, a spray bottle of disinfectant, a phone charging cable coiled neatly, and the watch Corbin had mentioned, resting face-up.

The screen was still lit.

Rachel leaned over it without picking it up, letting the tech nearby know with a glance that she wanted a photograph of it exactly as it sat. The display showed a gold badge, a stylized sunburst icon with the words PEAK ACHIEVED beneath it in bold lettering.

Below that, in smaller text, a timestamp.

7:32 p.m.

Rachel pulled out her own phone and scrolled back to Pike's video, checking the timestamp on the post. It matched, down to the minute.

"This is it," she said. "This is the exact moment from the video. She got the notification, filmed herself reacting to it, and less than three hours later she's dead with a needle mark in her neck."

Novak came up beside her and looked down at the watch without touching it. "Mott’s death happened eleven days after his milestone. This one happened same night."

"Different timeline, same trigger….maybe." Rachel straightened and looked back at Pike's body, at the stillness of her, the peculiar composure of it. "I don't think this is somebody killing based on opportunity. I think somebody knew this was coming for her tonight, specifically, because the app told them it was coming."

The ME had been listening in with interested. He glanced up from where he was packing her kit and said, "You want me to prioritize the tox screen."

"I want you to prioritize everything," Rachel said. "But yes. If there's a substance in her system that can stop a healthy heart fast and clean, I want to know what it is and how easy it would be to get."

Corbin, who'd been standing near the driveway door taking in the exchange, finally spoke again. "You think this is connected to something bigger?"

I think two people told the same app they'd hit the same milestone before they died, she thought. But it was too soon to jump to such conclusion, so Rachel kept the thought to herself. Instead, she said, “I don’t know just yet.”

She looked once more at the watch on the counter, its screen still glowing faintly gold in the low light of the garage. And though she knew it was silly, Rachel couldn’t help but feel that the sickly golden glow was almost taunting her, as if it had a secret it didn’t intend to tell.

CHAPTER FOUR

It was 1:15 in the morning by the time they pulled out of the residential street. The garage was still lit up behind them with crime scene tape strung across the driveway while a local forensics team was still at work. Novak drove with one hand on the wheel, the other rubbing at his eye in a way that told Rachel he was running on fumes.

"There's a Hampton Inn about ten minutes from here," he said. "I already called ahead. They've got rooms."

"Good." Rachel had her phone out, scrolling through the file the Cyber analyst had sent over from Anderson. "Before we crash, I want to look at the other name your analyst flagged."

"Mott?"

"Gerald Mott." She pulled up the details. "Fifty-two. Died two and a half weeks ago. Cause of death listed as cardiac arrest, no autopsy requested because he had a documented history of high cholesterol and a family history of heart disease. Nothing about it raised a flag with the local medical examiner at the time."

“Yeah. We already knew all of this.”

"Sure…but how'd Cyber even catch him?"

"Same as Pike, apparently. He posted about hitting his Apogee peak the same day he died." She scrolled further. "He actually posted it that morning. A picture of himself at the gym with the same kind of caption, all excited about the milestone. He didn’t have a TikTok following, so he put it on Facebook.”