Page 20 of Girl, Empty (Ella Dark #27)

Detective Jeremiah Riggs had always believed in the law. Like his daddy and his daddy before him. He wondered how they’d react to knowing that the third generation Riggsy was currently committing what any cop would consider tampering with evidence.

He was sitting in his office, deep in a dead man’s cell phone, and since he’d come this far, he might as well finish.

Riggs had hooked Thomas Grayson’s device up to his laptop and used his MiracleCure software to disable the passcode.

Then he’d unhooked the device and just browsed through the victim’s cell the old fashioned way.

Riggs had somehow convinced himself it was less illegal than downloading the entire contents of a murder victim’s phone to a laptop, but if he didn’t find something useful either way, then his ass was going to be on the chopping block.

Agent Ella Dark would take the brunt of the lashing, sure, but Riggs would certainly be caught in the crossfire.

The phone itself was pretty straightforward. A Samsung model. Riggs had tried not to look at anything too personal of Grayson’s, but if someone had lured the guy to that bank vault, there was a chance he did it through good old school texting.

But no dice, because the last message Grayson had received through any app was twelve hours before he’d been murdered.

The photo gallery was equally sparse, with the most recent picture being taken two days ago.

Grayson had taken a picture of himself beside a horse, which raised questions Riggs had no jurisdiction answering.

Next came the social media apps, or singular app in Grayson’s case, which was a typical middle-aged man’s kind of profile.

Updates were irregular, and the built-in messaging system was full of spam.

Emails were next, and the bulk of them were work related. Riggs didn’t want to dig too deep because he imagined this security stuff was highly confidential, but even so, the last emails he received were on the morning of his murder, and none of them were related to First National Bank.

Riggs swiped to the sent folder and found nothing of note. The same for the deleted files and the junk mail.

But then he caught a suspicious number one in the drafts folder.

He clicked in.

One unsent email.

Reid, something's wrong with the Sentinel app. I'm seeing system overrides that shouldn't be possible. First National vault showing emergency access initiated but that CAN'T happen on a timelock. Going to check it out. If something happens-

The message ended mid-sentence. Like Grayson had suddenly realized typing wasn't going to help.

Reid. Who the hell was Reid? There was no email address in recipient box.

And the Sentinel app. Riggs hadn’t seen that. Weren’t Dark and Ripley visiting someone from Sentinel Tech right now? Riggs went back to app screen and scrolled through until he found it.

There it was. A little green circle with an S in the middle, clearly a rip-off of the Superman logo. Riggs suddenly longed for the old days when tech companies had an ounce of creativity in them.

'What do we have here?' Riggs said. He familiarized himself with the logistics of the app and found it shockingly simple for something that dealt with security measures of some of the most high-profile buildings in the city.

Then he realized he'd already seen this app before, because Mark Miller – the branch manager of First National – had sent him screenshots of the same thing.

The interface was identical. Same green background, same menu structure.

Riggs navigated to the alerts section on Grayson's phone.

Riggs’s blood pressure spiked then, because the screen filled with red warnings. There was line after line of critical alerts, and they were all timestamped from last night.

11:26 PM: Emergency Override Protocol Initiated.

11:28 PM: Time Lock Bypass Requested.

11:31 PM: Manual Access Granted.

11:36 AM: CRITICAL - Atmospheric Sensor Malfunction - Vault Module.

Riggs grabbed his laptop and pulled up Miller's screenshots. Same timestamp. Same night. But Miller's alert screen showed pristine green checkmarks.

All Systems Normal. No Incidents Detected.

Two identical apps, monitoring the same building, telling completely different stories.

Riggs stared at both screens while his computer science brain tried to process what he was seeing.

Apps didn't just make up data. They received information from centralized servers, processed that data according to their programming, and then displayed it to users.

If two apps were connected to the same server, they should show identical information.

Unless one of them wasn't actually connected to the server at all.

‘Son of a bitch. This is…’

And just like that, Detective Riggs realized exactly how Thomas Grayson had been lured into that vault.