Page 45 of Girl, Empty
Ella found Detective Riggs in his office, sitting like he’d been nailed to his seat.This morning, his hair had been slicked back, but now it sat like a puffy cloud on top of his head.He looked like he’d just ran the hundred-meter sprint.
Ripley came up the rear.‘Lorraine is innocent, so please tell us you found something useful.’
‘This is… insane.’
‘Explain,’ Ripley said, ‘and explain in English.If I hear another techno-word I’m going to scream.’
‘Then get ready to scream, because I can’t make heads nor tails of this.Look.’Riggs gestured to his screen, where Ella saw what she guessed were screenshots from some phone app.‘Both Mark Miller and Thomas Grayson used an app by that Sentinel Tech company to monitor the security in the bank.But they’re not the same.’
‘Not the same how?’
‘Miller’s app shows no security breaches, but Grayson’s is full of them.Why?’Riggs wiggled Thomas Grayson’s cell phone.‘Because the app on Grayson’s phone isn’t the Sentinel Tech app.It’s a fake.’
Ella said, ‘Fake?How do you get a fake app?’
‘Tons of ways.I don’t know exactly how this happened, but there are a few differences in the layout of Grayson’s version, and it’s not just because it’s an older build or anything like that.Our perp somehow got access to this cell and created a forgery of the Sentinel app.’
Ella had an instant longing for the good old fashioned serial killers of yesteryear.She hated them all the same, but at least she understood them on a technical level.You knew where you stood with a middle-aged deviant who couldn’t get it up anymore.‘Okay, so we can safely say our killer is a hacker.’
‘Two dead bodies and all we know is that our killer’s a hacker,’ Ripley said.‘This is ridiculous.’
‘This guy’s more than a hacker, because hackers usually specialize in one area of cyber intrusion, like network penetration or malware or whatever.Our killer’s doing it all, and I’ve never met a hacker that could do that.’
‘How many hackers have you met?’Ripley asked.
‘Loads.And here’s the part that’s really bizarre.’Grayson tapped his laptop screen.‘This is Miller’s app.No alerts.All systems normal.No incidents detected.Right?’
Ella’s throat constricted as the scope of what they were dealing with became clear.This wasn’t normal behavior for anyone, even a serial murderer.‘Yeah.I see that.’
Riggs shoved the victim’s phone in her face.‘Compare this to Thomas Grayson’s app.Alert after alert coming in last night, right before midnight.’
She took the phone and compared the two apps.If not for the flood of alerts on Grayson’s, the two screens would have been identical.She thought the whole thing through and drew the only logical conclusion she could.‘Our unsub put a fake app on the victim’s cell, then filled it with fake alerts to lure Thomas Grayson to the bank.’
‘I don’t see any other reason for it.’
‘Jesus Christ in heaven,’ Ripley breathed.‘How does someone do that?Do you need to hold the person’s phone.Like, physically?’
'Not at all.You've probably heard a million stories of phishing, malware, Trojans, zero-day exploits.Once one of those infects the phone, the doer can access everything remotely, provided they've got some kind of connection.That connection could be Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or anything.'
‘How long would something like that take?’
Riggs shrugged.‘Beats me, but probably not long.He could just copy the code for the app and make a pretty good forgery within a day.But that’s another thing.Coding isn’t hacking.It’s another skill entirely.Our perp is like… I can’t even explain it.Don’t let the CIA hear about this guy, because they’ll want to hire him.’
‘So that’s why he wrotecell backdoor,’ said Ripley.‘He got in through the back-end of his cell phone.’
Ella took a moment to take it all in.The killer created a fake app on the victim’s phone, then sent fake alerts to that fake app to lure him to an empty building in the middle of the night.It was unbelievable, but there were still a hundred unanswered questions, because just luring someone to an empty building wasn’t enough.He had to get inside to trap Thomas Grayson in the bank vault.
The bank vault.
‘Let me see that cell phone again.’
Riggs passed it over.Ella looked over the alerts again.
11:26 PM: Emergency Override Protocol Initiated.
11:28 PM: Time Lock Bypass Requested.
11:31 PM: Manual Access Granted.
