Page 29 of Her Last Vow

"Anything else?”

"Nothing pressing. I expect the media will be all over this tomorrow because an online influencer picked the story up and is lambasting Apogee online. People are sharing it faster than we can keep up with. The whole internet's decided this is either a hoax, a conspiracy, or a horror movie, depending on which corner of it you're standing in."

"I'll get press liaisons looped in before this hits the morning cycle." Anderson exhaled audibly. "One more thing: you should think about reaching out to each of these people directly. Not just surveillance from a distance. Let them know what's happening, that they may be at risk, that they should be careful about their own routines for a few days. If one of these seven turns out to be a victim instead of a suspect, I don't want us explaining afterward why we sat on that information. And if the killing miraculously stops…well, it seems you’ve roped in your killer."

Rachel glanced at Novak, who was already nodding like he'd expected exactly that. "That's fair. We'll start making calls."

"Keep me posted," Anderson said, and the line went dead.

Rachel set her phone down on the hood of the car and looked at the list again, feeling the weight of what Anderson had just asked her to do. Seven phone calls to strangers, telling each one that a name-brand fitness app they used for work might also be the reason somebody wanted them dead.

But before that, she knew there was another call she needed to make first. She needed to start with Sloan.

It was 4:25 in the morning when she made the call, and she honestly didn’t give a damn if she woke him or not. After four rings, she expected it to go to voicemail, but she was shocked when there was a click and then his sleepy voice. It carried the thick, disoriented edge of someone who'd been sleeping poorly. If at all.

“Who the hell is this calling me at this hour?” he asked.

“This is Special Agent Rachel Gift.”

“Christ! Agent Gift. Do you know what time it is?"

"I do. And I'm sorry to wake you, but I wanted you to hear this from me directly instead of finding out some other way." She kept her tone even, professional, the same voice she used for every notification call she'd ever had to make—no matter what time of night it was. "We've had a third death. Aaron Diaz, twenty-six, found tonight in his garage with his Apogee watch showing he had reached his Peak. Same signature as Pike and Mott, and another local to the area."

The sleep dropped out of Sloan's voice almost instantly. "God. Okay. Is there... what do you need from me?"

"We've identified seven current employees with theoretical access to individual prediction data, and we're placing surveillance on all of them starting this morning. I'm calling each one personally to let them know. Between you and me, we are currently viewing them as potential victims or the killer."

When Sloan spoke again, his voice had changed entirely, sharper now, the warmth from their first meeting gone. "You're putting surveillance on my employees."

"Yes."

"Do you understand what that does? These are people with families, with lives outside that building.”

“Which is exactly why we’d like them to have protection right now.”

“When you put an unmarked car outside somebody's house for a few days, it doesn't stay quiet, Agent Gift. People notice. It gets back to the company, it gets back to our investors, and we're already bleeding from what's happening online right now. This could cripple us."

"I understand your concern," Rachel said. "But to be honest with you, I wasn't calling to ask permission. I'm calling as a courtesy, because these are your employees and I thought you'd rather hear it from me than from one of them tomorrow morning wondering why there's a car parked outside their house. We don’t need your permission for this."

"A courtesy." Sloan's voice climbed, disbelief bleeding into something closer to anger. "A fucking courtesy? You don't get to make a decision like this and then call it a courtesy after the fact. This is my company. These are my people."

"They're also potentially in danger, Dr. Sloan. And there’s a chance one of them could be responsible for these deaths. That's not a business decision. That's an active homicide investigation, and it's happening whether or not it's convenient for Apogee."

"You have no idea what you're doing to us." His voice had gone ragged now, the professional polish stripped away entirely. "Three days ago we were a wellness company helping people live longer. Now we're a punchline on every phone in the country, and you want to add federal surveillance vans to that? Do you have any concept of what that's going to do to us?"

"I need to go, Dr. Sloan," Rachel said. "I'll be in touch."

"Don't you dare hang up on me while I'm still—"

She ended the call before he finished the sentence, setting the phone face-down on the hood of the car, and stood there for a second in the cold, letting the quiet settle back around her.

"That go well?" Novak asked.

"About how you'd expect." She looked down at the dark screen of her phone, turning something over that had only now surfaced. "He's furious about the surveillance. Says it'll cripple the business."

"Makes sense. Bad press kills a company like his. As we’ve seen from our friend Mr. Tanner, it happens quickly, too."

"Does it, though?" Rachel picked the phone back up, scrolling absently through her contacts without really looking at them. "Think about what's happening online right now. Tanner's videos, the memes, the panic. That's not the kind of press that kills a wellness app. That's the kind of press that makes ten million people download it just to check their own peak date. You couldn't buy that kind of reach if you tried."