CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Rachel stayed in the car after Sloan disappeared inside, mostly because something about the emotional toll of their conversation had affected her in a way she hadn’t expected.
That, plus twenty-eight hours without sleep had a way of catching up all at once, the exhaustion arriving in waves instead of a steady climb.
Her eyes felt gritty as she sat in the car, dry at the edges and itchy.
There was a dull pressure building behind her left temple that coffee wasn't going to touch anymore.
Before she placed the call to AD Anderson, she looked out by the hood of the car, where Novak was leaning and speaking on the phone.
He had taken it upon himself to call the other seven people on the list they’d compiled, making sure they knew what was going on and that, at some point this morning, they may be contacted by the police about coming under protection.
Rachel then placed the call, and Anderson picked up on the first ring. "Tell me you've got him, Gift."
"I've got a lot of things, but none of them are an arrest. Sorry.
" Rachel leaned her head back against the seat, watching the glass doors Sloan had vanished through. "Fourth victim this morning. Different presentation, but tied to the app. We don’t think it was the killer, but are waiting for the ME to verify.”
“So…what? Just an accident?”
“Seems that way. But sir, listen. Apogee isn’t budging. I need this app suspended, and I need it fast, before someone else dies."
"As in a court order?"
"That's what I'm asking for, yes. I want a judge who'll move on this today, not next week." She kept her voice low, keeping an ear peeled on Novak’s conversation as well. "I'm not talking about shutting down the whole company. Just the app itself.”
Anderson was quiet for a second, and she could hear him typing somewhere on the other end.
"That's going to be a public safety argument, not a criminal one.
You'll want it framed as an imminent harm request, not tied to any one suspect.
Because if you name anyone within the company or anyone else in the filing and it turns out wrong, the whole thing gets thrown out and Apogee's lawyers use it to make you look reckless. We’d be eating shit on that for months. "
"Yes, sir. I know that. We’ll be careful about it."
"I know. I'm thinking about which judge signs it without asking a hundred questions first. And I just…for something like this, I just don’t know.
" There was another brief silence and she could hear the very faint sound of fingers on a keyboard somewhere on his end now.
"Halloran's the one I'd go to. She's handled two of our emergency injunctions before; she moves fast, doesn't need a lot of hand-holding on the technical side.
I can have somebody reach out to her clerk within the hour if you get me something in writing I can forward. "
"How long from filing to signature, if she's willing?"
"If she's willing, and if what you send me is clean?
Could be this afternoon. If she wants a hearing first, even a short one, you're looking at tomorrow at the earliest." Anderson exhaled, the sound of it carrying some of the same fatigue Rachel felt sitting behind her own eyes.
"I'll push as hard as I can on my end. You focus on getting me the affidavit.
Deaths, dates, the connection to the predictions.
Keep it factual, keep opinion out of it, and for God's sake don't put anything about a specific suspect in there unless you're prepared to name them formally. "
"Understood."
"How are you holding up?" Anderson asked, and something in his tone shifted, less procedural now. He did this from time to time, and she’d always found it slightly robotic.
"Just tired. Me and Novak both."
"When's the last time you slept?"
"I'll sleep when this is finished,” she said rather than answering the question.
"That's not an answer, Gift, that's a warning sign." He didn't push further, though, and she was grateful for it. "Get me that affidavit. I'll call you the second Halloran's clerk gets back to me."
The line went dead, and Rachel sat for a moment with the phone still against her ear before lowering it.
Through the windshield, she watched Novak pacing a slow line along the edge of the parking spot, his own phone pressed to his ear, his free hand moving in short gestures like he was trying to talk someone down from something.
She got out of the car, phone still in hand, and caught the tail end of what he was saying.
"—no, I understand it feels like an overreaction, but I'd rather you hear it from me than read about it online tomorrow.
Delete the app if you're comfortable doing that, and don't be alarmed if you notice a car outside your place for the next few days.
It's for your protection, that's all it is.
" Novak listened for a moment, nodded once though the person on the other end couldn't see it, and said, "I appreciate that.
Take care of yourself," before ending the call.
"How many left?" Rachel asked.
"That was three. Four more to go." Novak looked to the list in his other hand, waving it at her. "Nobody's thrilled to hear it, but nobody's arguing either. Everybody on this list already knows people are dying. They're scared enough that the surveillance part barely registers."
"Good. Keep going." Rachel leaned against the side of the car, arms crossed, watching the building. "Anderson's working on a judge. Halloran, if she's willing. Could have a court order by this afternoon if the affidavit's clean."
"That's fast."
"Fast for us. Slow for the person who dies tomorrow if it's not fast enough." Rachel rubbed at her eyes, aware of just how tired that sentence had sounded coming out of her own mouth. And now she had the dreadful paperwork of getting a court order in line to look forward to.
Novak was punching in the number of the next person on the list when Rachel's phone buzzed in her hand. Corbin's number filled the screen. She almost let it go to voicemail out of pure reflex before answering. So far, calls from him had caused nothing but trouble.
But of course, she answered. "You have to stop calling me,” she said, trying to sound humorous. “Every time you do, somebody's dead."
"Not this time," Corbin said. "Well. Not exactly. It's not great, but it's not the usual either."
"I'll take it." Rachel straightened up off the car. "What is it?"
"Sloan just went live. Like, right now, from inside a room at the Apogee offices. Some kind of company-wide broadcast, but it's public, anybody can watch it. I'm sending you the link."
“What the hell?” she said. “We’re literally there, in the parking lot. We spoke to him about fifteen minutes ago.”
“Maybe that’s what caused this, then,” he said. “Link sent.”
Her phone buzzed again a second later with the text. Rachel tapped it open, and Novak caught the shift in her posture. She heard him excuse himself from the call. He ended it and crossed to stand beside her, close enough that they could both see the screen.
The video was already several seconds in when it loaded.
Sloan was sitting at a large desk and it appeared he had done a bit of work to make himself look less washed out than he had fifteen or twenty minutes ago.
The glass walls of his office behind him let in the glowing morning light.
He wore a gray sweater he’d not had on earlier and as he spoke to the camera, he kept a small smile on his face, one of pure professionalism.
His voice, when it came through the phone's tinny speaker, was steady and low, carrying none of the exhaustion Rachel had heard in it twenty minutes earlier.
"I want to start by saying that Apogee was never meant to be a burden," Sloan said as they caught the feed live—roughly forty seconds into his message.
"It was built to be a gift. The ability to understand your own body, your own trajectory, in a way that traditional medicine has never quite managed to offer anyone.
I believed that then, and some part of me still believes it now. "
He paused, letting the words settle before continuing, his hands resting flat on either side of the podium.
"But something has happened to that gift over the last several days that I can no longer defend.
Our predictive model, the feature so many of you have come to rely on, has become something I never intended it to be.
It has become a countdown that some of our users are treating as a challenge instead of information.
It has become fuel for people online who would rather sell fear than understand what we built or why.
And regardless of what any of that says about the world we're living in, I have to take responsibility for the part my own creation has played in it. "
Rachel glanced at Novak, who hadn't moved, his eyes fixed on the screen.
"Effective immediately, I'm suspending the predictive peak algorithm across every Apogee device," Sloan continued.
"However, Apogee the app, the health tracking, and the wellness data will continue exactly as it has.
But the feature that tells you when your body will reach its optimal state, the feature that has turned so many of your lives into a race against a date on a screen, will be removed later today.
I built that feature to help people. I'm removing it because I no longer believe it's helping anyone.
And, as some of you may have already seen, it had also become the topic of a terrible series of tragedies. "
He continued to look directly into the camera, his expression softening into something that read as genuine, even through a phone screen in a parking lot.
"I know some of you will be angry with me.
Some of you built your routines, your goals, even your identities around a number my algorithm gave you.
I understand that loss, more than you might think.
But I'd rather disappoint you today than let this continue one more day in a direction I can no longer stand behind.
Thank you for trusting us. I hope, in time, you'll understand why I couldn't let that trust continue on the same terms. I just ask for patience and trust, and continued support for our amazing Apogee family. "
The video ended there, cutting to a static thumbnail of Sloan mid-sentence, his hand raised slightly as if still speaking. Rachel lowered the phone.
"That was good," Novak said after a moment.
"Really good. He didn't say murder once.
Didn't say killer, didn't say victim, didn't even say death.
Just made it about the algorithm being irresponsible, like it's a design flaw instead of four people dead. It makes me think he’d been thinking of this during that sleepless night he mentioned. "
"He's controlling the story before we can.
" Rachel looked back toward the building, the glass doors reflecting the morning sun now, giving nothing away.
"If this were about protecting the company, that's a smart move.
It gets ahead of Tanner and makes Sloan look like a hero instead of the man being investigated. "
"You think that's what it is? Protecting the company?"
"I don't know." Rachel turned the phone over in her hand, thinking about the man she'd just watched deliver that speech, and the man who'd stood in this same parking lot twenty minutes earlier looking like he could barely hold himself upright.
"It helps our case, in a way. The predictive data's gone, which means nobody else dies on a scheduled date because of it.”
“Yeah, but the killer may have already compiled a list. They may already know who’s next.”
“Possibly. But this also means Sloan just made himself look responsible and sympathetic in front of everyone who might end up on a jury someday."
"You don't think it's him," Novak said. It wasn't quite a question…not really.
"I don't know what I think anymore." Rachel watched the doors a moment longer.
"He's dying. He's exhausted. I've seen what genuine physical deterioration looks like. Hell, I’ve lived through it.
But…what I saw in his face twenty minutes ago wasn't performance.
But, no…that doesn't clear him. It just means if it is him, he's running out of time to finish whatever this is. "
Novak didn't answer. He looked back down at his phone instead, at the four names still waiting on his list, and started dialing the next one.