Page 23 of Her Last Vow

"You did the right thing calling me," Rachel said, though she was all but sure this move was also in the interest of public opinion. "Send whatever you have. We'll take it from here."

“Yeah, I’ll get it over to you.” Kline then hung up without much more than a clipped goodbye. It was almost as if she had used up whatever nerve had gotten her through the call in the first place.

Rachel ended the call and looked at Novak. "Wes Hartley. Data engineer."

"Had you seen the name yet?”

"No. He wasn't even on my list. Apparently, he was clean enough that he never came up." She was already pulling up the Bureau's internal search on her laptop. "Kline says his access to individual predictions wasn't supposed to exist at all. He built it himself, routed through a maintenance script instead of the normal system.”

“Maybe that's how he stayed off Kline's radar for over a year," Novak said.

He was moving too now, phone in his hand as he immediately got someone at the field office on the line to run a deeper search than what HR could offer. Between the two of them, it didn't take long. Hartley's Bureau file, Kline’s email, his last known address, and a lease that hadn't shown up anywhere in Apogee's outdated records at all gave them what they needed.

They were out the door with an active address for Wes Hartley just twenty-two minutes after Kline’s call.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Hartley’s apartment building was a mid-rise building just a little over fifteen miles away from their hotel. It had a keypad entry system, but after showing a resident their badges and IDs, they were able to get inside without any trouble. Hartley's unit was on the fourth floor, and the light under his door was on when they knocked at 10:41.

It took him almost a full minute to answer. He called out “hold on” in a concerned voice and then there was the sound of motion from inside. When the door opened, he kept the chain latched, peering out through the gap with his hair pushed up on one side like he'd been lying down. Behind him, Rachel could make out the edge of a couch and a television paused mid-frame, the blue light of it flickering against the wall.

"Wes Hartley?" Rachel held up her credentials to the gap.

“Yeah. It’s late. Who are you?”

"Agent Gift, FBI. This is Agent Novak."

"It's almost eleven o'clock." Hartley's voice had an edge to it that wasn't quite alarm yet. He looked at the badge, then at both of them, and didn't move to unlatch the chain. "What’s this about?"

"We'd like to ask you some questions about your work at Apogee," Rachel said.

"At my apartment. At eleven at night." He gave a short, disbelieving laugh. "You couldn't have called first?"

"We could have," Novak said. "But this is pressing, and we’re trying to wrap things up as quickly as possible."

Hartley's jaw tightened at that, but after a moment he unhooked the chain and pulled the door open, though he didn't step back to let them in. He stood in the doorway in a gray T-shirt and sweatpants, arms crossed, blocking the frame like he'd already decided this conversation was going to be short.

"I've got nothing to hide, so ask what you need to ask. But I'm not inviting the FBI into my apartment at this hour without a lawyer standing next to me."

"That's fine," Rachel said. "We can do this here."

"Great." He didn't sound like he meant it. It was almost like watching a child trying to do their best at pretending they were in control of a situation that was clearly over their heads. "So what is it? What do you want?”

"Were you aware that over the past few weeks, two Apogee users have died, Mr. Hartley? Renata Pike and Gerald Mott. Ms. Pike died yesterday, as a matter of fact. And both of them died on the exact day your algorithm predicted they'd hit their peak."

"I did hear about that. Around the office this afternoon." He smiled in a way that was bitter rather than amused. “So I guess you’re the two who were causing that particular headache today?”

“That would be us,” Novak said, matching Hartley’s irritated tone.

"And we found out something recently that made us want to speak with you,” Rachel said, keeping her voice even.

“And what might that be?”

"We have export logs showing nine single-user prediction queries run under your login over the past fourteen months. No batch job attached to any of them. No project code. Just individual names, individual dates, pulled one at a time through a workaround you built into your own maintenance scripts." She honestly still had no idea what it all meant, but she’d listened closely to Kline.

Apparently, she’d recited it back well because something in Hartley's face shifted, the irritation sliding into something more careful. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Bryce Tanner does," Novak said. "He's been sitting on your emails for over a year. Encrypted address, no name attached, sending him peak predictions he then used to build an entire channel around calling your employer a death clock.”