Page 25 of Her Last Vow

"I gave that information to a YouTuber, not a killer." Hartley's voice cracked on the last word, and he took a half step back from the door, like the frame itself had gotten smaller around him. "I was trying to expose something. I wasn't trying to..." He stopped, and for the first time since he'd opened the door, he looked less angry than afraid. Terror flooded his eyes and he said, in a near whisper: "You think I did this."

"I think you're the only person we've found with the access, the motive, and no alibi for either night," Rachel said. "So right now, I’m not ready to accuse you of anything, but I think you need to come with us and explain yourself somewhere other than a doorway."

"Am I under arrest?"

"Not yet," Novak said. "This can go easy or it can go the other way. Your call. For right now, we just need you to come with us and have a talk."

Hartley looked between them for a long moment, his earlier certainty gone entirely now, his face settling into something quieter and more frightened.

He uttered a curse and then said, "I want a lawyer there."

"You'll have one," Rachel said.

Hartley turned back to his apartment with a heavy sigh. “Let me get dressed then. I suppose I may as well come in.”

As the three of them made their way to the stairs, Rachel couldn’t ignore the slight churning in her gut…a churning that told her this felt a little too easy.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Aaron Diaz stepped down off the treadmill at 11:30. His shirt was soaked through and his breath was still coming in long pulls. The garage smelled like it always did this late, rubber and old motor oil, and a staleness that came from a space that never quite got enough air circulation. The slight, lingering smell of his own sweat sat beneath it all.

But he didn't mind it. He'd built this routine around that smell, three nights a week. It was routine, it was comfort. And sometimes, it was even the best part of his day.

He glanced down at his watch and grinned. The screen was still lit from the run, numbers settling now that his feet had stopped moving. His heart rate was easing down from a peak of 160, the number ticking lower in small increments every few seconds. It had felt like his chest might give out somewhere around mile three, a familiar strain that hit at almost the same point every night he ran. But he’d pushed through it anyway, because that feeling was the whole point.

His earbuds were still in, still blasting the same playlist he used for every late run: guitars turned up past the point of comfort, vocals scraped raw and screaming over the drums. He liked it loud enough that he could feel the bass in his sternum. It was the only thing that got him through the last mile most nights, something ugly and aggressive to match the burn in his legs. Tonight, it was Pantera, a staple of his much younger days.

Tomorrow was a gym day. Weights at 7:30, the same four days he'd kept for over a year now, and then a light kettlebell circuit when he got home from work. Weekly, he’d hit three nights a week on the treadmill in the garage, plus the five-mile loop through the trails by his house on Sundays when the weather cooperated. He liked the structure of it. He liked knowing exactly what his week would look like before it started, every session logged, every number tracked and compared against the one before it. His phone synced with the watch automatically each night, uploading the run to an app he checked first thing every morning as he scrolled through heart rate zones and pace splits like other people read the news.

He reached for the towel draped over the handrail and wiped down his face and neck. He was still catching his breath, still riding the tail end of the adrenaline that came with pushing himself so hard this late in the day. A shower would come next, then bed, then the alarm at 7:30 that he never actually needed because his body woke him up on its own most mornings now. He'd gotten good at this. Better than good. He was twenty-six years old and in the best shape of his life, and he knew it, and there was nothing wrong with knowing it.

He didn't hear the door creak open behind him.

The music was too loud for that, guitars cutting through everything else. He took a single step back, preparing to turn for his water bottle, when he felt something hard pressed into his back and then wrap around his chest. Aaron was fit and very strong and his first reaction was to fight. But before he could move or even fully understand what was happening, he felt a small, sharp pinch at the base of his neck. It was quick and precise, causing him to reach up out of instinct, fingers brushing the spot, expecting a bug bite or a stray hair caught wrong.

Then the heat came. It bloomed through his chest first, spreading outward fast, faster than anything he'd ever felt from exertion alone. His legs went first, just as he turned to see what was standing behind him. He saw it just as the strength drained out of his legs all at once. He was reaching for the treadmill's handrail before he understood he was already falling. The floor came up hard against his shoulder and then his cheek, the cold concrete a shock against skin still flushed from the run.

He still tried to see what had been behind him. He saw what looked like a shoe, and then jeans, and then…then everything went blurry.

He tried to push himself up and couldn't get his arms to answer. His heart, which had been easing back toward its normal rhythm just a minute earlier, was pounding again now. He could feel it behind his eyes now, beating faster than it had been at any point during the run itself, faster than it had ever been on the trail or under the bar at the gym. But it didn't feel like exertion anymore. It felt wrong in a way he had never quite felt before, something spreading through him that had nothing to do with effort or distance or reps.

The blur of his vision had already started to worsen and tilt, the garage sliding sideways as he remained on the floor. He caught a shape near the doorway, low, at the level his eyes had fallen to. A leg again…someone's leg, moving without hurry, stepping back through the door that led into the house. It was the garage door, the same garage door he'd oiled himself a few weeks ago to get rid of the squeaking noise…the same one he never heard because the music had been too loud.

He tried to call out and nothing came. His earbuds were still playing, the same screaming vocals grinding on somewhere above the sound of his own heartbeat.

His arm had ended up bent beneath him, his wrist turned up near his face by accident more than design, and the last thing his eyes settled on before the room went dark at the edges was his watch. The screen still glowed there against the concrete, close enough that he didn't have to focus to read it.

PEAK ACHIEVED, it said, the letters steady and bright, exactly the way they'd looked when he'd first glanced down at them less than a minute ago—when the only thing straining in his chest had been the effort of the workout.

The darkness came in from the corners first, narrowing everything down to that one small rectangle of light on his wrist, until even that was gone.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Having not yet settled down on any place to consider their base of operations, Rachel and Novak called ahead to the nearest precinct. Getting a room at a precinct they'd never set foot in before turned out to be its own small ordeal. The desk sergeant on duty didn't recognize either of their credentials on sight and had made them wait while he called someone to verify, and then the first interview room offered up had an overhead light that flickered on and off intermittently. That meant a ten-minute detour to a different room down a different hallway while a patrol officer apologized twice for something that clearly wasn't his fault. In the middle of all of it, Novak had ended up holding two cups of vending machine coffee he never got to drink because the machine ate his second dollar and jammed, and a different sergeant had spent a solid minute explaining that the jam happened "all the time" like that was supposed to be comforting. A third officer had wanted to know whether they needed a translator on standby, on the grounds that half the interview requests that came through that door involved one, and seemed almost disappointed when Rachel told him no.

By the time they actually had Hartley seated across the table from them, Rachel decided that it was almost funny. Which was good because she was starting to get irritated all over again in the manner with which Apogee employees were responding to the nature of these deaths…and Hartley was no exception. So she’d needed the slight reminder to slow down.

Hartley hadn't said much since he’d been escorted from his apartment. He sat with his arms crossed, and his jaw tight. He glanced at the door every so often like he expected his lawyer to materialize through it like a wizard. Fifteen minutes in, he'd answered maybe three questions, all of them some version of "I want to wait for my attorney."