Once again, Weldonville was clean. Humphry loved being the boss of a shift that had some professionalism to it. Every locker had the man’s personal belongings—car keys, cell phone, wallet, watch, the occasional pocketknife. That meant they weren’t carrying them on the cellblocks. He and his deputy, Scott, had gone through all of it, from the shoes on the locker floors to the pockets to the stuff on the shelves at the top, and found nothing that would cause him to make a comment in anyone’s file.

When Humphry had taken the job, Weldonville had been planned as a low-to-medium-security prison for nonviolent offenders—people embezzling from the government and tax cheats. But that wasn’t who they had now. The vast majority now were violent criminals, the overflow from high-security facilities. He suspected that when the Bureau of Prisons had asked wardens to send Weldonville their excess, there had been quite a few inmates hand-selected from their worst-behaved lists.

Humphry marched along the broad walkway in the center of the ground floor that the staff called Main Street. He walked with his head up and his shoulders back. His heels made a bright, hard click when they hit the polished concrete. He wasn’t going to tiptoe along. If any of the inmates in their cells could hear it through the steel doors, then it would do them good to hear the sound of honest, unapologetic strength. Weldonville was not the old-fashioned kind of facility that was designed to be ugly and threatening, but Weldonville was still a prison. If you resisted it, what would break first would be you.

He reached the open stairs that rose toward the administration levels. There were only a few elevators in the complex. They were made for moving freight, not people, and they were isolated from the cellblocks and other areas where inmates roamed. In the hall at the top of the steps was a set of bars across his route. He walked to the electronic lock, inserted his key card, and tapped his code number into the keypad, and the bars moved aside almost silently, rolling on well-oiled wheels into a pocket in the wall. After he passed, a sensor in the mechanism triggered the motor and made the gate roll back across the hall again and lock. He went through another gate at the top of the next set of stairs.

After that barrier, he entered a hallway. He could see the Operations section office, where he worked. Often the section reminded him of the bridge of a ship, partly because of its location and partly because it was full of monitors and other instruments for watching and controlling the prison. As he approached the office, he heard an alarm beeping and a female electronic voice saying, “Disturbance on Cellblock C. Disturbance on Cellblock C,” over and over.