Page 35 of Girl, Empty
'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 backdoorcarved 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 wedohave, which is a dead body in an impossible location.’
‘Andcell backdoor.I don’t know what the vic meant bybackdoor, but I’m sure I know whatcellmeans.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.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Nothing was real anymore, and that drove him insane.
You didn’t own anything.Everything was a subscription.You couldn’t do anything without the Internet.You couldn’t even tell if a piece of art was made by a person or a machine.Relationships were digitized and temporary.Even buying toilet roll needed an app.If you wanted to watch TV, you needed to pay some corporation ten dollars a month.Everything felt like it could disappear tomorrow, as though reality was in a state of constant buffering.
The world today was built entirely on ones and zeroes and bad code.It was a system with no concept of consequence.No one talked about this hazy reality screwed with your head, probably because few people even stopped to think about it in the first place, and that meant nobody realized just how dangerous it all was.
He understood this because he occupied the space between the real and the unreal, and had done so his entire life.Now he was sitting in the command center of his barren, five-bedroom house, surrounded by the one thing he knew better than anything: the digital world.
Thirteen monitors were arranged in a giant arc, which by his count must have been a world record for an amateur setup.Not that he was an amateur by any means, but he was what the major players would call a freelancer.He no longer had a boss and answered to no one, and he was determined to keep it that way until this whole thing ended.
The house he worked out of was just a shell.It wasn’t in his name, but it was in a name he made up.A name that had a job on paper but didn’t earn quite enough to pay taxes, and that was enough to keep him invisible from the kind of agencies that went looking for people like him.He wasn’t even sure he had a name anymore, at least not in any system that mattered.
Then there were the smaller material possessions, which were actually more difficult to obtain than the major things.A wall of servers hummed in the room downstairs, but they hadn’t been purchased at a store; they had been acquired through a hacked shipping manifest from a port in Long Beach, rerouted, and delivered by a third-party logistics firm that thought it was delivering industrial kitchen equipment to a catering company that didn’t exist.The custom-milled computer parts arrived in packages addressed to dead people.The fiber optic cable that ran directly to his property, bypassing the local ISP, had been laid by contractors who thought they were working on a government project.
