Page 11 of Her Last Vow

"We'll let you know what we find," Rachel said.

The elevator doors closed, and Novak exhaled once they were alone inside the car, his shoulders dropping slightly.

"She's good," he said. "Real polished."

"Too polished," Rachel said. "Everything she said was accurate right up until I asked who could see a specific person's peak date. That's when she started picking her words instead of just talking."

"You think she's hiding something?"

"I think she knows exactly how tightly that information is supposed to be locked down," Rachel said, "and I think she's already worried about who got past it."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Novak pulled out of the Apogee parking lot and merged onto the main road, the glass campus shrinking in the side mirror. Neither of them spoke for a minute, the silence filled with the low hum of the road.

"Oakley gave us a lot, I’ll give her that," Novak finally said. "But she didn't give us the one thing we actually need."

"Whether Mott shared his peak date." Rachel had her phone in her hand, scrolling back through her notes from the meeting. "She said the sharing feature is opt-in. If he never opted in, then whoever's doing this didn't find him through the app's public feed."

"And if he did opt in, we're looking at somebody who's just scraping public posts. A stalker with a spreadsheet, maybe. Nothing that requires inside access."

"Right. But if he didn't share it, and somebody still knew, that narrows things down to people with actual database access. Which is a much shorter list, and a much more useful one." Rachel pulled up her contacts. "Diane would know. She said herself he wasn't big on social media, wasn't the type to share things online. But I want to hear her say it directly about the app itself, not just Facebook."

"You think she'd know if he used the sharing feature?"

"I think there's only one way to find out," she said, scrolling through the case contacts on her phone and coming to Diane Mott's number. She entered her number and placed the call on speaker. It rang three times before Diane answered.

“Hello?”

"Mrs. Mott, it's Agent Gift again. Sorry to bother you twice in one day."

"It's fine." Diane's voice was steady and maybe even a little hopeful. "Did you find something?"

"We're still working through it,” Rachel said. “I wanted to ask you something specific about Gerald's account. Do you know if he ever shared his peak day publicly, the way Renata Pike did? Through the app itself, or on social media?"

Diane said nothing for a moment, making a little hmmm sound over the line. "I don't think so. He wasn't like that. Like I told you, he wasn’t really on social media.”

"Did he not like social media or was he just not very adept at it?"

Diane chuckled a bit and said, “Oh, Gerald didn't trust any of it. Facebook, the apps, all of it." Her tone then sharpened slightly, the way it had at the kitchen table earlier that morning. "He used to say identity theft was the biggest scam nobody talked about enough. He wouldn't even use the same password twice for two different accounts. I used to tease him about it, tell him nobody wanted to steal his Amazon login."

"So he wouldn't have opted into any kind of public sharing feature inside the app."

"I really doubt it. But I'm not going to sit here and tell you I know for sure, because I don't. He posted that one picture at the gym, the one we already talked about. That was Facebook, not the Apogee app itself. Whether he shared anything through the app, I couldn't tell you. He barely knew how half of that thing worked. I set up his email account for him three years ago and he would still have to call me every time he needs to attach a file to something."

Rachel glanced over at Novak, who kept his eyes on the road but was clearly listening.

"Was there anyone in his life who might have known his peak date without him sharing it? A friend, a doctor, anyone he might have mentioned it to?"

"Not that I know of. He didn't talk about that stuff much, even with me. I only knew because he showed me the notification the morning it came in." Diane's voice caught slightly. "He came into the kitchen holding his wrist out like a kid showing off a scraped knee. He was so happy about it."

Novak leaned toward the phone slightly, keeping his voice level. "Mrs. Mott, it's Agent Novak. Can I ask you something about those forums you mentioned this morning?"

"Sure."

"You said there's a whole community tracking these deaths. Did any of them point you toward anyone specific? A name, somebody who seemed to know more than the average person posting?"

"No, not really. But there is one person everybody talks about," Diane said. "Bryce Tanner. He's some kind of wellness personality. One of these younger kids, you know…he has a following online, does videos about supplements and biohacking and things like that. He's been saying for over a year that Apogee's dangerous. He calls it a death clock. A lot of the forum posts link back to his videos. People treat him like he's got some kind of inside information."