CHAPTER TWO
Novak drove, which meant Rachel had the passenger seat and the case file open on her phone as they sped toward Arlington.
Richmond was half an hour behind them, Arlington waiting about an hour ahead.
As she looked over all of the information and started to get herself situated, Novak gave her the rundown as he understood it—a rundown that had been updated as recently as five minutes ago.
"And Arlington PD called us why, exactly?"
"That's the part I still can't give you a clean answer on.
" Novak merged and settled into the left lane.
"The responding officer said there was nothing obviously wrong at first. No blood, no forced entry, no sign of a struggle beyond a knocked-over water bottle.
Looked like she might've just collapsed.
Except one of the officers recognized her. "
"Recognized her how?"
"She's got a sizable online following. Fitness stuff, mostly. Workout videos, nutrition, that whole world." He glanced at her briefly from behind the wheel. "A hundred thousand-something followers on TikTok. The officer's wife apparently watches her."
Rachel scrolled through what little had been uploaded to the case file so far, mostly preliminary notes and two photos of the exterior of the garage. "None of that explains federal interest."
"No. That part came literally about a minute before I pulled up to your house to pick you up. A data analyst flagged another death from two weeks ago that is eerily similar. A male, Gerald Mott, fifty-two, was found dead in his home. So, we’ve got two victims, it seems. Different ages, different towns, no connection anyone's found yet aside from using the same fitness app. Apogee, it's called. You know it?"
"Vaguely. I've seen the ads."
"It tracks all the usual stuff, but it's also got this feature that predicts a person's health trajectory over time.
It tells you when you're supposedly at your physical peak, based on all the data it's been pulling off you for months or years.
Recovery, heart rate, whatever else." He paused at a red light and looked over at her fully.
"Both of them posted about hitting that milestone.
Mott did it the morning he died. Pike did it not even ten minutes before she died.
But she had been sort of teasing it in her posts over the past week or so. "
Rachel sat with that for a second, feeling the shape of it before she had words for it. "Yeah, that feels like more than a coincidence.”
"It’s probably not." He pulled forward when the light changed. "The analyst flagged it as a pattern. Anderson didn't want to sit on it overnight in case there's something active still happening, so here we are. I think the fact that Apogee is a pretty huge company has something to do with it, too."
Rachel pulled up TikTok on her phone—an app she never used herself, but always for case research—and found Pike's profile. The most recent video sat at the top, posted just under three hours ago. She hit play, keeping the volume low.
Renata Pike filled the frame, flushed and smiling, sweat along her hairline.
A garage studio sprawled out behind her with resistance bands hung on the wall and a mirror catching the ring light she'd clearly set up for the shot.
She held her wrist up to the camera, tapping the screen of a smartwatch.
"You guys, I have been telling you for weeks this was coming," Pike said, breathless and grinning.
"My Apogee just confirmed it. Today is officially my peak.
The healthiest day of my entire tracked life.
Three years of data and it all led here.
" She pressed a hand to her chest, laughing at herself.
"I'm going to do a full breakdown tomorrow, the actual numbers, because you know I love the numbers, but right now I just wanted you all to see my face.
This is what showing up for yourself looks like. "
The video ended on a freeze frame of her laughing, one hand still on the watch. She looked happy and accomplished, not just acting for the camera.
Rachel set the phone face down against her leg for a second before she looked back at it.
"She looks happy." She thought about the set-up for a moment.
“What's the actual mechanism? The app pulls data and tells you what day you peaked.
Is that even a real thing medically, or is it marketing dressed up as science? "
"I don't know yet,” Novak admitted. “That's one of the first things I want to ask somebody at the company, assuming we get that far tonight.
" He signaled and changed lanes. "But even if it's soft science, that's not really the point right now. The point is a woman told a hundred thousand people the exact same thing, right before she died. I think that’s the core of this thing right now.”
"Same." Rachel looked out the window at the traffic thinning as they got closer to the exit. "You said no obvious cause of death on Pike."
"None the officer could see. No visible trauma beyond a small bruise on her head from where she fell.
I hope the ME's going to be able to tell us for sure.
" Novak eased off the highway onto the exit ramp. "If you look at Mott’s breakdown, it’s the same.
It was ruled a cardiac event initially, no autopsy, because he had a documented heart condition and nobody thought twice about it.
Given what we've got now, somebody's going back to request one. "
Rachel thought about how easy that would be, a plausible cause sitting right there in a person's chart, nobody looking twice.
"If there's a connection between these two, and Anderson's data guy is right that it's a pattern, we might be looking at more than two.
He said he'd only been tracking this a few weeks.
And if someone is using an app that uses any sort of social media connections… "
“Yeah, it could be a mess. He's already got a team pulling additional names. I told him to send anything he's got the second he's got it." Novak took the turn onto a residential street, slowing as house numbers came into view. "You know what gets me the most?"
"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.