Page 10 of Wrong Door

Miles moved to the table and looked at the water in the tray without touching it. It was slightly discolored, but not dramatically—not in a way that would register as wrong to anyone who worked with floral foam regularly. The foam itself leached a faint yellowish tint into the water it soaked in. Miles supposed this was normal but that would be a question for someone who knew flowers much better than he did. He photographed the tray and the bricks and then looked at the stack of unused foam on the far end of the table.

He crouched slightly and looked at the nearest brick from the side. The foam was the dense green variety used universally in the industry. He looked at the surface carefully. Along two edges of the brick, the color was slightly deeper than the interior, a marginally darker green. He then walked back over to Hale and looked at his hands again. Maybe that green hue on his hands hadn’t been from just stems and leaves. Surely this man handled that floral foam constantly, cutting it to shape, pressing stems into it, soaking the bricks, moving saturated bricks from tray to display. If so, that would mean his skin had contact with it for hours every working day.

"The foam," Miles said.

Vic came to stand beside him. She looked at the tray, at the bricks, at Hale's hands. "You think this is what did it?” she asked. “Is this the equivalent of the cleaning agent you pointed out in Ostroff’s studio?”

“I’m not sure. Some simple lab tests could tell us, though. If this is the case, it would be cumulative dermal absorption.”

“Meaning?” Pruitt asked from the other side of the room.

“Meaning that just like the cleaning agent, this wasn’t a single exposure event. It probably occurred over several days of handling foam that had been treated. Combined with inhalation from the soaked material sitting in a warm enclosed space, that would certainly do the trick." He looked at the refrigerated case at the back, its compressor running, circulating the air in the shop in a slow, continuous cycle. "If I am right, he's been absorbing this for days without knowing it. The skin presentation, the hemorrhaging, the timeline, it all fits a sustained exposure pattern rather than an acute one. But again…it’s just a theory. The ME and a basic lab test will tell us for sure."

“Let’s say you’re right,” Pruitt said from across the room. "Someone would have had to treat the foam before he used it.”

"Or treated the soaking solution, which would migrate into the foam every time he prepped it," Miles said. He looked at the container of water on the shelving unit above the table, a large plastic vessel with a spigot that was clearly used to fill the soaking tray. He photographed it without touching it. "That's the more likely point of introduction. One container, treated once, and every brick he soaked after that carried the compound."

Vic looked at the container. "How long would a container like that last him?"

"Depends on his volume. I’d assume a busy florist goes through significant amounts of foam. A week, maybe two. Was this a popular shop?” he asked, looking to Pruitt.

“Sort of. People mostly came for Mr. Hale. Sort of supporting small business, you know?”

Miles stepped back from the table and looked at the room as a whole, the way he had looked at Nadia's studio. "The delivery mechanisms are pretty similar, if I turn out to be right. The solvent in Ostroff's studio, and the soaking solution here. The compound is the same, and the principle is the same. It would have been something he touches every day, something integral to his work and that he’d have no reason to examine or suspect."

Pruitt looked at him, nodding. "Two victims, two different methods, but the same compound and approach."

"In the same city," Vic said. "And we've only been here five hours."

Miles took a deep breath and immediately regretted it. The metallic undercurrent in the air was stronger near the worktable, and his eyes had begun to feel dry and slightly irritated. It was a weird throwback to all the time he used to spend in the lab with an assortment of chemicals and solvents.

He looked at Vic almost apologetically and said, "I'm going to step out for a minute."

He went back through the shop, past the dahlia display and the refrigerated case. He couldn’t quite peg why, but the riot of color now seemed almost constricting and suffocating as he passed through. He hurried past it and walked through the front door onto Broughton Street.

The evening air was warm and carried the usual mix of any city: car exhaust and restaurant smells scattered everywhere. But here, in Savannah, there was also the faint salt edge of the coast a few miles out. He stood on the sidewalk and breathed it in, letting his eyes adjust to the cooler air.

Vic came out a minute later. She stood beside him and said nothing, waiting. He was glad that she had come out but also glad that she wasn’t speaking just yet. After a few more seconds, it was Miles who broke the silence.

"This isn't opportunistic," Miles said. "Either of these scenes. You can't introduce a chromium compound into a flower shop's soaking supply on a whim. You have to know that the shop uses that supply, know the volume of foam he goes through, know the concentration required for a sustained dermal exposure to reach a lethal threshold over a realistic working period." He looked at the lit window of the shop, at the spring arrangement still cheerfully facing the street. "And Ostroff is the same. You have to know she uses a brush cleaner, where she keeps it, and how often she uses it. You’d also need to know the studio well enough to swap a container without anything looking disturbed."

“So, you think the killer knows his victims personally?”

“I think, at the very least, that he spent time with these people before he went through with his plan. Or he spent time watching them very closely.”

Vic was quiet for a moment. "Which means there may be others he's already watched and researched."

"Yes," Miles said. "And we have no way of knowing yet how far along he is with any of them. Just like the other cases. So once again, we’re trapped in this damn loop."

“At least we know the loop well,” Vic said.

“Yeah, but you’d think by now we’d know how to either prevent ourselves from falling into it…or break the damn thing apart once we’re in it.”

With that, he turned and back inside where Detective Pruitt was still taking pictures of a dead man’s flower shop.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The drive from Broughton Street back to the precinct took a little over ten minutes. Miles spent most of it looking out the rear passenger window at the nighttime city moving past while Pruitt drove and Vic sat in the passenger seat. The restaurants were still lit and busy, and there were couples on the sidewalks, illuminated by the glow of the streetlights overhead. Savannah in the early night had an almost ethereal quality to it, that made it feel slightly tired and out of sorts. But it was charming in its way, despite their reason for visiting.