Page 22 of Wrong Door

"Yes," Miles said.

Miles chose not to say what all three of them were already thinking: a woman in a garden surrounded by flowers with mottled skin was probably not a coincidence. And if she had been killed in the same slow and methodical way as the others, there may be no way in hell they’d ever catch this killer.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The garden was somehow both quaint and impressive. It was the sort of at-home garden someone had put a lot of time into, something that went beyond a simple hobby and into passion. It occupied the full width of the backyard behind a narrow Craftsman bungalow, bordered on three sides by a low brick wall covered in climbing roses. Inside that border, the planting was dense but not crowded, the beds organized around a central path of stepping stones that curved from the back door to a wrought iron bench at the far end. The only plants Miles could instantly recognize were roses, wildflowers, what looked like mint, and long rows of lavender in one of the rear beds. Bees moved through the space steadily and without urgency, working the lavender and the open faces of the climbing roses. The faint buzzing noise they produced was oddly comforting.

In the middle of the central path, between the dahlias and the first row of lavender, a woman of about sixty or so was on her knees. She had fallen forward into one of the beds, her face buried in the potting soil.

She had gone down in a position that suggested she had been working when it happened, her weight forward, her gloved hands resting in the soil of the left bed where she had apparently been weeding. The mottling on the visible skin of her neck and jaw was pronounced, more advanced than Hale's had been, which told Miles something about the timing of it all. Her face was turned slightly to the right and almost touching the low brick edging of the bed. She was wearing a wide-brimmed canvas hat that had been knocked slightly askew, a faded green work shirt, and canvas trousers.

A police officer came walking from a small path to the right that wound behind a series of ferns. He introduces himself as he offered his hand to be shaken.

“Officer Tatum,” he said. “Good to meet you.”

“Agent Stone and Sterling,” Vic said. “What can you tell us?”

"The victim’s name is Patrice Odom,” he said. “Her neighbor found her about two hours ago. She'd come over to return a tool she'd borrowed, and she could see the body from the fence line. She didn't enter the garden." He looked at Odom and then back at Miles. "I made some calls while I was waiting. Patrice Odom, fifty-six. She's employed at Whitmore House on Abercorn Street. It's one of the historic estate properties, the kind that does tours. She’s one of several who manage the grounds."

Miles looked at the garden around him. “So, she does this for a living?”

"Yeah, and she has for about twelve years, from what I was told." Tatum looked at his phone briefly. "The estate administrator I spoke with said she essentially built the Whitmore gardens from the ground up when she came on. It's considered one of the better-maintained historic gardens in the city."

Miles stepped carefully onto the first of the path's stepping stones and moved into the garden. He stayed on the stones and kept his distance from the body. Vic followed Miles in, placing her feet with the same attention he was.

The garden was meticulous in the way that reflected long practice. The beds were edged cleanly, the soil between the plants turned and aerated, and the spent blooms removed from every stem within reach of where Odom had been working. Miles looked at the bed where her hands were resting and saw that she had been working her way along a row of what he thought might be salvia. A few dead stems were set aside in a small pile to her left. She had gotten about two-thirds of the way through the row.

He looked at her hands. The gloves were a standard gardening type, canvas with a rubberized grip on the palm and fingers. He didn’t think they were anything special, just the kind sold at any garden center. They fit closely enough that he could see the shape of her hands inside them. The right glove had a long streak of dark soil across the back. The left had less soil and showed more wear along the palm and the index finger.

He crouched on the steppingstone closest to her and looked at the gloves more carefully without touching them.

He was pretty sure the color was wrong. It was subtle, the kind of thing you would not notice without a reason to look. The canvas on both gloves was a faded tan. He assumed this might be the natural color of the material plus the accumulated staining of years of garden work. But along the inner wrist of the left glove, where the cuff folded back slightly, the canvas had a different cast. There was a faint yellowish discoloration, distinct from the gray-brown of soil staining. Leaning in even closer, he saw that there was a slightly waxy surface quality where the material had absorbed something and dried. It was present on the right glove, too, along the cuff edge and faintly across the palm where the rubberized grip had small gaps at the seams.

He then looked at her neck and jaw. The mottling there was extensive, more developed than Hale's presentation had been at the time of death. If he had to guess (and really, that was all he could do at the moment), she had been absorbing whatever was in those gloves for longer than Hale had been absorbing the compound from the foam.

"The gloves," he said.

Vic crouched beside him on the adjacent stone and looked where he was looking. She was quiet for a moment. "You think the toxin or chemical was worked into the fabric."

"The inner surface…could be. Every time she put them on, that was prolonged skin contact. And sweat and humidity from the hands would have accelerated absorption through the dermis." He looked at the pile of dead stems beside her. "She could have been using these for days. Weeks, if he treated them early enough and the concentration was calibrated for slow accumulation."

He stood and looked at the full garden, at the dahlias and the lavender and the climbing roses on the wall. He thought about the brush cleaner container in Ostroff's studio with the wrong handwriting on the label. The soaking solution in Hale's shop. And now a pair of gardening gloves treated with a compound that absorbed through skin with every hour of wear. He hated to think in such a way, but it was really sort of ingenious.

Three delivery mechanisms with the same chemical. Three victims. Each one chosen through their most routine professional contact with their materials.

"A painter, a florist, and now a gardener."

“Yeah…but some might conflate a florist and a gardener together,” Vic pointed out. “Different professions, sure, but not all that different.”

"Every one of them built their professional life around color. That's the selection criterion." He kept his eyes on the roses, as if he were trying to lure an answer out of their petals. "Not a personal grievance, not a professional conflict. He chose them because of what they do with color and what he believes that means."

"Back at his place, there were notes on those color wheels,” Vic said. “He ranked pigments and flowers and plants by how much chromatic energy he believed they pulled from the living world. That system on the walls wasn't abstract. It was a prioritization method."

Miles nodded, thinking of the manifesto pages in the watercolor pad, the calm, clarifying language of a man who had been working toward a conclusion for years. "He believes color is a finite resource…that it moves from the living environment into fixed objects, into paintings and cut flowers and cultivated private gardens. And he sees his victims as people responsible for that movement—that they are diminishing what everyone else can see. He thinks he's correcting something."

"He thinks he's giving it back," Vic said.

"That's how he'd described it, yes." Miles turned from the roses and looked at the body of Patrice Odom, at her gloved hands resting in the salvia bed. This was a woman who had spent twelve years building a garden at a historic estate. And she apparently loved it so much that she had worked with plants and dirt in her spare time as well.