Page 26 of Wrong Door

"He's already in the system," Miles said.

"For four months," Vic said. “That’s pretty damned close to the beginning.”

Miles pulled his laptop toward him and opened the task force database through the secure portal. It took a bit of digging, but he found it: Cord's file was there, sparse and incomplete, the kind of file that had been created because a flag was triggered and then never substantially added to. The flag notation was brief: name generated through academic conference cross-reference, color theory background, employment gap unaccounted for, no known direct contact with subject, review pending. There was a single attachment, labeled as “Conference Entry.”

Miles opened it up and read it. It had come from a color science and perception symposium, held in Atlanta three years ago. Cord had been listed as an attendee in the conference's published proceedings. And that is what linked him to Kane. Kane had been alleged, through a secondary source, to have been present at the same conference, not as a registered attendee but as someone who had been seen there by a person later identified as a Kane associate. The connection between Cord and Kane through that conference was indirect and inferential, and had been considered too thin to prioritize given the volume of similar flags being generated at the time.

“You looked into the employment gap, right?” Miles asked Pruitt.

From her place at the dry erase board, she nodded. “Yeah. Cord left SCAD for a while before the non-renewal. He was gone for two years and when he came back it was on a reduced adjunct position. The final non-renewal ended his connection to the institution entirely. The two-year gap in the middle of that timeline has never been explained and no one has found records of what he was up to during that time.”

“You think SCAD might know?” Vic offered.

“I can make a call and ask.”

Miles stayed on the taskforce database, pulling up the timeline Ortega's team had compiled on Kane's network recruitment activity and set it beside the Cord file on his screen.

The overlap was surprisingly clear. The two-year period when Cord had dropped out of any traceable professional activity corresponded almost exactly with the window of time in which the bureau believed Kane's network had been actively recruiting.

“The timeline is almost perfect,” he said. “But based on what we found in his home, I believe the belief was already there.”

“What do you mean?” Vic asked.

“The earliest entries in those manifesto pages were dated nearly four years back…so they predate the gap in Cord's employment record by several months. The chromatic depletion framework, the color indexes, all of it was developing before he ever encountered Kane's network. Kane didn't give him the idea." He looked at the conference entry again, the Atlanta symposium where Kane was thought to have been. "Kane found someone who already had the architecture built and handed him the permission to use it."

"And the chemistry," Vic added.

"And the chemistry. They would make a perfect team. The specificity of the chromium compounds, the delivery mechanisms, the calibrated concentrations. That's not something a color theory lecturer works out on his own from art supply research." Miles looked at the empty jars on the forensic photographs from Gaston Street, further building his theory. "Someone taught him that, or pointed him at the resources, or both."

He sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment, running it all through his head. The belief system had been Cord's, genuinely, developed over years before anyone found it useful. The obsession was real and it had been his all along. But somewhere in a two-year gap that no employment record explained, the obsession had been met by something external, something that gave it shape and direction and the specific technical capability that had killed three people in Savannah with methods that required knowledge a color theorist had no business knowing.

Kane had not created Russell Cord. He had found him and finished molding him.

Miles looked at the task force file again, at the notation about resource constraints and a pending review. "Hahn found this running a search that wasn't part of his assignment," Miles said.

"He’s working it, too?" Vic said.

Miles nodded, still not completely sure how he felt about it. But really, deep down, he understood that he was only being hesitant about Hahn because for right now, it seemed that he was inadvertently filling the same role Sarah would have filled. And he was already feeling her absence in this case in a way he had not expected.

“I don’t think Hayes or Ortega has officially assigned him to it,” Miles said. “Based on what I’m gathering, he may have just sort of stumbled onto it.” Thinking of Hahn, he picked up his phone and typed a reply. Good work. This helps a lot. Send everything you have on the flag to me directly. He sent it and set the phone back down.

Pruitt stepped forward and said, “No luck with SCAD. What’s going on? Can you catch me up?”

Miles sighed, slightly embarrassed to admit such a thing, and said, "Cord was flagged in our system four months ago. He was cross-referenced with Kane in regard to a conference in Atlanta. But because it had not yet been fully proven that Kane was indeed at the conference, the lead wasn't followed up." He looked at the whiteboard, at the growing list of names in Pruitt's clean columns. "He's a Kane disciple. The color theory isn't incidental to the case. It was the thing Kane liked about him. It’s why Kane chose him.”

Pruitt absorbed this without visible reaction. Then she looked at the board. "Which means the list is now not just a list of potential victims…"

“But maybe a list of potential suspects, too,” Vic finished.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Savannah College of Art and Design faculty directory was not a public document in any current form that Miles could find, but archived versions of it existed in several places online. The only viable information Pruitt had garnered from her call with them had pointed them to a rough, old and badly-in-need-of-an-update alumni website, he found indexed faculty listings that went back decades. From there, he was able to find a snapshot of the color theory department's adjunct roster from four years ago, the last year Cord had been listed. It felt flimsy, but he was also pretty sure this was the best place to start if they were trying to locate Cord or to figure out how to locate his kill list.

There were nine names on it besides Cord's. Miles had been running them one by one against LinkedIn profiles, academic email addresses, and publicly available contact information, building a current location for each one. He’d been looking through it all for nearly half an hour when the name Leslie Marks came up.

Marks was listed in the archived directory as a senior adjunct in the color theory program. She also had a current faculty page at the college that was active and recently updated. Her contact information included a departmental email and, in a linked professional profile, a neighborhood association affiliation that put her residential address in the Midtown area of the city. With this, Miles was able to cross-reference the neighborhood affiliation against property records and had a street address in four minutes.

Of course, it was now 2:40 in the morning and he wasn’t sure about knocking on doors solely in the hope of maybe getting information. He looked across the table at Vic, who had her coffee cup in both hands and was reading through the conference cross-reference material Hahn had sent over.