CHAPTER SEVEN
Novak pulled out of the Apogee parking lot and merged onto the main road, the glass campus shrinking in the side mirror. Neither of them spoke for a minute, the silence filled with the low hum of the road.
"Oakley gave us a lot, I’ll give her that," Novak finally said. "But she didn't give us the one thing we actually need."
"Whether Mott shared his peak date." Rachel had her phone in her hand, scrolling back through her notes from the meeting. "She said the sharing feature is opt-in. If he never opted in, then whoever's doing this didn't find him through the app's public feed."
"And if he did opt in, we're looking at somebody who's just scraping public posts. A stalker with a spreadsheet, maybe. Nothing that requires inside access."
"Right. But if he didn't share it, and somebody still knew, that narrows things down to people with actual database access.
Which is a much shorter list, and a much more useful one.
" Rachel pulled up her contacts. "Diane would know.
She said herself he wasn't big on social media, wasn't the type to share things online.
But I want to hear her say it directly about the app itself, not just Facebook. "
"You think she'd know if he used the sharing feature?"
"I think there's only one way to find out," she said, scrolling through the case contacts on her phone and coming to Diane Mott's number. She entered her number and placed the call on speaker. It rang three times before Diane answered.
“Hello?”
"Mrs. Mott, it's Agent Gift again. Sorry to bother you twice in one day."
"It's fine." Diane's voice was steady and maybe even a little hopeful. "Did you find something?"
"We're still working through it,” Rachel said. “I wanted to ask you something specific about Gerald's account. Do you know if he ever shared his peak day publicly, the way Renata Pike did? Through the app itself, or on social media?"
Diane said nothing for a moment, making a little hmmm sound over the line. "I don't think so. He wasn't like that. Like I told you, he wasn’t really on social media.”
"Did he not like social media or was he just not very adept at it?"
Diane chuckled a bit and said, “Oh, Gerald didn't trust any of it.
Facebook, the apps, all of it." Her tone then sharpened slightly, the way it had at the kitchen table earlier that morning.
"He used to say identity theft was the biggest scam nobody talked about enough.
He wouldn't even use the same password twice for two different accounts.
I used to tease him about it, tell him nobody wanted to steal his login. "
"So he wouldn't have opted into any kind of public sharing feature inside the app."
"I really doubt it. But I'm not going to sit here and tell you I know for sure, because I don't. He posted that one picture at the gym, the one we already talked about.
That was Facebook, not the Apogee app itself.
Whether he shared anything through the app, I couldn't tell you.
He barely knew how half of that thing worked.
I set up his email account for him three years ago and he would still have to call me every time he needs to attach a file to something. "
Rachel glanced over at Novak, who kept his eyes on the road but was clearly listening.
"Was there anyone in his life who might have known his peak date without him sharing it? A friend, a doctor, anyone he might have mentioned it to?"
"Not that I know of. He didn't talk about that stuff much, even with me. I only knew because he showed me the notification the morning it came in." Diane's voice caught slightly. "He came into the kitchen holding his wrist out like a kid showing off a scraped knee. He was so happy about it."
Novak leaned toward the phone slightly, keeping his voice level. "Mrs. Mott, it's Agent Novak. Can I ask you something about those forums you mentioned this morning?"
"Sure."
"You said there's a whole community tracking these deaths. Did any of them point you toward anyone specific? A name, somebody who seemed to know more than the average person posting?"
"No, not really. But there is one person everybody talks about," Diane said.
"Bryce Tanner. He's some kind of wellness personality.
One of these younger kids, you know…he has a following online, does videos about supplements and biohacking and things like that.
He's been saying for over a year that Apogee's dangerous.
He calls it a death clock. A lot of the forum posts link back to his videos.
People treat him like he's got some kind of inside information. "
"Do you know where he's based?" Rachel asked.
"Somewhere near Arlington, I think. A few of the things I saw said that every now and then, he’ll promote small businesses catering to nutrition, wellness, things like that. And most of them are Arlington or DC based.”
"That's very helpful. Thank you." Rachel paused, wanting to make sure she asked all that was on her mind so she wouldn’t have to bother this poor woman again.
"One more thing, and I want to be honest with you about why I'm asking.
A lot of what's circulating online about this app is speculation, not fact.
I don't want you to feel like we're dismissing what you've told us, but I also don't want you spending more nights going down these rabbit holes.
It's not good for you, especially right now. "
"I know how it sounds," Diane said quietly. "I'm not stupid. I just needed something to make sense of it. Something more than a doctor telling me his heart just stopped for no reason."
"I understand. We'll be in touch if we learn anything."
"Please do." Diane's voice had thinned out again, the exhaustion returning. "That's all I want."
Rachel ended the call and set her phone in her lap, looking out at the trees blurring past the window.
"Bryce Tanner," Novak said. "You know the name?"
"I don't, but I'm about to." Rachel pulled up a search on her phone, typing the name in along with Apogee. The first result loaded almost instantly.
It was a video that had been posted two days earlier with over four hundred thousand views.
The thumbnail showed a man in his thirties with a shaved head and an intense expression, sitting in front of an exposed brick wall.
The words DEATH CLOCK EXPOSED were written in bold red text across the image.
She tapped play and let it run for a few seconds, angling the phone so Novak could glance over as he drive.
"I've gotten three messages this week from people inside that company," Tanner said on the video, his voice pitched somewhere between outrage and satisfaction.
"Apogee's COO has been quietly meeting with health insurance companies for months, trying to sell them access to user data they swore up and down was private.
I've seen emails. I've talked to people who were in the room.
This isn't about wellness. It's about who's willing to pay for a list of names and dates. Not any better than this scam health insurance plot that’s rotting this country. "
Rachel scrolled through the comments briefly, then paused the video.
"He's not talking about the deaths at all," she said, skimming the description beneath it. "This one's about the COO selling data to insurers. Nothing here about Pike or Mott."
"Makes sense," Novak said. "Pike only died last night. This posted yesterday, before any of it happened. And Mott wasn’t exactly a social media darling."
"So whatever's got him worked up right now has nothing to do with our case." Rachel set the phone down again. "Or at least nothing he knows about yet."
"Doesn't mean he's clean. Just means he's angry about something else. If he’s building part of his brand around health-related conspiracies, that’s a deep, dark hole. Guys like this don't need real information to build a following. They just need an angle."
Rachel looked out at the road. "If he's already convinced himself the company's selling private data to insurers, it's not a big leap for him to decide somebody's using that same data to target people."
"We should talk to him."
"I'm not against it, exactly." Rachel looked out the window again, watching a gas station slide past. "I just don't love the idea of us showing up on his doorstep and giving him more material for his next video.
Guys like this thrive on attention from law enforcement.
If word gets out that the FBI questioned him, that becomes the story instead of anything he actually knows. "
"Maybe. But if he really does have sources feeding him something real about that company, that's worth knowing.
" Novak checked his mirror and merged onto the exit ramp.
"And if he doesn't, we've lost an afternoon talking to a guy with a following.
Either way we walk away knowing more than we do right now. "
Rachel didn't answer right away. She thought about Diane Mott—about how easy it was for a grieving person to tumble into rabbit holes, chasing patterns that felt like answers because the real ones hadn't come fast enough.
"I don't want to build this case around what a guy with four hundred thousand YouTube subscribers thinks is happening," she said finally. "I just want to make sure we’re being careful about that."
"Of course."
"I’ll call the bureau and get his address," she said, already tapping the number. "And when we talk to him, we don't tell him anything he doesn't already know."
Novak nodded, merging onto the main road that would take them back toward Arlington. "You sure you want to call ahead…or just show up?"
"Let's just show up," Rachel said as the line to the bureau started to ring. "I'd rather see his reaction in person than give him time to plan one."