Page 15 of Girl, Empty (Ella Dark #27)

‘Agents, I assure you, there’s no backdoor into the bank vault.’

Ella was standing outside the First National Bank with Mike Miller, the branch manager.

Ripley was there too, and all three of them were pretending not to be bothered by the cold.

Forensics were working the scene in the underground vault, and the Alpine Cleaning Services truck had to be turned away because this wasn’t the time for lemony fresh polished floors.

‘Is there a backdoor into anywhere in the bank?’

‘No. Absolutely not. It’s a bank. There are regulations about entries and exits. The only entrance is this front door right here.’

‘Does the word cell mean anything in a banking context?’

‘Cell?’ Not really. We sometimes call our stations cells, but it’s not common.’

Mike Miller struck Ella as the type of man uninterested in almost everything, which meant the few things he was passionate about, he likely devoured whole. Fortunately for her, he seemed devoutly passionate about his bank branch. ‘Tell me what happened from start to finish, please.’

The manager pulled his coat tighter around himself. ‘Just before 08:30, I met Gemma Watkins right where we stand now. We did the opening-up ritual together. It has to be two people, and one of them has to be the manager or assistant manager.’

‘Okay. What’s the ritual?’

‘Buzzer and keycode for the front door. Then a security door which requires my keycard and a biometric scanner. After that is a second door that leads to the elevator, and that needs a physical key and security code. Lastly is the vault, which requires two keys which unlock the vault electronically.’

Ella committed the sequence to memory, although even she had to admit it was all blurring together. Something had corrupted that perfect memory of hers recently, and it was starting to send her a little mad. ‘Right. Why were you opening the vault at all?’

‘We have to. Every bank does. The vault needs to be inspected every morning.’

‘Okay. And the victim? Thomas Grayson?’

The first real emotion Ella could see overcame Mark Miller. He pulled up his collar and breathed into it, probably to feel the blowback of warm air. ‘Thomas was our head of security.’

Ella willed Mark to continue but he didn’t. ‘Like a security guard?’

‘No. He oversaw all of our security systems. He dealt with our CCTV, cybersecurity, any possible breaches. That kind of thing.’

What was he doing here?’

‘That’s just it – I don’t know. Thomas only comes out when there’s a breach, and there was no breach.’

‘Looks like there was a pretty major breach to me, Mark,’ Ripley added.

‘No, I mean…’ – Mark pulled out his cell – ‘If there’s any security issues, I get alerts on my phone. Me and Thomas both do. I received nothing.’

‘How do these alerts work?’ Ella asked, already dreading the answer.

Too much technology, too many protocols, too ways for things to go wrong that apparently hadn't gone wrong at all. She tried to picture this unsub as flesh and bone, just every other serial killer she’d ever caught, but all she could picture was static.

‘We have a dedicated app. If there’s any breach, we get notified immediately. Sentinel Tech designed it for us.’

Ripley tapped Ella’s arm. It was a silent signal. Sentinel Tech Solutions were the same company that designed the security measures for the Morrison & Associates building too. In the homicide game, coincidences were unicorns – pretty, if only they existed.

'What triggers these alerts?' Ella asked. 'Be specific. Pretend I'm five years old and scared of the dark.'

'Everything. Motion sensors after hours. Door sensors. Heat sensors. Pressure plates. Infrared beams. If someone breathes too hard in that building after we close, I get a notification.’

‘But nothing from last night?’

‘Nothing. I can show you my logs.’

‘We’ll need to see them in full.’

‘What about the vault itself?’ Ripley stepped closer. ‘Talk us though how that works.’

'The vault operates on a time-lock system.

' Miller's voice took on a professorial tone, like explaining this might somehow change what they'd found inside.

'Once it's sealed at five PM, nothing can open it until eight-thirty the next morning.

Not a keycard, not a code, not even if the President himself showed up with the nuclear football. '

'No override?'

‘No. The vault is sealed between 5 PM and 08:30 AM. Every day. No exceptions.’

Ella watched him process the implications.

Thomas Grayson had either been locked inside when the vault sealed, therefore spending fifteen hours slowly suffocating, or someone had achieved the impossible and placed him there during the locked period.

Neither option fit into Mark Miller's universe, it seemed.

'Who has access during business hours?' Ripley asked.

'Me, my assistant manager, and two senior tellers. But we need two people present to open it, always. That's been policy since banks were invented.'

'What about Grayson?'

Miller shook his head. 'Security personnel don't have vault access. Separation of duties. Thomas could monitor it through cameras, review the logs, run diagnostics, but he couldn't open it. That would be like letting the prison guards have keys to the evidence locker.'

'Then how-,'

‘I don’t know!’ Miller’s composure finally shattered completely. ‘Don't you think I've been asking myself that? This shouldn't be possible. We planned for everything, from robbers to cyber attacks to natural freakin’ disasters. A hurricane couldn’t open that vault, okay?’

Ella studied him. She appreciated the display of emotion, but it was clear to see that Mark Miller wasn't upset about finding a body.

He was mourning the death of a universe where rules meant something and systems worked as designed.

She'd seen it before in people who'd built their entire identity around being in control.

‘Sometimes the impossible happens, and that’s why we’re here.’

‘Well, it shouldn’t happen. That’s the whole point. It’s like some kind of… illusion.’

Ella exchanged a look with Ripley. An impossible violation. An illusion. A victim that shouldn’t have been here.

And then there were the dead man’s final message: Cell backdoor carved in messy, shaky letters.

There were no backdoors into this place according to the manager, nor did the word cell have any correlation to the building.

Ella didn’t know anything about the victim other than the fact he suffocated, but she was confident in her assumption that he wasn’t the type to leave a cryptic message in the throes of death.

A dying man would have told it straight.

‘Thank you, Mr. Miller. One of our colleagues will take your statement.’ She motioned for Ripley to join inside the bank, out of earshot of everyone. ‘You noticed something here, Mia?’

Ripley said, ‘Yeah. I noticed that Miller is a porcelain hammer. Useless.’

‘Not that. I mean where’s our killer’s signature? He left a pentagram behind at the first scene, but nothing here? What kind of killer drops their signature after one murder?’

‘Could be a ton of reasons. Maybe he couldn’t get access to these computers, or something spooked him and he ran. Let’s focus on what we do have, which is a dead body in an impossible location.’

‘And cell backdoor. I don’t know what the vic meant by backdoor , but I’m sure I know what cell means. It’s pretty obvious.’

‘I’m all ears, and please don’t give me any technology gobbledygook. I can’t handle any more talk about keycodes and keycards and security codes and access panels.’

Ella glanced over her shoulder to ensure no one was listening. ‘So, you still feeling proactive?’

‘A little so less after this.’

‘How about we speed things up a little?’

The look Ripley gave her could have pickled vegetables. It started as skepticism, then shifted through about six different flavors of doubt before landing on something akin to intrigue. ‘Define speed.’

‘There’s something in that vault we need, and it would take months of paperwork to access it officially. We’ve got two murders in two days. Can we really afford to wait months?’

Ripley lowered her voice. ‘You want to steal his cell phone.’

‘Yup. I think Thomas Grayson was trying to tell us how the killer got in.’