Page 21 of Wrong Door

Miles read it twice. Then he turned to the next entry, dated eleven days later.

I have been trying to find the language for what I observed. The closest I can get is this: color in the living world is not infinite. It exists in quantities that can be measured and that can be depleted. When a painter fixes color to a surface, the color does not duplicate. It transfers. The source field loses what the fixed object gains. I believe this is demonstrable. I am beginning to work out how.

The third entry was longer, the handwriting slightly more controlled than the first two, as though Cord had settled into the project of it. He had begun constructing the index, the earliest version of it, still rough and intuitive, ranking colors not yet by compound but by what he called chromatic weight, his estimate of how much living-world saturation a given pigment consumed in its production and application. The numbers in this early version bore only a loose resemblance to the precise drain index figures on the walls. But the architecture of it all was the same.

Miles turned forward through the subsequent entries, reading selectively, tracking the development. By the fifth entry the language had become more technical, the intuitive rankings giving way to calculations that referenced actual color measurement literature. By the seventh, Cord was citing spectrophotometric studies and adapting their methodology to support the framework. The tone throughout was level and without drama, the tone of a man who considered himself to be documenting observable fact and had no need to argue for it.

The most recent entry, eight months ago, described three people that it seemed Cord had been studying closely. But at the end of each description, there were the words: PASS. MOVE ON. There were no names, locations or even discernable features described about the people in the entry. He wrote about them the way someone wrote about a decision already made, matter-of-factly, with the specificity of a man who had finished deliberating and moved into planning. And in the end, the people had not fully interested him.

“I don’t know if I’d call these manifestos per se,” Vic said.

“Maybe not. But it’s the same sort of verbiage from some of the others. It’s leaning in that direction and maybe at least gives us an idea of why he—”

He was interrupted by a loud banging at the door…Pruitt again, no doubt.

“Sorry to bother you, agents,” she yelled. “But you might want to get out here.”

Miles nearly argued the point but decided maybe he did need some time out of this damned suit. He knew it had only been an hour or so, but it felt like he’d been in it for half a day. He started for the door, and Vic followed behind him. When they stepped out onto the porch, the Savannah afternoon looked almost too bright.

Pruitt was standing at the bottom of the stairs, still wearing her N95 mask. “You might as well go ahead and take those suits off,” she said. “A call just came in…and it looks like we’ve got Victim Number Three.”

“How recent?” Vic asked.

“Not sure. The officer on site says it’s got to be at least a few hours.”

Miles started working to remove the suit right away. One of the members of the forensics team saw him struggling with and came over to assist.

“The crime scene is in the Ardsley Park neighborhood. Female, found in the back garden of the property.”

“Skin mottling?” Vic asked as she started getting out of her own suit.

“Yeah, the same that was flagged in the Ostroff and Hale cases. Plus, the victim is surrounded by flowers."

“Can you please call them back and tell the officers not to touch anything and keep the perimeter tight?” Vic asked.

“I already relayed all of that when I spoke with him.”

He ended the call and went to the base of the stairs. "Vic. Pruitt."

“You said Ardsley Park,” Miles said. “How far away is that?”

"That's about ten minutes from here."

"We can go now," Miles said. "But we found what might be this killer’s version of manifestos. They’re in an old watercolor pad. Can you make sure every single page is photographed?”

“Absolutely. You want me on the Ardsley Park scene when I’m done here?”

“If you have time, that would be great," Vic said.

They left the house on Gaston Street and got into Pruitt's car. As they pulled away from the curb, Miles looked back once at the house, at the pale gray facade and the dead window boxes and the accumulated mail on the porch, and thought about the watercolor pad and the three names in the most recent entry, two of them clear and one of them folded into shadow.

He pulled up the photograph on his phone as Pruitt drove and tried again to read the third name. The shadow from the paper fold ran directly across the last two letters and rendered them ambiguous. He could make out the first several characters clearly enough. He stared at it for another few seconds and then put his phone away, because there was a woman in a garden in Ardsley Park and the question of who else Cord had been planning for was going to have to wait ten minutes.

"The manifesto pages," Vic said from the backseat. She had been thinking through it in parallel. "He named three people. Eight months ago."

"Yes."

"Ostroff and Hale are accounted for."