CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Having not yet settled down on any place to consider their base of operations, Rachel and Novak called ahead to the nearest precinct.
Getting a room at a precinct they'd never set foot in before turned out to be its own small ordeal.
The desk sergeant on duty didn't recognize either of their credentials on sight and had made them wait while he called someone to verify, and then the first interview room offered up had an overhead light that flickered on and off intermittently.
That meant a ten-minute detour to a different room down a different hallway while a patrol officer apologized twice for something that clearly wasn't his fault.
In the middle of all of it, Novak had ended up holding two cups of vending machine coffee he never got to drink because the machine ate his second dollar and jammed, and a different sergeant had spent a solid minute explaining that the jam happened "all the time" like that was supposed to be comforting.
A third officer had wanted to know whether they needed a translator on standby, on the grounds that half the interview requests that came through that door involved one, and seemed almost disappointed when Rachel told him no.
By the time they actually had Hartley seated across the table from them, Rachel decided that it was almost funny.
Which was good because she was starting to get irritated all over again in the manner with which Apogee employees were responding to the nature of these deaths…
and Hartley was no exception. So she’d needed the slight reminder to slow down.
Hartley hadn't said much since he’d been escorted from his apartment.
He sat with his arms crossed, and his jaw tight.
He glanced at the door every so often like he expected his lawyer to materialize through it like a wizard.
Fifteen minutes in, he'd answered maybe three questions, all of them some version of "I want to wait for my attorney. "
"Your attorney's not here yet," Novak said, not for the first time.
"Then I'll wait." Hartley didn't look up from the table. “Nothing’s changed.”
That was fine with Rachel. Hartley had ended up coming along peacefully, if a bit begrudgingly, and that was the important thing.
And because he worked for a company like Apogee (not to mention having admitted to them that he was the leak), it made perfect sense to her that he would want a lawyer present.
As they waited for the lawyer to arrive, Rachel's phone buzzed against the tabletop. She glanced at the screen, saw a number with a local area code, and stepped out into the hallway to take it. Novak watched her go as he was left with Hartley and the silence he seemed determined to keep.
“This is Agent Gift,” she answered when she was in the hall.
“Agent Gift, it’s Detective Corbin…from the Pike scene.”
“Yes, of course. What can I do for you?”
"Well, for starters, you and your partner can come give me a hand,” he said in a flat and worried tone. “We've got a third one. Male, mid-twenties, found in his garage about half an hour ago.”
“An Apogee watch?”
“Yep, still on his wrist, and it says the same thing the others did."
Rachel felt something cold settle low in her chest. "Peak achieved."
"Yeah."
"That's not…” She nearly said that’s not possible as she glanced back through the narrow window in the interview room door at Hartley.
He was still sitting there with his arms crossed and his lawyer still absent.
They had the leak, but he and the killer were apparently not the same.
Depending on the timing of this new murder, it seemed Hartley was going to have a very solid alibi.
“Who discovered the body?”
"An ambulance actually. The Apogee noticed an extremely low pulse rate, and these things apparently have a built-in function that calls for help."
"Send me the address,” she said. “We're leaving now."
She ended the call and stepped back into the room long enough to catch Novak's eye and tilt her head toward the hallway. He was up and out of his chair within seconds, murmuring something to the uniform posted outside about keeping an eye on Hartley.
“We have to go,” Rachel said.
“But his lawyer…”
“Will be happy to head back home when he gets here. Detective Corbin just called. It looks like we’ve got a third victim.”
“Jesus, how fresh?”
“Half an hour or so, they think.”
Novak looked back over to the attending officer, but he didn’t have to say anything. The officer had apparently overheard everything. “Go on,” he said. “I’ll handle things here.”
They made their way back through the precinct and Rachel suddenly felt as if they'd wasted a tremendous amount of time securing that interrogation room.
They crossed the parking lot at a jog, and when they were in the car, Rachel pulled up the address, and Novak pulled out of the parking lot with a gentle squeal of tires.
“Hartley's been with us, in our presence, for the better part of an hour," Novak commented when they were on the road.
"I know."
"So either we've got the wrong guy sitting in there, or we've got two people involved in this."
“He’s still the leak that was getting info to Tanner.
Before this is all over, I’d say there’s a very good chance we’ll need to speak with him again.
” Rachel watched the streetlights slide past the window, thinking through what Kline had told her earlier in the night…
about Hartley's righteous, exhausted anger at his own company.
"I think he's exactly what he told us he is.
A guy who leaked data because he thought somebody needed to see it.
That's not the same profile as somebody walking into people's homes with a needle. "
“So you think Hartley is innocent?”
“Well, I certainly do now, if this body is as recent as Corbin suggested.”
"So somebody else had access to the same information he did."
"Or somebody else had access to information he never even touched." Rachel exhaled, fully aware that she was starting to confuse herself. God, she hated technology. "Either way, we've been looking at this like there's one door into that data. There might be more than one."
Neither of them said much else for the rest of the drive, though Rachel spent most of it running the last twelve hours back through her head, trying to find the place where the theory had gone wrong.
They'd built the case against Hartley cleanly.
Access, motive, no alibi. It had felt solid enough at 10:40 while standing in his doorway and watching him fold under the weight of it.
Now it felt like a shape she'd been too eager to fill in. And she wasn’t ready to admit that they may have jumped the gun with him.
They reached the address Corbin sent over twelve minutes later.
The house was small and quaint, sitting on a quiet street with a scatter of patrol cars already parked at odd angles along the curb, lights still turning without their sirens.
What stopped Rachel for a second as she climbed out of the car was the ambulance parked directly in the driveway, its back doors open.
The crew was standing near it in a way that told her they hadn't been called out here as a formality. But she then recalled what Corbin had told her on the phone, about how the Apogee watch had called for the ambulance when the body’s pulse dropped out.
They found Corbin near the garage entrance, and he waved them through without much preamble.
Seeing another garage that was far too similar to the Pike scene made Rachel feel dizzy for a moment.
This garage smelled faintly of rubber and sweat.
A treadmill faced the front wall and a man lay on black rubber flooring a few feet from it with one arm bent beneath him.
His watch caught the light from the garage's overhead fixtures, showing that it was indeed an Apogee watch.
As they drew closer, Rachel saw that PEAK ACHIEVED was sitting gold and bright above a timestamp that made Rachel's stomach turn when she leaned in to read it.
11:34 PM. A little more than an hour ago.
Rachel took in the rest of the room before she let herself focus on the body.
There were resistance bands on hooks along one wall, a shelf of kettlebells sorted by size, and a folded towel draped over the treadmill's handrail.
The whole setup had the same air of discipline she'd seen in Renata Pike's garage.
It was a space built by someone who'd made a habit out of pushing their limits and keeping count of the results.
The ME was already crouched near the body, and he glanced up when Rachel crouched across from him.
"Same signature," he said, before she'd asked anything.
"A small puncture wound to the back of the neck.
This time a little closer to the ear, but the same size, the same lack of surrounding bruising.
Whoever's doing this has a steady hand and knows exactly what they're doing. "
"Cardiac?" Novak asked.
"That's my read, and I'd bet on it holding once the tox comes back.
Fast-acting, clean, out of the system before you'd know to look for it. Now, that’s assuming it behaves anything like whatever's in Pike.
" He shook his head slightly and there was something almost like anger in his eyes.
"We still don't have anything definitive off her screen, by the way.
Whatever this is, it's not showing up on a standard panel.
It's like the drug just vanishes once it's done its job. "
“Have you seen anything like it before?” Rachel asked.
“No, not personally, but I do know that there’s stuff like that out there.”
Rachel stood and looked around the garage, the resistance bands hanging in a neat row on the wall, the kettlebells lined up by size. "Whoever's doing this is still out there, and they just killed somebody less than an hour after we thought we had our answer. They can’t have gotten far.”
"Bolder, too," Corbin said, stepping up beside her. "Pike's the first one, and there was time between the notification and the murder. Mott, we don't even have a clean timeline on. This one, though, the notification went off and he was dead inside the hour."
"And you said there’s a built-in function to call an ambulance in a time like this?" Rachel asked.
"Yeah, from what I gather, these newer models come equipped with that function.
If your heart rate crosses into a range the app doesn't like and doesn't come back down inside a set window, it pings local emergency services automatically.
GPS location, basic vitals, the whole package.
But you can send it manually, too, like if you hurt yourself on a run or whatever.
Looks like the victim—Aaron Diaz, by the way—triggered his manually just before he died.
" He nodded to the ambulance outside and said, "The ambulance got here, and the medics found the body just like this. "
"And he was already dead?”
“Yeah. I’m guessing whatever they’re injected with takes them out quickly. No more than a minute…probably less.”
Rachel crouched again near the watch, studying the timestamp, running the timeline of the night against everything they knew. Behind her, Corbin shifted his weight, and when she glanced back at him, he had his phone already half out of his jacket pocket.
"Oh," he said, tapping something on his phone, his mouth set into a scowl. "And there's something else you may want to see."
But the way he sighed as he showed them his screen made Rachel pretty sure she didn’t want to see what he had waiting for them at all.