Page 13 of Her Last Vow

The building was unremarkable from the outside. It was little more than a long row of gray metal units with roll-up doors, the kind of place better suited to storage or auto repair than anything resembling a media operation. A hand-painted sign above unit 14 read TANNER MEDIA in block letters, the paint slightly chipped at the edges.

They parked and walked to a smaller door beside the roll-up. Novak knocked twice, and the door was opened almost immediately. Bryce Tanner looked smaller in person than he had on screen, though no less intense, with the same shaved head and the same tightly muscled build visible under a fitted black t-shirt.

"Can I help you?"

"Bryce Tanner?" Rachel asked, showing her credentials. "I’m Agent Gift, with the FBI. This is Agent Novak. We'd like to ask you a few questions, if you have a minute."

Something flickered across his face, gone almost as fast as it appeared. Then he smiled, wide and easy, and stepped back from the door. Rachel could basically see him going from fear to something like excitement. He was likely already trying to figure out how he could make a visit from the FBI work for his brand.

"FBI. Wow. Yeah, come in, come in."

The inside of the unit had been built out with more care than the exterior suggested. A backdrop of exposed brick hung against one wall, flanked by a ring light on a stand and a camera mounted on a tripod facing a single stool. As they got closer, Rachel saw that the brick was clearly fake. Foam soundproofing panels covered another wall in a checkerboard pattern, and a folding table near the back held a laptop, several external hard drives, and a tangle of cables. The rest of the space was mostly bare concrete; all of the rebuilding efforts had gone into the small filming corner.

"Sorry about the mess," Tanner said, gesturing toward two folding chairs near the table. "This is just the studio. I've got an office space I use for the business side, but everything gets filmed here."

"It's a good setup," Novak said, glancing around.

"Thanks. It took me a while to get the acoustics right." Tanner sat down across from them, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, still smiling. "So what's this about? Let me guess. Apogee. Right?"

"What makes you say that?" Rachel asked.

"Because I've been talking about that company for over a year, and suddenly two people are dead on the exact days that app told them they'd peak." Tanner spread his hands. "I figured somebody official would show up eventually. Honestly, I'm glad it's you and not some PR firm trying to shut me up."

“How did you know about the deaths?” Rachel asked.

He gave a guilty shrug and said, “Whether you see it as pathetic or not—and I know some do—obsessing over that company has fueled my content for the past year or so. If someone sneezes hard in that building in Reston, I know about it.”

“But the most recent death—”

“Renata Pike,” he said. “Yeah. I got wind of that about an hour ago.”

Rachel nearly asked how, but she sensed that would sideline the more important meat of the conversation. Someone like Tanner would have ears and sources everywhere. Maybe someone on the police or at the hospital.

"You've been vocal about the company," Rachel said. "Calling it a death clock. Why is that?”

"Because that's what it is." Tanner's voice picked up energy, the same cadence Rachel recognized from the video. "I've had thousands of people reach out to me since I started covering this. Former employees, people whose family members died right around their peak day. Nobody wants to connect the dots because Apogee's got money and lawyers and a very good PR team. Like, scary good.”

"How long have you been covering the company?" Novak asked.

"A little over a year. I started because a viewer sent me her mother's peak date prediction, and her mother died four days later. That's when I started digging into the pattern." Tanner shrugged. "I'm not a scientist. I'm not saying I've proven anything. And I make sure to point those things out whenever I talk about Apogee. I'm just asking questions nobody else wants to ask."

"We were actually just at their offices in Reston," Rachel said, watching him carefully as she said it. "We talked with their VP of communications. She walked us through how the predictions work, how private the individual data is supposed to be."

Tanner's smile stayed in place for a half second too long before it faded. "You went to Reston."

"Yes, this morning," Rachel said. "We're trying to understand who might have access to a user's peak date before it becomes public. Whether it's someone inside the company, or someone who's found a way around their privacy controls."

"Someone like who?" Tanner's leg had started bouncing, his knee moving in a quick, tight rhythm.

"That's what we're trying to figure out," Novak said. "You've spent a year building a following around this idea. Some of your viewers seem to think you've got a source inside the company. Do you?"

Tanner stood up fast enough that his chair scraped hard against the concrete. The shift in his mood was like night and day—as if someone had flipped a switch. He went from being conversational and mostly polite to paranoid and defensive in less than three seconds. "I don't like where this is going."

"We're just asking questions," Rachel said, keeping her tone even. "The same way you ask questions in your videos."

"No, this feels different." Tanner's eyes moved between them, and his hands had curled into loose fists at his sides. "You're not here about Apogee. You're here about me."

"Mr. Tanner, sit back down," Rachel said. "Nobody's accusing you of anything." She wondered what had sent him on this trajectory. Was it the mention of having been at the building in Reston? Was it asking if he knew anyone on the inside?