Free Without Malice (The Without Series Book 1) by Jo Robertson

took deep breaths – in slowly, out slowly – and assessed the situation.
    She would not let this monster get the better of her.
    The primary emotion that drove her wasn’t fear but anger, coupled with helplessness. Sure, she was shaken up – who wouldn’t be when confronted with a calculated killer? – but Stark had stirred up a painful and primitive emotion, a fierce need to retaliate.
    Her psychology rotation in med school hadn’t been wasted. Somewhere in the back of her brain she understood that her current anger was for the loss of her mother at a young age, misplaced rage from her father’s arrest and incarceration all those years ago.
    She’d been a teenager then, motherless and fatherless, and unable to help her father against the massive amount of evidence the state had against him – evidence that pointed to Roger Franklin Milano as the murderer of his own wife, her mother. She’d been shuffled off to live with her aunt, her mother’s sister, who believed the eye witness who had been the major nail in her father’s case.
    Frankie didn’t want to get even with the system. She wanted to figure out what the hell was going on in Pelican Bay Prison. If the inmates truly ran the place, then Anson Stark was king. The correctional officers might bully him, try to break him every chance they got, but she’d noticed on occasion the narrow slip of alarm in their otherwise impassive faces.
    She didn’t think either of these particular guards was on the take, but someone was. Likely, many someones.
    She didn’t dare let herself ponder how high up the prison command the corruption might go.
    Toward the end of her shift, Frankie had even more cause to worry about recent events. She’d just returned from break, getting a cup of the truly awful coffee supplied by the prison. She planned to catch up on the never-ending task of updating medical records. She’d been doing this before the prison yard murder occurred and was now on the “F” files.
    She always kept a colored sheet of paper to mark her place, and when she pulled out the file in front of the bright marker – Fader, Henry – she found a 4x4 sticky note fastened to Henry Fader’s file. The note was a deep, blood-red color. She turned it over.
    Both sides were blank.
    She opened the file slowly, hands trembling for no apparent reason but a gut feeling that she wouldn’t like what she found inside. Henry Fader’s file was average sized, contained a list of normal medical complaints, and described a young black man. The notable part of the file was the large red stamp affixed to the top of the file.
    DECEASED.
    The date of death was September 23, 2013, several years ago. Why was his file still in the records cabinet? It should’ve been weeded out of the active files and already archived.
    The bigger question, Frankie asked herself – was this a personal death threat, a blood-red note marking a deceased inmate’s file? Did someone mean her to end up like Henry Fader – dead?
    She flipped through the pages to determine cause of death. Henry had been an amiable twenty-two-year-old African-American, primed for rehabilitation, taking courses for his GED, attending NA meetings and counseling sessions. On the evening of September 23, his naked body had been found in the shower. He’d been brutally savaged, raped and strangled. A crude symbol had been carved into his chest: LOD.
    Hands trembling, Frankie reached for the phone to call the only person she really trusted at Pelican Bay.
    Walt Steiner had been a cop when her father was arrested for the murder of her mother over a dozen years ago, and he’d been her lifeline. In fact, she’d chosen Pelican Bay when she was searching for a position as a prison doctor.
    Walt had transferred there shortly after Roger Milano went to Folsom Prison to serve out his twenty-to-life sentence for murder. Frankie checked Walt’s work schedule.
    His assignment was visitation lieutenant, the officer in charge of