Page 14 of Wrong Door

Vic was positioned behind her own laptop, looking over the longer list of businesses located all along Broughton Street.

"All right," Pruitt said. She had written four names in a column. One of them had an asterisk beside it. "Where are we?"

Miles looked at the board, reading the first two names and realizing it was a suspect list. Garrett Finch and Sylvia Drummond were the first two names and Drummond’s was the one with the asterisk beside it.

"What’s with the asterisk by Drumond?” he asked.

"That's the complicated one. I got confirmation about an hour ago that Sylvia Drummond has been in Spain for three weeks. I've tried her twice and gotten her assistant both times. The assistant says she's at a residency program outside Seville and has limited phone access. That could be true, or it could be the assistant running interference. Either way, I haven't spoken to her directly."

Miles considered that. "Three weeks in Spain."

"Give or take."

"Then she's almost certainly not our killer." He said it not to close the door but to be accurate about where the door was. "Our guy introduced a compound into Hale's shop and—“

“And you were right about the soaking supply,” Pruitt interrupted. “The lab results came back while you guys were out speaking to Hale’s customers.”

“So, like I was saying…someone contaminated the soaking supply at some point in the last several weeks. If Drummond was out of the country, she’s eliminated. The timeline doesn't work."

"I want to confirm the travel independently, though." Pruitt said. "Not just take the assistant's word."

"Agreed. Confirm it and keep her on the list until you do." Miles looked at Finch's name. "Finch is still in play for Ostroff as far as I’m concerned. The access history, the grievance, the studio familiarity….it’s too convenient. I'm less convinced on the chemistry, but I don't want to drop him based on a single conversation."

"What about the second two?" Vic asked.

Pruitt turned back to the board and tapped the first of the two new names. "Conrad Pell. He runs a wholesale floral supply operation out of Garden City, about forty minutes from here. He was Hale's primary supplier for roughly four years. Earlier this year there was a payment dispute, significant enough that Pell threatened to take it to collections and stopped fulfilling Hale's orders for about six weeks. Hale disagreed on the amount, claimed Pell had overcharged him on a bulk order and refused to pay the difference. It went back and forth, and eventually settled, but neither of them came out of it without hard feelings. Based on what I’ve seen and read, it supposedly all came down to a misunderstanding."

"Is there a paper trail on that?" Vic asked.

"There were emails, but that’s about it.”

"It still might be worth following up on," Miles said. Then, pointing to the other name, he asked: "Who is Warren Bly?”

"He’s a local landscape architect. He’s been operating in Savannah for about twelve years, dealing mostly with high-end residential work. About eight months ago, he was in competition for a major commission at an estate property on the Isle of Hope. It was a significant project, the kind that gets written up in regional design publications. But he lost it." Pruitt set the marker on the ledge of the whiteboard. "He lost it to Desmond Hale's floral design company, which had expanded into landscape consulting. Bly had been the frontrunner for months and Hale came in late and took it. Bly was apparently vocal about his feelings on the subject. Especially later on when Hale decided the landscaping game was just too much for him and had to back out."

"Vocal how?" Miles asked.

"He filed a complaint with the property owner alleging that Hale had made representations about his firm's qualifications that were not fully accurate. The complaint went nowhere. But he told at least two colleagues in the industry that Desmond Hale had blindsided him and that he intended to make sure people knew what had happened."

Vic looked at the board. "A payment dispute and a lost commission. Neither of those is exactly a motive for killing someone the way Hale was killed. And it was also apparently not very well known because no one we spoke with this morning mentioned it."

"And it does feel like a bit of a reach," Miles said. "The method is too specific for an anger killing. You don't spend weeks researching chromium toxicology and contaminating a man's work supplies because he beat you to a contract." He looked at the board, at all four names. "But people with grievances talk. They approach the person they have the grievance with. Maybe they show up outside their shop." He looked at Pruitt and explained, "Margot Finney described a confrontation about two weeks ago. Slight build, canvas hat, forties."

"Pell is mid-fifties," Pruitt said. "Bly is forty-nine.” She shrugged, smirked, and said, “I haven't confirmed a canvas hat in anyone's wardrobe, but I also haven't asked."

Miles looked at the board for a moment longer. The four names arranged in a column, two from Nadia Ostroff's world and two from Desmond Hale's. There was no obvious through-line connecting any of them to both victims. That was consistent with what he already knew, that the killer had arrived at these victims through his own logic and not through any shared social network they hadn’t yet identified. But the absence of a connection between the suspects was not what was nagging at him.

It was the victims themselves.

He had been sitting with it since last night, since he had stood on the sidewalk outside Hale's Blooms, thinking about Nadia Ostroff's studio and the paintings covering every inch of wall space. It had surfaced again on the drive back from Broughton Street that morning, and he had pushed it aside to focus on the Finney interview. But now here it was again, coming back into focus as he stared at the whiteboard.

A painter. A florist.

"There's something about the victims," he said. “A commonality that is so obvious you sort of miss it.”

Vic looked up from her laptop and said, “Share with the class, please.”

"A painter and a florist," he said. "I doubt they were chosen at random, and as of right now, there seems to be no connection between them. But I do think they were chosen for something they have in common." He thought about the way Hale's shop had looked, the density of living color in it, the dahlias and the roses and the ranunculus. And then there was Ostroff's studio, saturated with color from every wall, from the harbor scenes and the color studies to the single painting face-down on the concrete. "Color," he said.