Page 23 of Wrong Door

A car pulled up at the front of the property, just barely audible. Several seconds later, Pruitt appeared at the small gate and peered in.

“Same story here?” she asked.

“Looking like it,” Vic answered.

“The ME pulled in right behind me,” she said.

Miles stepped back off the path and onto the grass at the garden's edge. He looked one more time at the gloves, at the faint discoloration along the cuff edge of the left one. The ME would confirm the compound, and the lab would confirm the gloves. None of that was the question anymore as far as Miles was concerned.

The question that truly scared him was just how long Cord had been at this. This killer had put his very quiet pieces in place long ago…weeks, maybe months in some cases. There was no telling how many other bodies they would find before even getting a scent of where Cord was. He dared to hope they might find clues as to his hit list in the chaos of writings and notes at his house. But if not…they were in trouble.

“Officer Tatum, can you give us an address for this estate Ms. Odom worked for?” Miles asked.

"Yeah, it’s 1132 Abercorn Street," Tatum said, reading from his phone. “Whitmore House.”

Miles looked to Vic and said, “That’s our next stop. We should talk to some of the other people who worked with her. If it’s a large enough estate to attract tours, that would be pretty public. Maybe Cord was scouting here there. Maybe someone saw something, or a security camera could have picked up something.”

“That’s a lot of maybes,” Vic said, but she was already heading back for the yard.

“Detective Pruitt, can you please make sure there are digital copies of every single bit of writing from Cord’ place as soon as possible?”

“There’s already a team on it,” Pruitt said. “Are you hoping for a kill list?”

It was a terrible thing to expect; he was well aware of that. But he found himself nodding and, with a growing knot of worry and unease growing is his stomach, he followed after Vic, leaving the garden and the fallen body of Patrice Odom behind.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The drive from Odom's garden to Whitmore House took a little less than ten minutes. Miles spent most of it thinking about the notation sheets on Russell Cord's walls, the dense pages of handwriting that were now being catalogued and photographed in their entirety back on Gaston Street. Pruitt's team would go through all of it, and he was holding onto the possibility that somewhere in those pages, in the margins of a color wheel or the closing lines of one of the manifesto entries, Cord had written something that functioned as a list. A name, an address, a description of a target he had been watching. He knew that it was possible that there was nothing, that Cord had been careful enough to keep the operational details of his planning separate from the ideological record he had left behind. Miles didn't know yet and not knowing was its own specific weight to carry.

Whitmore House sat at the end of a long brick drive off Abercorn Street, set back from the road behind a double row of live oaks that were old enough that their canopies had grown together overhead. They formed a tunnel of shade that the afternoon light came through in broken, shifting patterns. The house itself was antebellum, three stories of pale stucco with a wide veranda across the front and a cupola at the roofline that caught the sky above the tree canopy. The grounds extended around all four sides of the structure, visible from the drive as a series of distinct garden spaces connected by gravel paths, each one cultivated to a different period-appropriate standard. Beyond the house, Miles spotted a larger informal garden in the English style, the plantings taller and more naturalistic than the formal spaces at the front.

They were halfway up the stone steps when the front door opened. They were greeted by a woman in her late forties, with reading glasses on a lanyard around her neck and the contained, managing expression of someone who was trying to keep it together.

"Agents Sterling and Stone?" she said.

"That's right," Miles said.

“Yes, a Detective Pruitt called about five minutes ago to make sure someone was available to talk to you. I’m Cecelia Hartman, one of the managers. Come on in.”

She led them through the main hall. It consisted of a wide corridor with pine floors and period furniture arranged along the walls,. From there, they entered into a side room that was clearly staff territory rather than the public-facing part of the house. The room was large but held only a round table, six chairs, and a sideboard with a coffee maker. The room smelled of old wood, coffee, and something faintly floral. Miles thought that was probably just the nature of a house where fresh arrangements moved through on a regular schedule.

Hartman gestured toward the chairs and they sat. She poured coffee without asking and brought the cups to the table and sat across from them, her hands folded in front of her.

"Ms. Hartman, do you know why we’re here?" Vic asked.

“Yes. I knew before Detective Pruitt called. When Alice, Patrice’s neighbor, called the police, she called us next. She was a weekly visitor and was very distraught. It was through the staff before I could get ahead of it." She looked up apologetically and added, "I'm not sure it would have mattered. These things move fast in a small community."

Miles nodded. "How long had Patrice been with the estate?"

"Twelve years this past March." Hartman said it without having to think about it, which told him something about how she held her staff in her mind. "She came to us from a landscape firm in Charleston. We were lucky to get her."

"What did she do here, specifically?" Vic asked.

"Everything, really, when it came to the grounds." Hartman settled back slightly in her chair. "She redesigned the informal garden in her first two years. Completely reconceived it from the original plan, which had become historically inaccurate through years of ad hoc planting decisions. She researched the period, sourced the appropriate varieties, oversaw the installation herself. After that, she managed all of it: the formal parterre, the kitchen garden, the seasonal beds. She knew the soil chemistry of every section of the property. She knew which beds got afternoon shade in July and how that changed what you could grow in them." She looked back into her coffee cup and Miles was pretty sure she was trying not to cry. "She was not someone who treated this as a job with hours," she finished.

"Did she have any conflicts with anyone here?" Miles asked. "With colleagues, with vendors, with anyone connected to the estate?"

Hartman looked at him directly. "None that I was ever made aware of. And I would have been made aware. Patrice was not a person who generated that kind of friction. I've been sitting in my office since I found out, trying to think of a single person who would have wanted her harmed." She shook her head. "I can't."