Page 6 of Cipher

“She got hurt because help was late.” Bex’s gaze dropped toward the legal pad, and her fingers tightened around the pen, obviously feeling some misplaced guilt. “If I’d recognized it faster⁠—”

“No.” The word came out sharper than I intended, pulling her eyes back to mine. “She got hurt because somebody exposed her address and redirected the deputy. You sent help after they tried to make that impossible, so don’t take their decision and make it yours.”

Bex held my gaze for several seconds, the vulnerability in her expression giving way to a warmth that reached places I had no interest in examining inside the sheriff’s department. If ever.

Her lips parted, but then she only nodded before lowering her attention to her notes again. My hand tightened around the edge of the console because touching her face in gentle reassurance would have created several problems, and none of them would have ended with my hands leaving her quickly.

I opened the forensic kit and connected a read-only bridge between the department’s network core and the Black Castle laptop. The device allowed me to examine traffic, volatile logs, and active sessions without relying on county tools that might already be compromised. Stryker moved with Raines into the supervisor’s office to review personnel access while Hawkeye took a position near the dispatch entrance, leaving me to the work and Bex close enough to answer questions.

The telephony gateway remembered Nina even though the recording archive and CAD system claimed she had never existed. An inbound 911 connection had entered at the exact time Bex wrote down, remained active for four minutes and seventeen seconds, then terminated…appearing to be from the caller’s side. The archive contained an allocation number for the recording but no audio object was attached to it, while the CAD database skipped an event sequence that should have belonged to Bex’s incident.

“You found it,” she whispered, leaning over the back of my chair as the recovered fragments filled the screen. Her hand settled on my shoulder, and heat spread beneath her palm before driving straight down my spine. “That proves Nina called.”

“Proves the system received a call.” I kept my fingers moving, trying to ignore the desire that speared through my body from the accidental brush of her breast against the back of my arm. “The person who deleted the incident cleared the visible record. But they obviously couldn’t remove every trace left by the surrounding systems.”

Bex stared at the lines on the screen as though she might force them to reveal the name behind the action. “So our favorite hacker found the ghost in the machine.”

My hands stopped over the keyboard, and I turned my head slowly enough to find her mouth only inches from mine. “Not a hacker.”

I hated being called that, though hearing it from Bex didn’t irritate me as much as it usually did.

The corner of her lips lifted, restoring a small piece of the woman who’d held out her hand at the wedding and dared me to take it. “Right. Because you definitely aren't breaking into anything no one should be able to access without clearance.”

“I was invited.”

She arched a brow, and it was cute as fuck. “You say that like it makes what you’re doing less suspicious.”

My lips tipped up at one corner. “It makes it billable.”

Her laugh escaped before she could stop it, soft and tired but happy enough to hit me in the chest. I looked at her mouth a second longer than necessary, imagining silencing that soft sound with my lips and tongue before lifting her onto the console and spreading her thighs around my hips. The fantasy ended with her fingers in my hair and my cock buried so deep inside her that every reason I’d found to stay away became as irrelevant as it felt now.

I turned back to the laptop before Raines caught the direction of my thoughts through some transcendental parental instinct. “I’m working.”

“You’re the one staring,” she retorted.

“I was assessing a distraction.”

Bex leaned closer, her breath warm in my ear. “I distract the unbreakable Cipher?”

More than I intended to admit. I shoved some stubborn hair off my forehead with an irritated flick and resumed searching the audit history. Her pleased little hum told me she had noticed the retreat but wasn’t bothered by it.

The false rollover carried none of the usual creation steps visible from a dispatcher’s console. It appeared as a fully formed event under administrative authority, complete with a plausible location, incident code, and narrative brief enough to pass during a busy shift. The nearest deputy’s status had then been changed remotely, removing him from Nina’s address without generating the routine sequence of dispatcher inputs that should have accompanied the reassignment.

“They used administrative privileges to delete Nina’s call and create the rollover that redirected the deputy,” I told Raines when he returned from the supervisor’s office with Stryker.

The sheriff planted both hands on the edge of the empty console, his mouth flattening beneath his mustache. “Can you tell where the session came from?”

“Not yet.” I opened the remote-access records and traced the session through the network, finding an approved maintenance tunnel tied to an account outside the building. “Activity touched a contractor channel, but it authenticated through a local administrative token. Either path could have initiated it.”

“Eric Stowe,” Raines muttered, glancing toward Stryker. “He owns the one-man public-safety technology firm that maintains our CAD system, call-recording archive, and linked records-management platform. He’s had the remote-support contract for six years.”

“Who else has the administrator credentials?”

“No one, officially.”

“Claims aren’t access logs.” I expanded the records and found enough shared credentials to make the entire arrangement offensive. “His remote-support account is one possible entrance. Any county employee with administrative credentials is another, and somebody inside could route through the contractor tunnel to make the access look external.”

Hawkeye came closer from the door, his gaze moving over the lines on my screen despite having no interest in pretending he understood every symbol. “Meaning Stowe, somebody in the department, or both.”