They cautiously followed the trail of dried blood and descended deeper into the abandoned ship.
Chapter Ten
Prodor Moffit was a brilliant doctor, scientist, and convicted serial killer. And incredibly dangerous. A man who was able to use practically anything as a weapon with deadly efficiency.
It was never determined when exactly Prodor Moffit's psychoses started. But several of the prison psychologists thought, after Moffit's conviction and incarceration, that it must have started when he was around ten. His parents were going through a bitter divorce and when it was eventually finalized, his mother was given full custody of Prodor’s younger brother, who at the time was five. She packed up what she could carry and left, leaving Prodor with his overbearing father. She remarried three years later, and with the change of her last name, her new husband adopted Prodor’s brother. Prodor, who was very close to his little brother, never saw him again.
To avoid his father, Prodor Moffit poured himself into his studies. Always a bright, gifted, and somewhat troubled student, he first studied astrophysics at a very young age. Then, when entering the equivalent of the human race’s high school, he focused on forensic science. There he studied under some of the most influential IPF forensic scientists available. Upon entering college, he once again changed his academics, finally settling on medical science. He was very young when he got his doctorate, five years earlier than his contemporaries.
He received a position at the prestigious Hopper Hospital on Ashlar, a state-of-the-art research hospital. Many of the patients came to the hospital with rare or incurable diseases. Hopper being a research hospital, many of the diseases were cured. It was noted, after Prodor Moffit’s arrest, that many of Prodor's patients during his first year at Hopper still succumbed to their diseases, even after responding positively to their treatments.
By his third year at Hopper, Moffit had befriended several orderlies. He chose them very carefully. Single, no real family, loners, dim-witted and easily manipulated, but very loyal. And of course, the money he offered was a nice incentive. Much more than what they were making at Hopper. He needed their help. He needed patients for his research.
Several patients suffering from dementia during Prodor Moffit’s tenure would wind up missing. The dementia wing, at that time, had a very lax security system. And being that the patients were harmless and not a threat to themselves or others, they were allowed to wander the halls. The disappearances would, of course, be covered up by hospital administration, due to the possible and very likelihood of lawsuits. They declared that the patients simply walked out of the hospital.
And yes, there were several lawsuits. New security rules were implemented within the dementia wing to appease the litigants.
The authorities spent several days, weeks, sometimes months trying in vain to find the patients who just wandered away, but with the help of certain orderlies these poor souls were never found.
After his arrest and conviction of twenty-five murders, authorities determined that at least twelve of Prodor's victims had been vivisected in a morbid attempt to cure the most incurable diseases. Which, of course, was Prodor Moffit’s justification for the crimes. The psychologists all agreed that most likely Prodor was obsessed with vivisecting his victims, but they disagreed about whether it was to make others feel his childhood pain or something altogether different.
Some psychologists felt that he just enjoyed doing it.
There were more victims, the IPF was sure of that, going back as far as when he was young. IPF researchers found several old police reports from the neighborhood where Moffit lived, reporting of missing pets. Three years after those reports, two children went missing, never to be seen again. The researchers were confident Moffit had something to do with these reports, but had no evidence to confirm these theories.
And these theories included his father, who had been missing for the past sixteen years, and his mother, missing for ten. There had been no evidence of any kind of a struggle at either home. No evidence of blood. No evidence of a crime.
Just missing.
Chapter Eleven
Jeff Trent and Genghis Khan proceeded to the third deck where the detention center was located and where the fight seemed to have been much more intense. And it was. More shell casings and a lot more blood splatter. The guards had known that they had to contain the inmates here. That this was where the fight had to end. If the inmates got through and to the upper decks there would be no way of stopping them from taking the ship.
The front part of the detention center was the outer office. It was a small room with a desk bolted to the floor. Computer consoles and security camera monitors were mounted to the walls, sharing space with built-in recessed filing cabinets. A gun rack for three PK 30A assault rifles and two SK 5 shotguns stood empty. A small couch lay upturned, along with a couple of chairs. One of which was broken, used either as a shield or a weapon. Toward the back of the outer office stretched a long hallway with eight open cell doors, four on each side of the hall, each door the entrance to a five-foot-by-eight-foot holding cell.
Jeff Trent bent over and retrieved a small computer system and placed it back on the desk where it should have been. He then picked up the only surviving chair and sat in front of the computer and switched it on. The screen immediately came to life. He started to access video files of the security cameras.
In the meantime, Genghis Khan proceeded to investigate the rest of the crime scene. With his nose to the ground, he started down the hall, slowly swinging his head back and forth as his olfactory system took in the most minute trace of
