Page 7 of Cipher

“Yeah.” I looked at the sheriff. “Right now, you’ve got two doors into the same room and no proof who walked through either one.”

Raines dragged one hand down his face. “That narrows it down to an unhelpful number of people.”

“Better than the entire county.”

“That supposed to comfort me?”

“No.”

The answer pulled a faint sound from Hawkeye that might have been a laugh. Stryker remained focused on the records, the hard line of his jaw telling me he had already shifted from evaluating a technical breach to considering the people endangered by it. “Think this has happened before?”

“Possibly. Could be no one questioned it before Bex.” I searched backward through months of gateway logs, event sequences, recording allocations, and unit-status changes, looking for the same combination of gaps rather than identical deletions. It was a task that should have taken hours, but with my rapid information processing, advanced abstract reasoning, and strong working memory, I spotted the pattern in fifteen minutes.

It appeared only four times among tens of thousands of calls, which explained why no one had connected them before. Two incidents had recordings disappear while the telephone gateway still showed successful calls, one contained a unit-status change without dispatcher input, and another showed a suspicious response delay after an active event abruptly dropped in priority.

“Found four older incidents.” I opened them side by side. “Not enough to look like an operation if someone reviews each one separately. One missing recording becomes a storage fault, an unexplained status change gets blamed on user error, and a delay disappears inside a busy shift.”

Bex moved around the desk and studied the event summaries without touching the keyboard. She bit her lip and blinked several times as she realized that Nina had not been the first person left waiting for help. Then her expression turned fierce. “Do we know whether anyone was hurt?”

“Not from this data.” I wanted to comfort her, but giving her reassurance without evidence wasn’t how I was wired. “Raines, can you pull the original case files without alerting the department to what we’re comparing?”

The sheriff nodded, fury tightening the lines around his eyes.

“Use paper copies or a clean Black Castle device,” I warned. “Until I lock down privileged access, assume every sensitive search inside this network can be seen by whoever did this.”

The next hour belonged to containment. I forced a credential reset for all accounts, disabled unmonitored remote access, and created temporary privileges that expired after each approved use. Then I installed an independent mirror that would record every action to a hardened Black Castle server outside county control.

Raines watched the progress from behind my shoulder, Stryker arranged for Black Castle personnel to remain available without flooding the department with strangers, while Hawkeye went through the physical-access list and camera coverage.

“Can we bring local dispatch back online?” Raines asked when the final credential rotation finished.

“Yeah.” I tested the mirror, deleted a harmless training event, and watched the action appear immediately on the Black Castle server with the user, terminal, time, and changed fields preserved. “Anybody tries to make a call disappear, I’ll get the alert before they finish.”

Bex finally released the breath she’d been holding. “So it won’t happen again.”

“Not the same way.” I didn’t promise more because someone capable of manipulating the system could change tactics once the first route closed. “Doesn’t mean whoever did it is finished.”

She nodded with quiet acceptance that impressed me more than false bravery would have, especially when fatigue had stripped away most of the control people used to make themselves look stronger. Bex was warm, outgoing, and sweet enough to calm a terrified woman through a whispering phone call, but none of that made her fragile.

Raines turned to his daughter, his expression filled with concern. “I’m taking you home. You’ve been awake long enough, and I don’t want you driving.”

“Okay.” Bex tucked her tablet into her bag, removed the headset from around her neck, and pushed some loose hair behind one ear before turning toward me. “Are you staying?”

“I have targeted alerts to install.” I jerked my chin toward the outer room. “Go sleep.”

Her brows rose at the order. “Pretty bossy for a man I don’t belong to.”

My mouth tightened as a denial tried to slip out.

Bex tilted her head to the side, studying me. “Right?”

I looked over at Raines, several feet away, speaking to Stryker. Then Hawkeye, who’d heard our conversation and suddenly found the physical-access report much more interesting than it had been a moment earlier. Returning my gaze to Bex, I felt my control reach the same strained edge it had occupied when she stood in front of me in that pale-blue dress.

“Get some sleep, Bex.”

“That wasn’t an answer.”

I shook my head. “Only one you’re getting tonight.”