Page 31 of Her Last Vow

She came around the body and looked where he was pointing. A mark sat in the crook of Greer's left arm, red and slightly raised. This was not the surgical precision they’d seen in the other victims, but something rougher. Something more hurried.

"That's not our guy," Rachel said quietly.

"You sure?"

"Look at it. Every other injection site was one mark, clean, no bruising around it. This is sloppy. Multiple attempts, and it's in the wrong place entirely." She sat back on her heels, looking at Greer's face, slack and pale in the early light. "Whoever did this wasn't trying to hide it."

“Well, if she was running, the killer would have had a harder time getting a clean injection. Maybe he just couldn’t take his time with this on…wasn’t able to catch her by surprise.”

The ME arrived just seconds later, ducking under the tape with his bag already in hand. He rushed over to the body and crouched where Rachel had been standing. He worked in silence for a stretch before speaking.

"Cardiac event, if I had to guess right now," he said, but Rachel could hear the uncertainty in his tone. "We won't know for certain until I get her open, and the tox screen's going to take days, not hours, especially if we're looking at something that doesn't show up clean the first time around. Like the others." He glanced at the injection site in the crook of her arm, turning it gently to get a better look. "This isn't your killer's work. Wrong location, wrong technique. Whoever did this was giving her something intramuscular, not delivering a single dose designed to disappear."

“You’re certain?”

"No, but it’s likely. Maybe…maybe some sort of steroid. We'll know more once we're in her system properly, but that presentation, in a woman her age, with a heart giving out during a jog..." He shook his head. "It happens more than people think.”

"Any chance it's not what it looks like?" Novak asked. "Somebody trying to make it read like an accident?"

"Anything's possible until the tox comes back." The ME peeled off his gloves and dropped them into a bag at his side. "But if you're asking whether I think somebody snuck up on a woman jogging in a public park at dawn and jabbed her in the arm to fake a steroid injection, I'd tell you that's a lot of trouble for someone. If it’s the same killer, they were in a hell of a hurry. But that injection site in the arm…it makes me wonder…"

“Wonder what?”

“Look at the angle. It could have been self-inflicted. And I have to suggest steroids again. I’ve seen the injection enough times to at least raise the alarm on it in this case.”

Rachel looked back toward the tape line, where the crowd had grown thicker instead of thinner. There were more uniformed officers there to keep them back, but there were still far too many phones held up into the air. A news van had pulled up somewhere behind the patrol cars; she could see the mast of a satellite dish rising above the tree line.

"We need to get into her apartment," Rachel said to Novak. "Maybe there's evidence that this is some sort of self-injected steroid, and if that's the case, as cruel as it sounds, we don't need to waste our time trying to tie it to our case."

“I’ll see if one of the cops has the address,” Novak said. “I see Corbin over there…”

As it turned out, Corbin had just then gotten Greer’s address and when Rachel and Novak left the scene to head that way, Corbin went with them. The apartment was fifteen minutes away, a modern building with a gym on the ground floor and a concierge desk that let them up without much resistance once Rachel showed her credentials. The unit itself looked like it had been staged for a magazine spread, all clean lines and neutral tones, the kitchen counter bare except for a row of protein powder containers arranged by size, largest to smallest. The second bedroom had been converted into a home studio. A powered-down ring light angled toward a yoga mat, a tripod folded against the wall, three different phone mounts stacked in a basket like they were part of the decor. It was, in some basic ways, eerily similar to Renata Pike’s crime scene.

"I'll take the kitchen and the living room," Corbin said, already pulling on a pair of gloves. "You two want the bedrooms?"

Rachel nodded and started with the studio, working the drawers of a low cabinet pushed against the wall beneath the ring light. She found nothing inside but extra memory cards, a phone charger, and a tangle of loose cables. A corkboard hung near the door, pinned with printed photos of Greer at various stages: before-and-after shots, a race bib from some 10K, a torn magazine clipping with her name circled in marker. There was nothing that told her anything she didn't already know.

Novak worked the bedroom closet, going through the pockets of a row of hanging jackets while Rachel checked the nightstand drawers. The nightstand held a planner, mostly empty except for gym class times written in shorthand, a half-used bottle of melatonin, and a charging cable for the Apogee watch, coiled neatly beside a spare wristband still in its packaging.

"Anything?" Corbin called from the kitchen.

"Not yet," Rachel said.

She moved into the bathroom next, working through the medicine cabinet first. Ibuprofen, a prescription for birth control, an unopened box of bandages. It felt like a massive miss until she turned her attention to the linen closet. There, Rachel found a zippered case tucked behind a stack of towels. She unzipped it carefully and found four unlabeled vials, a scatter of syringes still in their wrappers, and a handwritten dosing schedule. A second, smaller case sat behind it, empty except for a few loose needle caps rattling around the bottom.

"Novak," she called, and he came in from the bedroom, Corbin a step behind him. She set what she had found on the closed toilet seat to let them see clearly.

"That'll do it," Corbin said, looking at the vials without touching them. “Looks like the ME was right about the steroid speculation.”

Rachel was still crouched over the open case when Novak took out his phone. “I’m checking to see if she has any online presence. Maybe she posted something that will clue us in.”

"Makes me wonder if she might be in the crowd that Tanner mentioned in his latest post,” Corbin said. “About people racing their own countdowns."

Novak's voice sounded deflated when he said, “If that’s the case, she probably wasn’t murdered. Maybe the ME was right. She inadvertently killed herself trying to win a race that was never real to begin with."

"Not intentionally." Rachel looked back toward the bathroom, toward the case of vials sitting open on the counter. "But intentional or not, it's the same outcome our guy wants. Another death near a predicted peak. Another headline that makes this look bigger than it already is."

"You think whoever's doing this planned for something like this to happen?"