The gates of Rockview Correctional Facility opened at 6:47 AM. Not with ceremony. Not with fanfare. Just a guard hitting a button and the chain-link sliding back.
Ken Blake stepped through in clothes that didn't fit him anymore. The shirt hung loose on his frame. Seven years had carved away everything—muscle, certainty, hope. The sun hit his face, and he didn't blink. He'd almost forgotten what real sunlight felt like.
Outside the gate, a bus stop. A bench. An old woman is waiting for Route 4. She didn't look at him. Nobody did. He was invisible, which was perfect.
Blake counted his possessions: $47 in discharge money. A prison ID that expired yesterday. A folder of release papers. A list of halfway houses that wouldn't take him. He was fifty-two years old and owned nothing.
The bus came. He got on. Paid with four dollars and sat in the back, watching the prison shrink in the rear window until it became just another building in the landscape. Pennsylvania unfolded around him—trees, fields, a McDonald's that looked identical to the one he'd eaten at in 2016. Before prison. Before James Patterson. Before any of this.
The motel room was $39 a night. Cash only. The manager didn't ask questions. That was good. Blake had seven hundred dollars, saved from prison jobs. If he was careful, maybe he could last three weeks.
He sat on the bed in room 12 and opened his laptop—a secondhand Lenovo he'd bought for fifty dollars at a pawn shop. The screen was cracked in one corner but it worked. He could get online.
First, he searched for James Patterson.
The results came back immediately. Too many James Pattersons. He refined the search: "James Patterson, university researcher." Still too many. "James Patterson, research fraud." Nothing. "James Patterson, university scandal." A few articles from 2017, but they were about someone else.
Blake switched to social media. LinkedIn showed a profile—James Patterson, Director of Operations, Tech Consulting Firm, Richmond, Virginia. The photo was current. He looked tired. Good.
Facebook was more useful. James's ex-wife had a public page. Her maiden name was Emily Washburn, but she'd kept the Patterson name professionally even after the divorce. Blake knew this already—he'd Googled her from prison, memorized her face, her updates, the small details of her life.
Emily Washburn Patterson had moved to Idaho. She worked as a financial manager for a potato farm cooperative near Boise. There were photos: her in flannel, standing next to a barn. Her in an office, smiling at something off-camera. She looked older than Blake remembered, but good. She looked like someone who'd escaped something.
Blake sat back. Emily and James were divorced. This was important. This changed things.
He clicked on their separation notice—public record—and read it carefully. The filing date was three years ago. The grounds were "irreconcilable differences." One of them had cited "financial instability and emotional distance" as factors. Blake couldn't tell from the form which one said it.
He searched for James's current address. Found a lease agreement posted accidentally on some rental site. Richmond, Virginia. 2847 Brookside Apartments, Unit 4C.
Blake bookmarked it.
Then he sat with the laptop open, staring at James's profile picture. The man looked hollow. Not sad exactly—something worse. Like someone who'd learned that nothing mattered. That you could follow all the rules and still lose everything.
Blake understood that feeling.
The next morning, Blake sat in the motel office with a cup of coffee from the 7-Eleven across the street. The manager—a fat man in a Steelers shirt—barely acknowledged him. Blake had paid for two more nights. He had time to think.
He thought about James Patterson.
Seven years ago, they'd worked together at the University of Pennsylvania. Blake had been Dr. Kenneth Blake then—published researcher, respected by his peers, with a promising career studying pharmaceutical applications in aging populations. James had been a junior researcher, bright but ambitious, hungry to prove something.
They'd been competitors, but friendly ones. They'd gone to conferences together. Shared lab space. Blake had even liked him. That was what made it worse.
Blake had been close to a breakthrough. A study that could have changed his career, maybe his life. He'd worked for three years on it. Gotten preliminary results that looked perfect. Too perfect, as it turned out.
The data had issues. Structural problems. Nothing he'd done intentionally—just sloppy methodology mixed with hope mixed with the human tendency to see what you wanted to see in numbers. But they were supposed to be good data. He'd been so sure they were good.
James had asked questions. Just questions at first. "Did you verify the source data?" "Can we see the collection protocols?" Then more direct questions. Then accusations. James had looked at Blake's work and found the problems.
Blake had asked James to keep it quiet. To let Blake fix it quietly. To not publish. He'd promised to redo the study properly. He'd begged, actually. He'd never forgotten the look on James's face—this young, ambitious man seeing an opportunity and not being able to resist it.
James had gone to the department head. Then the university administration. Then he'd published a paper specifically about the methodological flaws in Blake's research. He'd named Blake directly. He'd called it "a cautionary tale in peer review failure."
Within two months, Blake had lost his position. Within four, the university had initiated a formal inquiry. Within six, Blake had been forced to resign and faced a defamation suit from one of the study's co-authors—someone who claimed Blake's "sloppy work" had damaged her reputation.
He'd lawyered up and filed a counter-suit against James for defamation and tortious interference. The trial had been brutal. James's testimony was calm and factual. He'd presented the data problems clearly. The jury had sided with James.
Blake had been ordered to pay damages. Forty thousand dollars he didn't have. He'd liquidated everything and still come up short. His house had gone. His career had gone. His marriage—such as it was—had disintegrated when his wife realized he was financially ruined.
And then there was Emily.
Blake had met Emily at a university function in 2014. She was smart, funny, working in finance. She'd moved to Pennsylvania from Idaho, looking for something—Blake had never figured out what. He'd spent six months thinking he was in love with her. She'd been kind about it when she'd told him it wasn't going to work. She'd said she was interested in someone else.
That someone else had been James Patterson.
Blake had found out from mutual friends. James and Emily had gotten married in 2015. Blake had sent them a wedding gift anyway—a nice one, expensive, more than he could afford. He'd needed to show that he didn't care. That it was fine.
It hadn't been fine.
The harassment charges had started in 2016. Blake had called Emily. Thirty times. Showed up at places he knew she frequented. Left letters. Written emails. He'd been trying to explain something—he'd never been clear on what. That it wasn't fair. That James didn't deserve her. That Blake would have been better. Something like that.
Emily had gotten a restraining order. James had pressed charges. Blake had been arrested.
The trial had been quick. Blake had a lawyer who advised him to plead guilty to harassment charges in exchange for dropping the more serious stalking allegations. He'd done it. He'd been sentenced to seven years.
That had been 2017.
Blake shut the laptop and lay back on the motel bed. The ceiling had a water stain. He'd been staring at it for three days now. It didn't look like anything in particular.
Seven years. He'd served every day of it. Had his appeal denied. Had watched his life become a statistic in the Pennsylvania DOC system. Inmate #47892. He'd learned to make license plates. Had worked in the prison library. Had taken anger management classes and learned to breathe deeply when he felt the rage coming.
The rage had never stopped coming. He'd just gotten better at hiding it.
Now he was out. He had $700. He had nobody. He had a face that everyone online now associated with academic fraud and harassment. He had a future that was a blank wall.
Blake got up and went to the window. The view was the highway. Trucks passing. Dingy shops across the street. America.
He thought about Emily in Idaho. She'd rebuilt. She'd left James (why—financial problems, according to the court filings). She'd gone back home. She probably didn't think about Ken Blake anymore. She probably didn't think about any of it.
He thought about James in Richmond. Working some tech consulting job. Probably dating again. Probably telling people he was a researcher once upon a time, before things went wrong. Before he'd done the right thing and destroyed a man's life in the process.
Blake opened the laptop again. He searched for "James Patterson, current address, Richmond."
Found it. 2847 Brookside Apartments, Unit 4C.
He bookmarked it again, then did something else. He searched for contract killers. Hitmen. The dark web. He knew enough to know this was stupid—it was monitored, it was tracked, it was exactly the kind of thing that would put him back in prison.
But he did it anyway.
He found sites. Sketchy ones. He made an account on something called "Solutions." He posted: "Seeking professional removal. Target in Richmond, VA. Can pay $10,000 to start. Willing to negotiate."
He knew it was probably a scam or an FBI honeypot. He knew it was insane.
He did it anyway because he had nothing left and nothing to lose, and the rage that he'd been managing for seven years had finally found a shape. A focus. A name.
James Patterson.
Blake closed the laptop and lay back on the bed. The water stain stared back. Outside, the trucks passed. The world kept going. Emily worked in Idaho. James worked in Richmond. Blake lay in a motel room with $700 in his pocket and a plan that was already falling apart.
But it was something. It was the first time in seven years he'd felt like the future might matter at all.
Even if that future was just revenge.