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."
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.