Page 103 of Unlocked

He thanked her and moved on.

Rush arrived from the other side of the building, four minutes after Ryker's call carrying ear buds. “I checked the main exits. No one is trying to get out.”

Archer pulled them into the corridor outside the dining room.

"Flynn and Cash are in the security room. Help them. I need eyes on every camera in the building for the last forty minutes. I need to know who went through that kitchen corridor and where they went."

“On it,” Ryker said and then took off down the hallway.

"Rush, kitchen staff. All of them. Nobody leaves that kitchen until I've spoken to them." Archer paused. "And find out if anyone came through there who shouldn't have."

Rush nodded and sped toward the exit.

Archer stood in the corridor for a moment. The building was locked. Whatever had happened, whoever had done it, they were still inside. That was the only thing that was working in his favor right now, and he was not going to waste it.

Purposefully, he strode into the kitchen himself.

The kitchen was large and professional and currently contained seven staff members who ranged in demeanor from frightened to stoic. Rush was already working through them. Archer stood back and watched and waited, and after four conversations that produced nothing useful, a young man in a chef's whites said, quietly and with the look of someone who wasn't sure if he was doing the right thing, that he'd seen Daniela rush through.

Archer looked at him. "Daniela?"

"Yes, sir. She came through the kitchen maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes ago. She had her coat on. She wasn't supposed to be done until eleven. I thought maybe she had a family thing."

"Which way did she go?"

He pointed toward the service corridor at the back of the kitchen.

Archer's jaw tightened. Daniela. Who had brought Tatum up to Kelly's room. She’d been in the building every day and had access to every member. Daniela had been in a position to see and access everything.

His earpiece crackled. Flynn's voice. "Boss. I've got Daniela on camera in the service corridor. She's moving fast. She went past the laundry, past the equipment storage. She was heading toward the medical center."

"The ambulance bay," Archer said.

"Yes, sir. The doors out there aren't on the main lockdown. They're on a separate system."

Archer was already moving. "Ryker. Rush. With me. Flynn, Cash stay on the cameras. Keep us informed." The irony that they were using cameras to track a killer wasn’t lost on him. The cameras were only in the main hallways, but hopefully that would be enough. Davis be damned, cameras were necessary.

They went through the kitchen and into the service corridor, moving quickly and quietly. Through two turns and a set of fire doors, the camera feeds painting a picture of where she'd been twenty minutes ago.

"She's still there," Flynn said over his phone. "She can't get the doors open. She's been trying for the last twelve minutes. She doesn’t have the right access to open the ambulance bay doors."

The medical center was at the far end of the building's ground floor, tucked away from the member-facing spaces. The ambulance bay was a small covered area accessible through heavy, reinforced doors that could be opened from either side under normal circumstances. While in lockdown, they required an override code that only four people in the building possessed.

Daniela was not one of them.

Archer pushed through the final set of doors into the medical center's rear corridor and stopped.

Her back was to the ambulance bay doors, and she faced them, a palm pistol clutched between her hands, aimed at Archer’s chest.

It was small. Almost absurdly small. And it didn’t even look like a gun. The size and shape of something that had been designed to be exactly what it was, compact, concealable, printable, undetectable by the scanners at the Society's entrance.

Her hands were shaking.

She was twenty-four years old. He knew this because he knew the ages of all his staff. She had been with the Society for two years. Her employment record was clean. Her background check had been thorough.

He looked at her and felt the cold anger that had been building since he'd looked at Kelly's face settle into something focused.

"Daniela," he said, keeping his voice quiet.