CHAPTER FOUR
"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.”
She nodded as she looked through the notes. “I see that here. Looks like he only had three hundred followers. But the Apogee app also has the picture. I guess there is a social feature to it.”
Novak exhaled through his nose. "Do we have an address for him?"
“145 West Lane, Hope Springs."
"Never heard of it."
"Same here,” Rachel said. She pulled up her GPS on her phone and inputted the address. "It's a small town, looks like. Ten miles outside Arlington, more or less."
Novak took the turn onto the main road before he answered, working through it. "Relatives?”
“A wife. I say we pay her a visit tomorrow.”
“Agreed. So…we have a death in Arlington, and then a death just ten miles outside. I mean…that’s practically next door to one another.”
“Seems weird.”
“Sure does. The app's supposed to have users everywhere. It’s a national company with a big following, and both deaths happened within ten miles of each other."
Rachel set the phone in her lap for a second, watching the empty road slide by.
"If this were random, or if it were someone inside the company with access to a huge list of names, I'd expect the deaths to be scattered all over the map.
Instead we've got Pike in Arlington and Mott ten miles away in Hope Springs. "
"Could be coincidence. Small sample size."
"Could be," she said, though she didn’t believe it, and she didn't try to make herself sound like she did.
"But if I had to bet, I'd say whoever's doing this doesn't have national reach.
I'd bet they're working close to home, and the geography's going to matter more than we think once we've got more names. "
Novak nodded slowly, eyes on the road. "Anderson's going to want an explanation to a lot of the same questions we don't have answers to yet."
"Anderson's going to have to wait until morning like the rest of us." Rachel looked back down at the file. "It doesn’t look like anyone outside of standard PD has spoken with Mott's widow. Not according to these notes, anyway. Local PD closed it out as a natural death and moved on."
"So she doesn't even know anyone's looking at it twice."
"No. And she's about to find out her husband might've been murdered in his own house as opposed to tragically dying from some sort of unseen heart issue.
" Rachel closed the file and looked over at Novak.
"We should go first thing. Before word gets out that we're looking at Pike as anything other than what it looked like on the surface.
I don't want Mott's case getting contaminated because some local paper runs a story that connects the dots for us. Even if we keep it as quiet as we can, I’m assuming the sudden death of a TikTok personality with hundreds of thousands of followers might garner some attention.”
"First thing," Novak agreed. "I'll call ahead in the morning, let her know we're coming, keep it vague. Just tell her we're following up on her husband's case as part of a broader review."
"That'll work." Rachel looked out the window at the dark buildings sliding past—office parks and a shuttered gas station, the kind of nothing that filled the space between one town and the next. "I keep thinking about that video. Pike holding up her watch like it was the best day of her life."
"Mott probably did the same thing. Some picture at the gym, grinning like an idiot." Novak's jaw tightened slightly. "Doesn't seem fair, does it. The one thing they were proudest of turned into the reason somebody killed them."
"If it's really the reason," Rachel pointed out. “It might be too early to make that assumption just yet.”
"We'll find out."
She thought of Paige then, unprompted; she thought of the case board on her laptop screen and the seriousness with which she'd talked about a woman murdered decades before either of them had been born.
Rachel wondered, not for the first time tonight, what her daughter would make of this case, where it seemed the victims had been reduced to a data point on somebody's private tracker.
She reached into her jacket pocket out of habit and felt nothing there, then remembered she'd left Eleanor's key in the drawer at home.
She hadn't held it tonight, hadn't turned it over the way she usually did before falling asleep, and something about that absence needled at her even now.
It was small and unresolved, tucked away next to everything else she hadn't figured out yet.
The Hampton Inn's sign came into view a few minutes later, and Novak pulled into the mostly empty lot, where he parked near the entrance.
"Let’s get some sleep," he said, cutting the engine. "I'll call Diane Mott around seven, see if she can see us by eight thirty or nine."
"Works for me." Rachel gathered her bag from the floor of the car and paused with her hand on the door handle. She grabbed her phone and sent a quick text to Jack to let him know what was going on.
She opened the door and the cold air came in around her ankles. They walked toward the hotel entrance without looking back, the file on her phone still open in her mind even after she'd closed it.