Page 20 of Wrong Door

Along the left edge, a row of glass jars stood in ascending order, each one labeled in the same small hand as the wall annotations. The labels read drain index 3.1, drain index 5.4, drain index 6.9, drain index 8.2, drain index 11.7. The two jars with the highest numbers held faint yellow residue settled at the bottom. The rest were empty and dry.

Miles photographed each jar, the task made quite difficult because of the gloves.

On the shelving unit to the left, he found color theory reference texts with their spines creased flat from use. There was also a collection of scientific journals with paper tabs marking specific articles, and an empty chemical storage container whose interior was dry but faintly discolored along the base. A stack of purchase receipts with names and dates sat in a neat pile organized by date on the top shelf. Miles climbed the lowest rung of the shelving unit to read the top one without disturbing the stack. It was from a chemical supply company for two kilograms of Chromium trioxide. The date was five weeks ago.

"His equipment is gone," Vic said, looking at the bracket marks. "He packed the capability and left the framework."

"He knew someone might eventually come here," Miles said. "He didn't think it would matter. More than that…leaving all this crap on the walls makes me wonder if he wanted us to see it. Sort of taunting us, maybe."

Vic looked like she was going to say something else, but she was interrupted by a knocking sound behind her. It came from the front door, and it was immediately followed by Pruitt’s voice. She left the door closed, yelling through so they could hear.

“Sterling…Stone…the property records on the house juts came through. The landlord confirmed Cord paid his rent through the end of the month in cash. Sixteen days ago, in person."

Miles looked back at the worktable, at the absent equipment and the graduated jars. "He settled the rent so nobody would come looking before he was finished." He thought about the relabeled brush cleaner in Ostroff's studio, the treated soaking supply in Hale's shop. This was a man who worked in increments and saw no reason to hurry. "Whatever he's still planning, he made sure he had time for it."

Pruitt’s voice came back through the door, slightly muffled. "BOLO's going out right now, and I'm getting vehicle information from the landlord.”

Miles and Vic nodded, even though Pruitt could not see them. Vic sighed and said, “We need forensics in here before anyone touches any of this."

"Yeah…and that might take a while,” Miles said, looking round the room once again and starting to feel overwhelmed.

He didn't move. He stood in the Tyvek suit in the middle of Russell Cord's living space, surrounded by thirty color wheels and years of careful notation. Slowly, he looked at the color wheels and understood that they had confirmed their killer and lost him at the same time.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Once the importance of what was inside had been discovered, the Hazmat team lead okayed three other people to enter. One was Pruitt, and the other two were members of a forensic team. The forensics team had been through the main room twice and moved upstairs, but Miles was still studying the color wheels and looking for more names.

He had been looking at the wheels from this lower angle for several minutes before it resolved into a pattern. From a standing position in the center of the room you saw the totality of it, the sheer coverage, the density of the annotation. From the floor, with a different sight line, the arrangement became visible. The wheels with the highest drain index numbers were clustered along the front wall, the one that faced the street and caught the morning light first. As he moved toward the back and sides of the room, the index numbers dropped, the lower-urgency pigments receding away from the entrance. It was not random. It was a priority system, organized so that when Cord walked into the room each morning, the first things he saw were the ones that concerned him most.

Miles photographed the room from the floor to capture the arrangement at the angle that made it legible, then pushed himself up and crossed to the shelving unit. The forensic team had already logged the shelf contents and moved on. The reference texts that had been on the bottom shelf were now stacked to the side, each one tagged. Miles crouched in front of the unit and looked at what the removal of those books had revealed: the back wall of the shelf, which was now visible for the first time, and against it, lying flat and horizontal, a large-format watercolor pad.

It had been completely hidden behind the books. You would not know it was there unless you took every book off the shelf and looked. Somehow, it had gone overlooked, perhaps because it looked quite meager among everything else. He pulled on a fresh glove, lifted the pad carefully by its corner, and carried it to the worktable.

He opened the cover and saw that the first page was a color study. It was a rendering of a small section of what looked like a garden wall, painted in late afternoon light. The color was good—genuinely good. It possessed the kind of observational accuracy that required both technical training and a talented eye. He turned the page and this time saw a painting of a section of sky at dusk, the transition from blue to amber handled with restraint. He turned again. Another study, this one interior, a table surface with objects on it, the shadows dense and warm.

He turned pages steadily. All studies, all accomplished, all annotated in the lower margins with the same small hand he had been reading on the walls all morning: pigment names, proportions, and beside each color passage, a drain index number. Cord had been rating his own paintings by how much chromatic damage he believed he was doing in the act of making them.

Miles turned another page, and another. The studies continued for roughly two thirds of the pad.

Then a blank page.

He turned it.

The page on the other side was covered in handwriting, dense and close-lined, running from the top margin to the bottom with almost no space left unused. The handwriting was the same small hand as the annotations but different in character, less controlled. The letters slightly more compressed, the lines running at a faint downward angle by the time they reached the bottom of the page. He read the date at the top. Nearly three years ago.

He turned the page and came to another page of text, dated two weeks after the first. This one had the same compressed quality to it, the same slightly downward drift of the lines. He read it through. Then the next page. Then the next. He stood at the worktable and read through all twelve pages without moving, without looking up.

When he reached the last page, he stopped.

Then he looked up. "Vic. I think I found the manifestos…"

“What?” she asked, shocked.

But the time she was by his side, he was sure of it. Each entry was dated, the earliest nearly three years ago, the most recent from eight months back. They were not addressed to anyone, and they did not read like arguments designed to persuade. They read more like a man clarifying his own thinking, working through the logic of the belief system visible on the walls and arriving, each time, at the same conclusion by a slightly different route. The language was controlled and without apparent anger. He wrote about chromatic energy the way someone wrote about a physical property they had observed directly and documented carefully, without drama, with the confidence of a person who considered the observation settled.

The earliest entry described what Cord called his first awareness of the depletion, a moment in a graduate color theory seminar where he had looked at a reproduction of a Monet hanging. The entry read:

Today in Adler's seminar I understood something I have not been able to stop thinking about. There was a Monet reproduction on the wall, the water lilies, the large one. I have seen it many times. Today I looked at it and understood that the field it depicts no longer exists at that level of saturation. Not because the pond changed. Because the painting took something from it. I cannot yet explain the mechanism. I know only that I perceived it clearly and that the perception was not aesthetic. It was factual.