In theory, I should have been able to see down the hallway that led to the women’s ward. However, I should have been able to do that with all of them and couldn’t. There were not just big steel doors that separated each hall from the hub, but each had been built with a slight curve to it. These hallways were cell free, with three layers of security built into them. The cells existed only on the outer ring.
Furthermore, there were more layers of security for the women’s ward. It was designed with the idea that serial killers preferred female victims. Even female serial killers if they couldn’t get anything else.
I was beginning to see flaws with this design. Originally, I had thought it was brilliant. After spending a few hours on the inside, I had come to the conclusion that each spoke should have been its own self-contained unit with only one real exit and a fire exit in the tower. From where I was standing, fire seemed like an unlikely worry. A fire was burning in one of the hallways in a corridor that had lost its door, but the ventilation system was removing the smoke quickly. A fire suppression system was coating the floor with foam. The walls and doors were withstanding the heat without so much as a crack forming and the steel security doors were probably hot, but they weren’t molten. I made a mental note to talk to someone about it if they really were building a second one. I did not know who that someone was, but I could probably find them.
I had five people with me: Fiona, Caleb, Eric, Demetrius Lazar, and Dominic Lazar. The other law enforcement and killers had been left in the cafeteria, law enforcement and serial killers alike, working to figure out who the bad guy was. I wasn’t going to hold my breath that it would be sorted when we returned.
Fiona and I were leading the charge, mainly because if they were holed up, it would be from protecting themselves. Just like the men were in the cafeteria, they would be less likely to shoot us on sight. After all, they were the only women on site. Also, Fiona was determined and I didn’t want her tramping off and running into something big and bad. Caleb and Eric were covering the rear. I trusted them the most at the end of the line. If someone attempted to sneak up on us, they’d have to deal with the two psychopaths first. Ideally, Malachi and Gabriel would be with us, but we needed a psychopath with a badge in the cafeteria. Gabriel could hold his own, but I felt better leaving him with Malachi than with the rest of the normal law enforcement agents. Then there was Patterson and that was all I could say about that.
We checked the window of the second security door and found the corridor empty. Dominic Lazar entered the code and the door whooshed open. I looked at him, then the door, then the curved wall of the hallway. Someone had let the men out or had given the men the codes. Originally, I thought maybe they had just hit a button or something and opened all the security doors. Yet, both of these were still closed. None of the security doors in the men’s ward that I had been forced to walk down with Deacon Priest had been closed.
“Can the security doors on the men’s wards be opened all at one time?” I asked Dominic.
“No, they have to be opened individually. In the event of an emergency, we can open all the security doors. Why?”
“Because every hallway I have been down, the security doors have been open, except this one. If it is inmates with the codes, then that does not explain how the killers from the secure ward got out.”
“We can open each door individually and leave it open with a master code, but I don’t have that code.” He looked at me. “We each have individual codes to open doors. Normally, my code wouldn’t open these doors, but since we are in lockdown, the computer system recognizes there is a problem and allows it. To leave doors open, you have to enter a master code and only a handful of people have those. However, once a master code has been entered, it will unlock all the doors connected to that circuit. The secure ward is on the ground floor. If someone entered the master code into checkpoints one, two, and three on a floor above one, the corresponding doors on the ground floor would open. This is not true of the women’s ward. It has a different master code.”
“So, they could all be safe and sound and not even realize there’s a problem,” Fiona stopped.
“They know there was an alarm, an announcement, and an automatic attempt to shut down all the security doors. The master code had to be entered after the riot alarm was triggered.”
“Maybe she will be happy to see you,” I told Fiona.
“She will be. It doesn’t mean I’ll be happy to see her. She dismembered my fiancé, and that’s not something you just get over.”
“Well, maybe she had a good reason, like Eric.”
“The irony of that statement,” Fiona sighed. “My sister dismembered my fiancé a week before our wedding. She was arrested the day I was supposed to get married for his murder. She also killed one of my other sister’s boyfriends. Being jealous is one thing, but dismembering over it, is another.”
“While they were alive?” I asked.
“Yes,” Fiona answered.
“Brutal,” I tried not to smile. I had a feeling I was going to like Fiona’s sister and it was going to be a problem.
“Wait, you both have family inside the Fortress?” Demetrius asked.
“Yes,” Eric answered. “Bella wrote me a nice thank you note when Fiona was transferred to the SCTU, glad that my sister would be keeping her sister alive.”
“That was nice of her,” I said and wished I hadn’t. Fiona’s face darkened, her lips thinned, her cheeks turned red, her eyes narrowed, drawing her eyebrows together, and her forehead filled with wrinkles. “It is nice because she is impressed by what you do and happy that she thinks you have found someone that can protect you,” I quickly explained. Fiona and I had sort of become gal pals as of late. She wasn’t Nyleena, but I would go out of my way to hurt someone that hurt her. Truth be told, she and Nyleena were my only gal pals besides my mother and Elle. So, of the four females in my life, only one wasn’t related to me. I was pretty sure that wasn’t normal.
I didn’t dislike women, they disliked me. They couldn’t handle being friends with someone who was constantly on the verge of being killed or killing someone else. It was hard for guys to be my friend, and girls were almost unfathomable.
We headed through the second security door. The third made my stomach flop. There were three dead bodies in it, all male, all slowly being squished by the pneumatic system that controlled the door. Their bodies were an obstacle, but the door was intent on winning. Despite having killed a few people in my time and watching Xavier do countless autopsies, touching dead people still bothered me. Dead bodies could still transmit diseases and release toxins as their organs exploded inside their rotting bodies.
The dead bodies were a problem, so we were going to have to move them. So was the new information about how the Fortress operated. I wasn’t entirely convinced one US Marshal would be able to enter master codes in each of the different cell blocks, even if they only had to enter them into three doors on each block. This would mean that there was more than one Marshal, possible two or three or even five, since the women’s ward seemed untouched. I didn’t like conspiracy theories. I found them wishy-washy. Yet, I appeared too wrapped up in some sort of massive conspiracy that could shake the very foundations of law enforcement. If the US Marshals were involved, it would explain why the federal buildings had been taken so quickly. US Marshals guarded those as well as the Fortress. Our fingers were in many things and something like this could end the oldest organized federal policing agency.
The only bright spot at the moment was that the Secret Service guarded the FGN and FGA. They recruited specifically for that job and preferred to hire out of the military. The people in our guard booth and patrolling our streets would die to keep our families, and theirs, safe. They all lived in the same place we did. It was a job perk, cheap, incredibly sturdy housing. The government charged all of us about half the building cost and provided a vetted network of service companies to tackle any situation that arose. They didn’t charge us. They charged the government.
Being a cop had always been dangerous, but being a cop in the twenty-first century was the equivalent of signing up to stand in front of a firing squad. Serial killers, mass murderers, drug cartels, anarchists, and organized crime killed about two thousand officers a year. I was sure that this event would double if not triple the rate for this year. Prosecutors, paralegals, judges, and even public defenders were also prime targets with about five thousand of them dying each year. These numbers were staggering, but, oddly, we were not the worst country to live in.
That dubious honor went to a country in Asia where the population was dropping much faster than it was rising. The only reason it wasn’t being considered a civil war was because serial killers were spearheading the decrease in population. Last year, a mass murderer and serial killer had teamed up and attacked a police barracks. They had killed everyone inside. Eventually, they were caught by organized crime figures, and handed over to the military for punishment. Things were beyond bad when organized crime was handing over bad guys for execution.
“Hey, do you want to help?” Fiona asked, tapping my leg. There was an arm in her other hand and she was bent over trying to remove the body on top with the help of Eric and Demetrius.
“Absolutely, move,” I answered and walked over to the door. I looked at the panel, studying the buttons I could see. None of them said emergency lock, so I hit all of them and kicked it. The door whined for a second, then it clicked twice and the pneumatic hinges shot the door into the locks. The bodies were now in two pieces. One had been shot down the hallway past us.
“Seriously?” Eric raised an eyebrow. “Do you just go around kicking everything?”
“Normally, no, but today, yes.” I waved my hand at the key pad. Dominic walked over and entered his code. The door opened. The smell was repulsive. The gore was beyond belief, dripping down the steel and seeping from the holes where the bottom locks slid in and out of the door. However, we could easily step over the bodies now with no need to touch them. “Watch your step. You do not want to slip in this stuff.”
“I have no words,” Demetrius said.
“I have several,” Eric answered. “I’m also beginning to wonder if the right Clachan is locked up in here.”
“Patterson’s here,” I told him.
“You have issues,” Eric frowned at me. “Serious issues.”
“Do not judge me, I did not climb to the top of a building and start killing convicts inside a prison recreation yard,” I snipped at him. “Everyone in the door was already dead. They can charge me with desecration of a dead body. Considering the circumstances, it would probably earn me a slap on the wrist and maybe a Post-It note in my work file.”
“You should find a therapist. What you just did was not normal,” Eric suggested.
“My therapist is in Witness Protection. It might be part of why I’m feeling so hostile.” I looked at him. “That and I feel like I’m trapped in some stupid reality TV show and I keep waiting for someone to jump out and claim it was all a joke and I have won the grand prize; a year’s worth of ice cream. Conspiracies do not happen in the real world. They happen in the mind and in movies. Yet, everywhere I look, I see one giant conspiracy and it is getting worse not better.”
“That, I agree with. Whoever is doing this is well connected, has a large bank account, and a serious dislike for someone in law enforcement that is being covered up by mass killings,” Eric said. Everyone looked at me.
“I cannot be the only police officer on the planet with enemies. Malachi has plenty too.” I didn’t know about anyone else inside the walls of this damned prison, but it was likely they had enemies too.