Page 19 of Wrong Door

Even before they reached the porch, Miles picked up on the chemical scent. It was faint, diluted by two weeks or more of open air and the warm, green smell of the neglected lawn. He was pretty sure it wasn’t coming from anywhere outside but was contained inside and had started to leak out in trace amounts through gaps in doors and windows. He had smelled it twice in the past thirty-six hours, so he knew exactly what it was.

He stopped on the bottom porch step and looked at Vic. “You smell it?”

Her expression didn’t change but she had caught it, too. "Yeah," she said quietly.

He didn’t go up the remaining steps just yet. He stood where he was and looked at the gap at the base of the door, at the window frames, at the seal of the threshold. It then occurred to him that if this house had been vacant for two or three weeks, the smell still being present after this length of vacancy was odd.

He took his phone out and called Pruitt. She answered on the second ring and immediately said, “I'm four minutes out."

"He's not here. The property's been vacant for at least two weeks, probably more. The mail is piling up, and the lawn has been neglected. More importantly, there's a chemical smell at the threshold. Faint but identifiable."

There was a brief silence as Pruitt thought this through. "Okay. I'll call the warrant in from the car. We'll need the chemical hazard notation to expedite it."

"Note it. And we'll need a hazmat assessment before anyone goes in. If we can smell it from out here, I have no idea how bad it must be inside. I’m surprised none of his neighbors have made any complaints."

"Understood.”

He ended the call and stepped back down to the walk. Vic was already at the property line, looking at the side of the house, where a narrow passage between the rental and its neighbor gave a partial view of the side yard.

"Miles, come here.”

He came to stand beside her and looked where she was looking. The side of the house had two windows on the ground floor, and below each window was a window box—the painted wood kind that were generally planted with seasonal color. There were four of them along the side of the house. He could see three of them from where he was standing, and each one held plants that were entirely dead. Not recently dead, not wilting or browning at the tips, but fully gone to rot; the stems had gone rigid and gray, and the leaves curled and papery. He looked at the fourth box visible from the front and saw the same condition.

He came back to the front and looked at the window boxes there, which he had not registered when they first arrived. There were two of them on the front porch rail, flanking the steps, and they were in the same condition as the ones on the side. Four boxes of dead plants arranged around the exterior of a house that smelled of chromium compounds and had not been occupied in weeks. If it was simple neglect and lack of watering, they’d be a little sad-looking but not completely ruined like this.

His pone buzzed in his pocket and he took it out without looking away from the dead plants. “This is Sterling,” he answered.

“Hey, it’s Pruitt. Hazmat will be there in fifteen and I’ve already placed a request for a search warrant, listed as high priority.”

“Sounds good.”

“I’ll literally see you in about thirty minutes.”

Pruitt ended the call, leaving Miles and Vic standing on the sidewalk in front of the empty rental while a series of dead plants faced the street behind them.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The warrant came through thirty-six minutes later, and as soon as they got the call, Pruitt rushed up the porch steps with a lock pick set out in hand. She was also wearing an N95 mask just in case. It was much less cumbersome than the suits Miles and Vic were wearing.

The hazmat team had already done their exterior sweep and cleared the residence for limited entry. Their team lead had been specific about the conditions: low-level protective suits, gloves, and respirators before anyone crossed the threshold. The suits were the lightweight Tyvek variety, not the full encapsulated gear of an acute chemical emergency. Miles had worn them more times than he could count during his time in countless labs. They were strong enough to create a barrier against dermal contact and to filter the air at a safe level but without completely impeding their motion. That wasn’t to say it was comfortable by any means. Miles had put his on in the front yard and was already irritated at the way the material trapped body heat and created a friction against every movement. Also, these models were built in a way that the respirator altered the sound of his own breathing into something loud and close. Vic was beside him in the same gear, her hair tucked back, the respirator making her face unfamiliar in a way that was slightly disorienting.

Pruitt worked the front door in under two minutes, and they went in. Pruitt stepped to the side and, as they had discussed with the Hazmat team lead, closed the door once they were inside. Miles started for the center of the first room—a living area of some kind—but stopped after just three steps.

The walls were covered floor to ceiling on all four sides in hand-drawn color wheels and dense pages of handwritten notation. The wheels were large, many of them two to three feet across, rendered on drafting paper and filled in with actual paint. There were at least twenty of them…probably more. The annotations running along each segment were small and precise, providing the pigment name, formula notation, and then a secondary figure labeled drain index. The index numbers ranged from the low single digits to above twelve, and the higher numbers were circled in red. The circled segments corresponded to the most saturated pigments, the deep viridians, the heavy carmines, the full cadmium yellows and oranges.

Between the wheels, filling every gap in the plaster, were pages of notation that at first read like a scientific paper. They were filled with numbered sections, with data tables in the margins and references to color measurement systems, the Munsell system, CIE color space, spectrophotometric coefficients. Miles was familiar with most of it and it made him feel uneasy.

“Any idea what any of this means?” Vic asked Miles, stepping up beside him.

“Most of it, yah…but it’s sort of all over the place.”

Miles stood in the middle of it and turned slowly. Through the respirator, his breathing was the loudest thing in the room.

"He's been building this for years," Vic said. Her voice was slightly muffled by the respirator but clear enough. She moved to the far wall and was reading a section of notation between two of the larger wheels.

"Oh, at least," Miles said as he looked at the nearest wheel. The annotations in the margins were dated, small notations in the upper corners of each sheet, and the earliest ones he could see went back nearly four years. That placed it before the non-renewal at SCAD and long before his dismissed complaints. So, it seemed that this bizarre obsession had started before his failures.

Miles moved to the worktable along the back wall, the Tyvek suit shifting and catching with each step. It was a six-foot folding table that had been used as a workspace of some kind. The surface was stained in the pattern of container rings and solution spills. Along the right edge, metal brackets had been bolted to the table and then removed, the screw holes clean against the surrounding stain, the brackets gone. Whatever equipment had been mounted there had been packed out deliberately.