CHAPTER TWENTY
Myers Park was already busy with the comings and goings of police by the time Rachel and Novak pulled into the lot along the western rim.
But it wasn’t just the police presence that had the park busy.
The scene had grown past what the local uniforms could contain before word got out.
The morning was still cool, the sun low enough that it hadn't burned off the haze sitting over the grass, and the air carried the smell of cut lawn and someone's coffee from a nearby cart.
It had apparently decided it was okay to open for business despite everything happening thirty yards away.
Two patrol cars sat nose-to-tail across the entrance to the main trailhead, blue lights spinning without sirens.
A stretch of yellow tape ran from a bike rack to a light pole to keep the gravel loop clear.
Beyond the tape, a growing cluster of joggers stood in place, some with earbuds still in, and their phones already out.
A woman with a golden retriever on a leash kept craning her neck to see past an officer's shoulder while the dog strained at the end of the leash toward whatever was pulling everyone's attention.
A man in cycling gear had one foot still clipped into his pedal, like he hadn't decided yet whether this was worth stopping for.
Farther down, two women in matching workout gear stood with their phones raised, filming instead of watching, narrating something to whoever might be on the other end.
"Move it back, folks, come on," one of the uniforms was saying, arms spread wide like he was herding cattle instead of people. He wasn’t even trying to conceal the anger in his voice. "You’re all actively interfering with an active crime scene!”
But nobody moved it back. If anything, the crowd along the tape line had thickened since Rachel had gotten out of the car.
Their phones were angled toward the tree line where a cluster of paramedics and officers stood over something on the grass just off the paved path.
A second officer had abandoned the crowd altogether and was crouched by the bike rack, trying to keep a man with a stroller from walking his usual loop straight through the middle of the scene.
"Word travels fast," Novak said, nodding toward a woman in running shorts, holding her phone up at an angle clearly meant to catch something past the tape.
"It's a public park at seven in the morning," Rachel said. "It really can’t be helped."
They ducked under the tape and found Corbin near the tree line. His face had a tightness to it that hadn't been there at Diaz's garage. Rachel wondered if he was starting to feel the pressure of the case now that the public was getting an up-close seat.
"Rough morning," Rachel said.
"And getting rougher." Corbin gestured toward the grass. "Female jogger found off the main loop about forty minutes ago by another runner. Holly Greer. Paramedics worked her for a few minutes, but she was already gone by the time they got here."
Rachel followed him toward the body, the grass wet enough with dew that it darkened the toes of her shoes.
Holly Greer lay on her side just off the paved trail, one leg still bent at the knee like she'd gone down mid-stride.
Her running shoes were bright white against the green.
She wore leggings and a fitted tank, an Apogee watch strapped to her left wrist.
Rachel crouched, careful not to disturb anything, and studied the readout on the watch.
The face of the watch was white, not gold—not the triumphant lettering she'd seen twice now, burned into her memory from Pike's garage and Diaz's.
What she did see, though, were small white numbers ticking against a soft blue background. Two days, eleven hours.
"She wasn't there yet," Rachel said.
"Come again?" Novak said.
"Her peak. She was close, but she hadn't hit it." Rachel looked up at Novak, who'd crouched beside her. "Every other victim died on the exact day of their peak—in the case of Pike and Diaz, within minutes. But this one's still got two days on the clock."
Novak made a hmmm sound as he studied the watch face himself. "That doesn't fit."
"No," Rachel agreed. "It doesn't. I think it even gives us a whole different approach.”
“Maybe the killer knows we’re getting close and doesn’t see the point in wasting time.”
“Maybe,” Rachel agreed.
She leaned in closer to the body, looking for what she already suspected she wouldn't find.
Every other victim had carried a single clean puncture at the base of the skull or along the neck, precise and small.
She checked Greer's neck first, the pale skin along her hairline, the collar of her tank top.
She used her flashlight to look closer but found nothing.
It was Novak who found it, crouched at Greer's other side. "Rachel."
She came around the body and looked where he was pointing. A mark sat in the crook of Greer's left arm, red and slightly raised. This was not the surgical precision they’d seen in the other victims, but something rougher. Something more hurried.
"That's not our guy," Rachel said quietly.
"You sure?"
"Look at it. Every other injection site was one mark, clean, no bruising around it. This is sloppy. Multiple attempts, and it's in the wrong place entirely." She sat back on her heels, looking at Greer's face, slack and pale in the early light. "Whoever did this wasn't trying to hide it."
“Well, if she was running, the killer would have had a harder time getting a clean injection. Maybe he just couldn’t take his time with this on…wasn’t able to catch her by surprise.”
The ME arrived just seconds later, ducking under the tape with his bag already in hand. He rushed over to the body and crouched where Rachel had been standing. He worked in silence for a stretch before speaking.
"Cardiac event, if I had to guess right now," he said, but Rachel could hear the uncertainty in his tone.
"We won't know for certain until I get her open, and the tox screen's going to take days, not hours, especially if we're looking at something that doesn't show up clean the first time around.
Like the others." He glanced at the injection site in the crook of her arm, turning it gently to get a better look.
"This isn't your killer's work. Wrong location, wrong technique.
Whoever did this was giving her something intramuscular, not delivering a single dose designed to disappear. "
“You’re certain?”
"No, but it’s likely. Maybe…maybe some sort of steroid. We'll know more once we're in her system properly, but that presentation, in a woman her age, with a heart giving out during a jog..." He shook his head. "It happens more than people think.”
"Any chance it's not what it looks like?" Novak asked. "Somebody trying to make it read like an accident?"
"Anything's possible until the tox comes back.
" The ME peeled off his gloves and dropped them into a bag at his side.
"But if you're asking whether I think somebody snuck up on a woman jogging in a public park at dawn and jabbed her in the arm to fake a steroid injection, I'd tell you that's a lot of trouble for someone. If it’s the same killer, they were in a hell of a hurry.
But that injection site in the arm…it makes me wonder… "
“Wonder what?”
“Look at the angle. It could have been self-inflicted. And I have to suggest steroids again. I’ve seen the injection enough times to at least raise the alarm on it in this case.”
Rachel looked back toward the tape line, where the crowd had grown thicker instead of thinner.
There were more uniformed officers there to keep them back, but there were still far too many phones held up into the air.
A news van had pulled up somewhere behind the patrol cars; she could see the mast of a satellite dish rising above the tree line.
"We need to get into her apartment," Rachel said to Novak. "Maybe there's evidence that this is some sort of self-injected steroid, and if that's the case, as cruel as it sounds, we don't need to waste our time trying to tie it to our case."
“I’ll see if one of the cops has the address,” Novak said. “I see Corbin over there…”
As it turned out, Corbin had just then gotten Greer’s address and when Rachel and Novak left the scene to head that way, Corbin went with them.
The apartment was fifteen minutes away, a modern building with a gym on the ground floor and a concierge desk that let them up without much resistance once Rachel showed her credentials.
The unit itself looked like it had been staged for a magazine spread, all clean lines and neutral tones, the kitchen counter bare except for a row of protein powder containers arranged by size, largest to smallest. The second bedroom had been converted into a home studio.
A powered-down ring light angled toward a yoga mat, a tripod folded against the wall, three different phone mounts stacked in a basket like they were part of the decor.
It was, in some basic ways, eerily similar to Renata Pike’s crime scene.
"I'll take the kitchen and the living room," Corbin said, already pulling on a pair of gloves. "You two want the bedrooms?"
Rachel nodded and started with the studio, working the drawers of a low cabinet pushed against the wall beneath the ring light.
She found nothing inside but extra memory cards, a phone charger, and a tangle of loose cables.
A corkboard hung near the door, pinned with printed photos of Greer at various stages: before-and-after shots, a race bib from some 10K, a torn magazine clipping with her name circled in marker.
There was nothing that told her anything she didn't already know.
Novak worked the bedroom closet, going through the pockets of a row of hanging jackets while Rachel checked the nightstand drawers.
The nightstand held a planner, mostly empty except for gym class times written in shorthand, a half-used bottle of melatonin, and a charging cable for the Apogee watch, coiled neatly beside a spare wristband still in its packaging.
"Anything?" Corbin called from the kitchen.
"Not yet," Rachel said.
She moved into the bathroom next, working through the medicine cabinet first. Ibuprofen, a prescription for birth control, an unopened box of bandages.
It felt like a massive miss until she turned her attention to the linen closet.
There, Rachel found a zippered case tucked behind a stack of towels.
She unzipped it carefully and found four unlabeled vials, a scatter of syringes still in their wrappers, and a handwritten dosing schedule.
A second, smaller case sat behind it, empty except for a few loose needle caps rattling around the bottom.
"Novak," she called, and he came in from the bedroom, Corbin a step behind him. She set what she had found on the closed toilet seat to let them see clearly.
"That'll do it," Corbin said, looking at the vials without touching them. “Looks like the ME was right about the steroid speculation.”
Rachel was still crouched over the open case when Novak took out his phone. “I’m checking to see if she has any online presence. Maybe she posted something that will clue us in.”
"Makes me wonder if she might be in the crowd that Tanner mentioned in his latest post,” Corbin said. “About people racing their own countdowns."
Novak's voice sounded deflated when he said, “If that’s the case, she probably wasn’t murdered. Maybe the ME was right. She inadvertently killed herself trying to win a race that was never real to begin with."
"Not intentionally." Rachel looked back toward the bathroom, toward the case of vials sitting open on the counter. "But intentional or not, it's the same outcome our guy wants. Another death near a predicted peak. Another headline that makes this look bigger than it already is."
"You think whoever's doing this planned for something like this to happen?"
"I don't think they had to," Rachel said. She walked back into the converted studio, looking at the tripod, the ring light, the mat worn thin in the center from repeated use. "They just needed enough fear and enough noise, and people would start doing the rest of the work themselves."
“Well,” Novak said, “this studio makes some sense. Looks like she was on TikTok as well. Not nearly the following Pike had, though. Looks like she was just getting started. A little less than eight thousand followers.”
“Maybe that was enough to catch the attention of the wrong people, though?” Corbin suggested.
“Maybe,” Rachel said.
She thought of Tanner's video from the night before, the shadowy figure climbing out of a phone screen, the meme with sixty thousand shares.
If this newly developing theory was right, maybe somewhere in that noise, a woman had decided the only way to prove she wasn't afraid was to push her body past what it could survive.
And maybe she had died two days early doing it, in a public park, in front of a growing crowd already reaching for their phones.
"So…are we agreed?” Novak said. “That this was probably not the work of our killer?”
“I think so,” Corbin said.
“Same here,” Rachel agreed. “But I don’t think the media is going to give a damn. I think we’ve got maybe another few hours before this entire thing blows up beyond our control.” She then looked to Novak and said, “And I think the only person who can help us control it is Dr. Sloan.”