CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Corbin unlocked his phone and held it out so both of them could see the screen. "Bryce Tanner's been busy during the last four or five hours,” he said. “TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, whatever it's called this week. Same stuff on all three, more or less, just formatted differently for each platform."
Rachel took the phone from him and scrolled.
The top post was a video, paused on a thumbnail of Tanner's face mid-sentence.
His expression was somewhere between grief and triumph.
He'd swapped the fake brick backdrop from his studio for something plainer, a bare wall and softer lighting, like he'd wanted this one to read as more sober than his usual content. She hit play.
"I've been telling you for over a year," Tanner said into the camera, his voice pitched low and steady, with none of the manic energy she remembered from their earlier encounter.
"I've been telling you Apogee is a death app, and everybody called me a conspiracy nut, and now we're at three.
Three people, dead on their exact peak day.
I can't tell you how I know about the third one.
I can't tell you who I've been talking to.
But I've spoken with certain authorities, and I can tell you this isn't a rumor anymore.
This is confirmed. People are dying on schedule, and that company is letting it happen. "
The video ran another forty seconds past that, Tanner walking through a loose timeline of Pike and Mott.
His tone never rose, and he never broke into the theatrics Rachel had expected.
It was the restraint that made it land. He wasn't performing outrage.
He sounded like a man who'd rather not be right.
It was a reminder of just how good he was at his job.
“Well, that sucks,” Novak said from over her shoulder.
"He's careful," Rachel said, handing the phone back to Corbin. "No names. No details he could get pinned on for interfering with an active investigation. Just enough to keep himself covered and everybody else terrified."
"He's good at this," Novak admitted. "I hate that he's good at this, but he is."
"Convincing, too." Rachel had seen enough of Tanner in person to know the on-camera version wasn't entirely an act.
He believed what he was saying, or believed it enough that it read as sincere, and that made it worse.
"Delivery like that gets shared by people who'd never watch one of his videos otherwise.
He's not selling paranoia. He's selling certainty, and right now certainty is the one thing nobody else in this case can offer. "
Corbin scrolled to a different post, this one a screenshot of a trending topic; the phrase Apogee Death App was sitting near the top of a list with a number beside it that had climbed into six figures.
"It's not just him anymore,” Corbin said.
“Once he posted, it took off on its own.
People are sharing his videos, quoting him, running their own theories underneath. "
"What kind of theories?" Rachel asked, though she suspected she already knew the answer.
"Some of it's the usual doom and gloom stuff.
People are saying they're scared to check their own peak date, scared to even open the app.
" Corbin kept scrolling, shaking his head.
"Some of it's worse. There's a whole thread of people bragging about pushing their workouts harder, trying to beat their own predicted peak before it catches up with them, like it's a race they can win if they just get there first…trying to outrun their own death clock.”
"That's going to get somebody hurt," Novak said.
"It already has, probably, just not the way they think.
" Corbin turned the phone so they could see another post. This one was of a cartoonish illustration of a shadowy figure with long fingers climbing out of a phone screen toward a sleeping figure in bed.
"Somebody's decided there's a hitman built into the app,” he said.
“A few different versions of the same idea are floating around—a guy climbing out of a phone.
A creature living in the watch itself. People are calling it the Apogee monster, like it's a ghost story now instead of an actual murder investigation. "
Rachel took the phone again and looked at the image longer than she needed to, watching the comment count tick upward even as she held it. "This has a life of its own already. And it only sprouted up earlier today."
“Don’t you just love social media,” Novak muttered.
"There's a meme, too, if you want to see genuinely bad taste in action.
" Corbin pulled it up without waiting for her to answer, a split-panel image with a caption about hitting your peak that Rachel didn't bother reading past the first line.
"That one's been shared something like sixty thousand times.
Dark humor mostly, people making jokes about their own mortality, but it's everywhere.
My niece sent it to me an hour ago with no idea I was standing in the middle of the actual case. "
"People cope how they cope," Novak said, though he didn't sound entirely convinced of it himself. In fact, he was starting to sound aggravated.
"Sure,” Rachel said. “Except every share is another few thousand people who now think this is a joke, or a ghost story, or a race to win, instead of what it actually is.
" Rachel scrolled through a few more comments under the meme before handing the phone back.
Most of them were harmless—just the usual gallows humor that showed up under anything grim enough to go viral.
But a handful worried her more, users tagging friends with their own predicted peak dates attached, half joking and half not.
"We could go back to Tanner,” Rachel said, doing her best to find some kind of a solution. “Tell him to take it down."
"He wouldn't," Novak said. "Even if he agreed, it's already out past him. That video's got copies on a dozen accounts by now, reposted, screen-recorded, stitched into other people's content. Taking down the original wouldn't touch any of it."
"And I guess showing up at his studio again does nothing but hand him more material," Rachel admitted.
She had seen enough of Tanner's instincts firsthand to know exactly how he'd use a second visit from the FBI.
He'd have it filmed before they were out of the parking lot, framed as confirmation of everything he'd already been telling his followers.
"Every time we go near him, we make his story bigger. We'd be lighting the fire ourselves."
Corbin slid his phone back into his jacket pocket. "So what do you want to do?"
"Nothing, where he's concerned. Not yet.
" Rachel looked past him toward the garage, toward Diaz's body still lying where it had fallen, the watch on his wrist still doing its little celebratory thing.
"This isn't a Tanner problem anymore. It's a clock problem.
The longer this stays public and unsolved, the worse it gets.
More theories, more panic, more people out there trying to outrun their own predicted peak like it's something you can beat if you just push hard enough. "
"That's not going to end well for somebody," Novak said quietly.
"No. It's not." Rachel pulled her jacket tighter against the night air, the temperature dropping now that they'd been standing outside talking for several minutes.
"Which means we don't have the luxury of taking this slow.
Whoever's doing this is inside a very small circle, and we need a name before the internet decides it already has one for us. Right now every theory floating around online is competing for attention with the actual one…and once the media really catches on to it, our jobs are going to be a lot harder.”
As if that were the firing gun to a race, all three of them headed back into the garage, hoping to get ahead of this case before the morning brought a whole new problem.