CHAPTER NINE
Tanner sat across from them at the folding table, which Novak had set back up when they’d re-entered the studio space.
Novak had righted the table and gathered the scattered hard drives, though the laptop screen had a fresh crack running through one corner.
Tanner kept glancing at it like he wanted to say something about the damage and knew better than to try.
His hands were cuffed behind his back, causing him to scrunch up his shoulders.
Rachel sat back down where she had been just fifteen minutes ago, but Tanner remained standing. Novak stood directly beside him, in the event that he might try something stupid again.
"Let's start over," Rachel said. "You're not under arrest. Running from federal agents isn't a crime by itself, but it's not smart, either. Right now I want to know why you did it."
"I told you already." Tanner's voice had steadied some since the parking lot, though his knee still bounced under the table. "I thought you’d think I did it…that if you went to Reston first and talked to them that they’d point fingers at me to shut me up.”
"We showed you credentials," Novak said. “You knew we were FBI.”
"People fake credentials." Tanner shook his head.
"Look, three days ago I put out a video calling their VP of Ops a liar to his face.
Not implying it. Saying it, on camera, with his name in the title.
Companies like that don't send strongly worded letters.
They send people. I've had cars sit outside this place for hours.
I've had guys come in here asking about camera equipment who didn't know the first thing about cameras. "
"And you thought we were part of that," Rachel said.
"I thought you were spooks," Tanner said. "And yes, I know how it sounds. But you said Reston, and something in my head just went off. I've been waiting for something like this for a year, and I panicked. That's it. That's the whole reason."
"Spooks," Novak repeated. "Meaning what, exactly? You think a wellness tech company has people on payroll to intimidate a YouTuber?"
Tanner looked slightly offended as he considered the question for a moment. "I think a company that size has people on payroll to do whatever needs doing," Tanner said. "I don't know what you'd call them.”
Rachel understood it, but she also thought Tanner was being a little too dramatic. And that he was thinking very highly of himself. "We need to establish where you were last night. Specifically between six and eight."
"I was here," Tanner said it fast, like he'd been ready for the question since the loading dock.
"Filming. I do a livestream every Tuesday and Thursday, seven to nine, sometimes later depending on chat.
As many as two or three thousand people watch it live.
It's archived on my channel with a timestamp.
You can pull it up right now if you want. "
"We will," Rachel said.
"I'm not lying. Check it. I was on camera the entire two hours, and you can see the chat log scrolling the whole time, real people, real usernames, some of them I've talked to for over a year.
There's no way I edited that after the fact.
It's live." He looked between them. "I didn't even know Renata Pike existed until this morning. "
Novak had his phone out already, pulling up Tanner's channel.
He found the stream, scrolled to the timestamp, and let it play for a few seconds before nodding once at Rachel.
It didn't fully free him from suspicion just yet, but it was enough to make Rachel feel that, if anything, he might be a good source of information and nothing more.
"There's a comment right at 7:40 last night," Novak said, angling the screen toward Rachel. "Somebody asking about supplement stacks. He answers it live, on camera, at the timestamp…at the time of Renata Pike’s death."
"Okay," Rachel said. "We'll verify it properly with your platform directly, not just what's visible on the page. But that's a good start."
Tanner exhaled, some of the tension leaving his shoulders. "So what do you actually want from me?"
She didn’t intend to give him Diane Mott’s name or to inflate his ego in any way, so she did her best to keep it simple.
"You've been calling Apogee a death clock for over a year," Rachel said.
"You said in your videos it started because a viewer sent you her mother's peak date, and her mother died four days later.
Is that the only source you've had, or has it kept going? "
Tanner didn't answer right away. He looked down at the floor and adjusted his shoulders again as the cuffs pulled his arms awkwardly back. Something in his face changed, like he was deciding whether the next thing he said would make his situation better or worse.
"There's a source," he said finally. "Somebody inside the company. Has been for months."
"Who?" Novak asked.
"I don't know their name. I've never met them, never seen a face, nothing.
" Tanner's voice had dropped, quieter than anything he'd said since they walked in.
"They reach out through an encrypted email address. There’s never any signature, and no real name.
They send me things. Screenshots, mostly. Internal documents."
"What kind of documents?" Rachel asked.
"Peak date predictions. Individual ones.
Not aggregate data, not company-wide stats.
Actual names attached to actual dates. That's how I knew that woman's mother's case wasn't a coincidence.
The source sent me three other names before her, all with the same pattern.
Deaths that lined up almost exactly with the predicted peak. "
Rachel felt the room narrow slightly around what he'd just said. "How many names total, over the year?"
"Eight, maybe nine. I'd have to check my email to be sure.
" Tanner glanced toward the cracked laptop.
"Not all of them died. Most of them are still walking around, as far as I know.
The source just sends me the predictions when they come across something interesting.
I've used maybe four of them in videos, always without names, just to make the pattern argument. "
“Why without names?” Novak asked.
“Come on, man. I could get in a shitload of trouble for that sort of thing.”
"You said this information was locked down internally," Rachel said. "And just this morning, their VP of Communications told us that nobody at the company browses that data casually. Access to that sort of thing is restricted and logged."
"Then somebody's not following the rules," Tanner said. "Because I've had this stuff sitting in my inbox for months."
"Did the source ever say what their role was? Data team, engineering, anything?"
"No. I asked, more than once. But they always deflect.
" Tanner shook his head. "I always figured it was somebody with a grudge.
Somebody who got passed over for a promotion, or got fired and wanted to burn the place down slowly.
That's usually how these things go. I never thought—" He stopped himself.
"Never thought what?" Rachel asked.
"I never thought anybody was actually using it to hurt people.
I thought it was just proof the company was lying about their privacy stuff.
A story about corporate hypocrisy, not a story about murder.
" His face had gone pale again, though this time it read as something closer to sick than afraid.
"If people are dying on the dates I've been sitting on for a year, and I never once thought to hand that over to anybody who could actually do something about it... "
"You're handing it over now," Rachel said. "That matters more than what you didn't do a year ago."
"Does it?"
"It will if it helps us," Rachel said. "But we need everything you have. Every email, every screenshot, every name, whether you used it in a video or not."
"Yeah. Okay." Tanner nodded fast, like agreeing was the only thing he could do right now that felt useful. "It's all still there. I never delete anything, not even the stuff I don't use. I've got folders going back to the first email."
"How does the source contact you?" Novak asked. "Same address every time?"
"Same address. It's some string of random letters and numbers, not a name.
I looked into whether I could trace it once, early on, but I don't have that kind of skill and I didn't want to pay somebody who might turn around and sell me out to Apogee's lawyers. Plus, if this guy knows his stuff, I feel like he’d know if I was doing something…
something untoward." He shrugged and added, “You know…like handing his material over to the feds.”
"We'll have people who can look at it and be discreet," Rachel said.
Novak was already moving toward the laptop. "We're going to need that computer."
"Take it. Take whatever you need." Tanner held up his cuffed hands slightly. "Can you take these off now? I told you everything. And I'm obviously not running again."
Rachel nodded at Novak, who came around and unlocked the cuffs. Tanner rubbed at his wrists and didn't say anything else for a moment, staring at the table.
"One more thing," Rachel said. "The names on those screenshots...do you recall if the name Gerald Mott was ever in one of them?"
Tanner shook his head slowly. "Not that I remember. But I can go back through everything."
Rachel stepped back and let Novak start on the logistics of the laptop and the email account.
If Tanner was telling the truth, and his alibi held up the way it looked like it would, then whoever was doing this hadn't found their victims by scraping public posts or guessing at symptoms. They'd been handed the information directly, the same way Tanner had.
The killer wasn't reading tea leaves in a public feed.
They knew the exact date because someone with real access to Apogee's model had given it to them, or because they had that access themselves.
"If this checks out," she said quietly to Novak, "we're not looking at a stalker with a spreadsheet anymore."
"No," Novak said, working the laptop bag onto his shoulder. "We might be looking at somebody inside."
Rachel knew this was true, but didn’t like the idea. Once again, it made her think back to Diane Mott and the idea that there was some sort of conspiracy buried in all of this.