Page 41 of Girl, Empty
‘Rankin isn’t the only one.’
‘You’re kidding?Two murders?’
‘Two murders, both in buildings you assisted with security for, security which our perpetrator bypassed without breaking a sweat.’
Lorraine sat back in his chair and folded his arms.The classic defensive gesture – put a barrier between you and your audience.If you created a barricade, it gave the fallible human mind permission to lie.
‘Bypassed security?In what way?’
‘Maybe start by telling us where you were the past two nights.’
‘You suspect me of killing two people?’
‘Suspect is a strong word.You’re technically a person of interest,’ Ella said.
‘What’s the difference?’
‘The difference depends on where you’ve been the past two nights, specifically between midnight and one AM.’
‘Fine.Last night I was at home with my wife and my youngest.Went to bed about eleven, got up at nine.The night before I did a corporate gig at the Tontine Hotel over on Belfast Street.I finished about midnight.’
Ella sighed through her nose.If Lorraine was telling the truth, and had the receipts to back it up, he was off the hook.‘Can you prove that?’
‘Easy.There’s a video of me at the Tontine, and my doorbell cam will confirm I never left the house.’
Ripley said, ‘We’re going to need more than that.’
‘More than footage of menotbeing the killer?If that’s not an alibi, what the hell is?’
‘We’ll need eyewitness accounts, because our perp is pretty good at manipulating technology.’
‘How good?’
‘Where to start?’Ella said.‘At the Morrison building, the cameras blacked out one by one, then he managed to access the elevator and circumvent the weight measurement, biometric scanner and retinal scanner.At First National, he got through three security doors and somehow opened the bank vault.’
The blood drained from David Lorraine’s face and left a canvas of pale skin behind.The showman in him evaporated, and he suddenly sat rigid in his chair.‘Are you kidding?’
‘No.’
Lorraine went quiet for a long moment.Ella let him process the fact that the robust security measured he’d designed had been violated with apparent ease.‘Do you have any idea how it was done?Inside job?Corrupt security guard?Anything?’
‘We don’t know.We were hoping you could shed some light on things.The whole thing seems impossible.’
Lorraine violently scratched his beard and then blew out a breath.‘Nothing’s impossible.Only things that look impossible.Just like magic, there’s always some simple explanation, and it’s usually so obvious that most people look right past it.’
‘So you're saying you know how this could have been done?’
‘No.But…’ – Lorraine glanced over his shoulder then back at the agents – ‘Could we go somewhere else?I don’t want to talk about this out here.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
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.
