Page 28 of Her Last Vow

"What kind of theories?" Rachel asked, though she suspected she already knew the answer.

"Some of it's the usual doom and gloom stuff. People are saying they're scared to check their own peak date, scared to even open the app." Corbin kept scrolling, shaking his head. "Some of it's worse. There's a whole thread of people bragging about pushing their workouts harder, trying to beat their own predicted peak before it catches up with them, like it's a race they can win if they just get there first…trying to outrun their own death clock.”

"That's going to get somebody hurt," Novak said.

"It already has, probably, just not the way they think." Corbin turned the phone so they could see another post. This one was of a cartoonish illustration of a shadowy figure with long fingers climbing out of a phone screen toward a sleeping figure in bed. "Somebody's decided there's a hitman built into the app,” he said. “A few different versions of the same idea are floating around—a guy climbing out of a phone. A creature living in the watch itself. People are calling it the Apogee monster, like it's a ghost story now instead of an actual murder investigation."

Rachel took the phone again and looked at the image longer than she needed to, watching the comment count tick upward even as she held it. "This has a life of its own already. And it only sprouted up earlier today."

“Don’t you just love social media,” Novak muttered.

"There's a meme, too, if you want to see genuinely bad taste in action." Corbin pulled it up without waiting for her to answer, a split-panel image with a caption about hitting your peak that Rachel didn't bother reading past the first line. "That one's been shared something like sixty thousand times. Dark humor mostly, people making jokes about their own mortality, but it's everywhere. My niece sent it to me an hour ago with no idea I was standing in the middle of the actual case."

"People cope how they cope," Novak said, though he didn't sound entirely convinced of it himself. In fact, he was starting to sound aggravated.

"Sure,” Rachel said. “Except every share is another few thousand people who now think this is a joke, or a ghost story, or a race to win, instead of what it actually is." Rachel scrolled through a few more comments under the meme before handing the phone back. Most of them were harmless—just the usual gallows humor that showed up under anything grim enough to go viral. But a handful worried her more, users tagging friends with their own predicted peak dates attached, half joking and half not.

"We could go back to Tanner,” Rachel said, doing her best to find some kind of a solution. “Tell him to take it down."

"He wouldn't," Novak said. "Even if he agreed, it's already out past him. That video's got copies on a dozen accounts by now, reposted, screen-recorded, stitched into other people's content. Taking down the original wouldn't touch any of it."

"And I guess showing up at his studio again does nothing but hand him more material," Rachel admitted. She had seen enough of Tanner's instincts firsthand to know exactly how he'd use a second visit from the FBI. He'd have it filmed before they were out of the parking lot, framed as confirmation of everything he'd already been telling his followers. "Every time we go near him, we make his story bigger. We'd be lighting the fire ourselves."

Corbin slid his phone back into his jacket pocket. "So what do you want to do?"

"Nothing, where he's concerned. Not yet." Rachel looked past him toward the garage, toward Diaz's body still lying where it had fallen, the watch on his wrist still doing its little celebratory thing. "This isn't a Tanner problem anymore. It's a clock problem. The longer this stays public and unsolved, the worse it gets. More theories, more panic, more people out there trying to outrun their own predicted peak like it's something you can beat if you just push hard enough."

"That's not going to end well for somebody," Novak said quietly.

"No. It's not." Rachel pulled her jacket tighter against the night air, the temperature dropping now that they'd been standing outside talking for several minutes. "Which means we don't have the luxury of taking this slow. Whoever's doing this is inside a very small circle, and we need a name before the internet decides it already has one for us. Right now every theory floating around online is competing for attention with the actual one…and once the media really catches on to it, our jobs are going to be a lot harder.”

As if that were the firing gun to a race, all three of them headed back into the garage, hoping to get ahead of this case before the morning brought a whole new problem.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Rachel let Corbin's phone and everything on it fade to the back of her mind once she and Novak stepped out of the garage. She had her own laptop open on the hood of the car by then, parked at the curb outside Diaz's house, and Novak stood beside her with his own screen angled so they could both see it. The list from the hotel room the night before sat open in a browser tab, eight names that had become seven the moment Hartley was ruled out as anything more than a leak.

"Seven," she said, mostly to herself, scrolling through them again. "Seven people who could theoretically pull an individual prediction, and any one of them could be standing in a garage tonight instead of asleep in their bed…as a killer or a victim.”

“We need to get eyes on them as soon as we can,” Novak said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” she said. “Let’s just hope Anderson is understanding when I wake him up in about twenty seconds.”

“Wake him up?” Novak said. “Hell, I’m convinced that man never sleeps.”

“We’ll see,” she said, already dialing.

She wasn’t all that surprised when Anderson picked up on the second ring. His voice was rough, but it was impossible to tell if he’d been sleeping. "Gift,” he said. “Tell me this is good news."

"It's not. Sorry. We've got a third victim, and the one suspect we had has been cleared. He was in an interview room with us when this most recent one died."

There was a pause on the other end, brief and heavy. "I appreciate the update, but I don't think it was necessary at four in the morning."

"There’s more, sir. This means whoever's doing this still has access, and we've got seven names left on a suspect list built off the model team." Rachel read them off one at a time, watching Novak nod along as she confirmed each. "I want surveillance on all seven, starting now. Not tomorrow, not after shift change. Now. And that order coming from you and within the bureau is going to make it go a lot faster."

"You'll have it," Anderson said, with no hesitation in it at all. "I'll get local field offices coordinating within the hour, split across jurisdictions if we have to. Anybody local to Reston or Arlington gets priority."

"Thank you."