CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Thai food had gone lukewarm on the desk between them, cartons open and mostly picked through.
Rachel had been camped out in Novak's hotel room for the better part of two hours now, ever since Sloan's lawyer had finally sent over the employee files. They’d chosen Novak’s room because his table was almost like a small desk, whereas the table in Rachel’s room was barely big enough for just her laptop and notebook.
The material Sloan had reluctantly sent over supplied current and former employees, going back to when the model team was first staffed.
The cover email had run four paragraphs before it got to the attachment, thick with language about voluntary cooperation and reserving all rights.
But to Rachel, not a single line of it had sounded voluntary.
She picked at a piece of pad see ew with her chopsticks and thought about the version of Sloan she'd sat across from that afternoon. He’d seemed mostly warm right up until the moment he wasn't; there had been very little transition. Warm one moment, cold the next. But Rachel knew it wasn’t as if he’d had much of a choice.
If he’d decided to stonewall a federal investigation into two deaths tied to his own product, it would create media headlines far worse than anything they might find in the files.
"I think he was cornered into looking cooperative," Novak had claimed as they’d started, just as the food had arrived. "He gets to be the guy who handed it over instead of the guy who fought it. Doesn't mean he liked doing it."
"No. But it means he's smart enough to know which version of this story he'd rather be in," Rachel had said.
From there, the work had been monotonous, but necessary.
They split the list between them, Rachel working backward from the current model team while Novak ran down former employees who'd left under anything other than clean circumstances.
It took the better part of an hour to get through all of it, cross-referencing names against court records, old news mentions, anything that might explain a person capable of pulling individual predictions and handing them to a stranger, or worse.
Six names caught Rachel’s attention along the way, and she jotted them down as she passed by them: a data scientist who'd been party to a messy custody dispute two years back; a former ML engineer let go eight months ago after a dispute over authorship credit on a research paper; a statistician with a restraining order filed against him by an ex-girlfriend, later dropped.
Rachel sat with each one for a while, running the shape of them against what she knew about the killer, testing whether any of it fit.
But she couldn’t deny that honestly, none of it held.
By the time she'd finished background checks on all eight members of the current model team, she had nothing.
No arrests, no violence, no history that pointed anywhere useful.
Whoever was doing this had never so much as gotten a speeding ticket that showed up in the system.
"Anything on your end?" she asked, closing the last file and rubbing absently at her forehead.
"Same as you. Clean records straight down the line." Novak leaned back in his chair. "Which either means we're looking for somebody who's never slipped up before tonight, or we're looking in the wrong direction entirely."
Rachel closed her laptop halfway and sat back too, feeling the hours in her shoulders.
Nights like this were the part of the job nobody put in the recruitment brochures…
nights of hour after hour of names that led nowhere, court records and old news clippings that amounted to nothing more than other people's bad luck.
She'd learned a long time ago not to resent it.
More often than not, the work paid off eventually, even when it felt like torment in the moment.
It was rarely the flashy break that cracked a case.
It was usually this instead, the tedious sorting through everything that wasn't the answer until whatever was left had nowhere else to hide.
Rachel's phone rang before she could turn her attention back to the Apogee list. She didn't recognize the number, and she almost let it go to voicemail before her better instincts forced her to pick up.
"This is Agent Gift."
"It's Tessa Kline." The voice on the other end was quieter than it had been that morning, none of the enthusiasm from behind her monitors. "I know it's late, but…I got your number off the card you left at the front desk."
Rachel sat up straighter and motioned for Novak to grab his laptop. A call from Kline was absolutely the last thing she’d been expecting. "Dr. Kline, that’s not an issue at all. What can I do for you?"
"Well, I told you I’d go through those export logs and I just now got around to finishing."
“Oh. I appreciate that. Did you find something?” As she asked, she placed the call on speaker mode and set it in the middle of the table, right beside their dinner.
There was a long, drawn-out silence from the other end, longer than it needed to be. "I wasn't going to call tonight. I was going to send it over in the morning through the lawyers, the way Sloan wants everything to go. But I did find something, and I didn't feel like sitting on it until nine a.m."
Rachel glanced at Novak, who'd already set his food down and was watching her closely.
It wasn't lost on her how strange this was.
An Apogee employee, on her own initiative, was calling an FBI agent after hours to hand over information her own company's lawyers hadn't cleared yet.
Nobody else at that building had shown her this much urgency.
"I'm listening," Rachel said.
"There's a pattern in the export logs that doesn't match anything legitimate," Kline said.
She sounded hesitant, and Rachel supposed it came from fighting the feeling that she was betraying the company she cared for so much.
"Every individual prediction request goes through an internal query system.
Normal use looks like batches. A data scientist pulling fifty or a hundred users at once for a recalibration run, something like that.
What I found instead were single-user queries.
One name, one date, spaced out over months.
There is no batch attached to them, no project code, nothing that would explain why someone needed just one person's peak date at a time. "
Rachel wasn’t quite following the logistics of it all, but she got the gist. "How many queries are we talking about?" she asked.
"Nine, going back fourteen months. And all of them traced to the same login.
" Kline's voice tightened as she continued, and Rachel worried she might change her mind halfway through.
"Wes Hartley. He's on the data engineering side, not modeling, which is part of why it took me this long to catch it.
His access wasn't supposed to touch individual predictions at all.
He built a workaround into one of his own maintenance scripts.
It's clever. You'd only find it if you already knew exactly what to look for. "
Rachel wrote the name down and felt something settle into place. "The dates on those nine queries…do they line up with anything?"
"I checked before I called you. And yes…two of them are Renata Pike and Gerald Mott."
Novak had gone still across the desk, his pen frozen over the legal pad he'd pulled out. Rachel kept her voice level, though her pulse had picked up in a way she didn't bother trying to talk herself out of.
"You said nine total. Tanner told us the same source sent him roughly that many names over the year."
"Then it's him," Kline said. "It has to be. Nobody else on that team has a login that touches individual data the way his does. Not without leaving a trail I would've caught months ago."
"Do you have an employee file on Hartley? Current address, anything?"
"I can send you what HR has, but I'd expect it's out of date.
He works remote most weeks. I don't think I've seen him in the sublevel more than a handful of times this year.
" Kline exhaled audibly and Rachel could hear sadness in it.
"I need you to know I didn't send this to Sloan first. I know how that looks, going around him, but if I sent it up the chain tonight it would sit in legal until tomorrow afternoon.
And quite frankly, I wasn't willing to wait that long knowing what it might mean. "
"You did the right thing calling me," Rachel said, though she was all but sure this move was also in the interest of public opinion. "Send whatever you have. We'll take it from here."
“Yeah, I’ll get it over to you.” Kline then hung up without much more than a clipped goodbye. It was almost as if she had used up whatever nerve had gotten her through the call in the first place.
Rachel ended the call and looked at Novak. "Wes Hartley. Data engineer."
"Had you seen the name yet?”
"No. He wasn't even on my list. Apparently, he was clean enough that he never came up.
" She was already pulling up the Bureau's internal search on her laptop.
"Kline says his access to individual predictions wasn't supposed to exist at all. He built it himself, routed through a maintenance script instead of the normal system.”
“Maybe that's how he stayed off Kline's radar for over a year," Novak said.
He was moving too now, phone in his hand as he immediately got someone at the field office on the line to run a deeper search than what HR could offer.
Between the two of them, it didn't take long.
Hartley's Bureau file, Kline’s email, his last known address, and a lease that hadn't shown up anywhere in Apogee's outdated records at all gave them what they needed.
They were out the door with an active address for Wes Hartley just twenty-two minutes after Kline’s call.