Page 28 of Wrong Door

“I assure you, this is very important. She’s in no danger but we believe she could help us with an urgent case we are working on.”

There was silence for three seconds, and then the door opened on a man in his fifties wearing a t-shirt and pajama pants. His hair was pushed sideways from the pillow, his expression set firmly against being so rudely awaken. Behind him, a short-statured woman was coming down a flight of stairs that led into the foyer.

“I’m Leslie Marks” she said. She was tightening a robe along her waist as she eyed the agents. She was in her mid-fifties, with short silver-streaked hair and a face that was clearly tired but also intrigued. She looked at Miles and Vic with the evaluating attention of someone accustomed to assessing new information quickly. "What’s going on?”

They both showed their badges again. “We need to ask you some questions about a former colleague of yours,” Miles said. “A Russell Cord.”

“Oh, I see. Well, come on in.”

Marks brought them through to the foyer, down a small hallway, and into the kitchen at the back of the house. She put coffee on without asking whether they wanted it, which Miles appreciated, and she sat across the table from them while it brewed. The husband sat at the kitchen counter on a stool, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“So, what do you need to know?” she asked.

“Just what you can remember about him when you worked together at SCAD,” Miles said.

“Has he…has he done something?”

Miles caught the tone she used when she asked this, as if she’d almost expected it.

“We don’t know for certain,” Vic said. “We’re hoping your answers might help us figure that out. So, what can you tell us about him?”

“Well, based on his behavior when he came back to SCAD after his hiatus, I’m not all that surprised that the FBI are asking about him. He just seemed…off when he came back.”

"Off how?” Vic asked.

"He was always intense," she said. "From the first semester I knew him, actually. But it got more noticeable after he spent that time away.”

“Do you know where he was during that two-year absence?” Vic asked.

“No clue.”

“And was he ever rude or aggressive?”

“No…he was never really unfriendly. Just very focused. The color theory work consumed him in a way that went beyond professional interest. He was always drawing, always making notes. You'd see him in the faculty lounge with his sketchbook, and he'd be annotating color swatches with calculations that weren't part of any assignment or course preparation." She paused for a moment, as if staring into the past to make sure she got the details right. "In his final semester, there was a guest lecturer. A chemist from the pigment industry who came to talk about chromium's role in historical and contemporary pigment formulation. Standard material for that level of the program." She looked at the coffee maker as it gurled and spat, filling the pot. "Russell became fixated on it. He attended the lecture three times, because the same speaker did two additional sessions for different cohorts. He wasn't assigned to the other sessions. He just showed up."

"Did he say why?" Miles asked.

"He said the chromium angle confirmed something he'd been working on. He was not more specific than that, and I didn’t press him. And there was no reason he would have. We were colleagues, sure, but not friends."

“So, you never spent any time with him outside of work?”

“No. But I was invited to his garage a few times. Many of us were.”

Miles felt his senses heighten and little alarms flaring in his head. “What garage?”

"He rented a garage," Marks said, rolling her eyes as if the idea was silly. "It was near the Savannah Arts Academy, on the west side. He kept it the whole time he was at SCAD, I believe.” She considered this for a moment, nodding as the memory came back to her. "He was very particular about it. He said he needed somewhere for his materials, somewhere separate from his living space. He invited a few of us to see it at one point, made it sound like a studio space. But like I said…I never went. A couple of colleagues said they did go, once, and that it was full of his color work—charts, samples, equipment. Things like that. They thought it was eccentric, maybe a little pretentious.” She shrugged and added, “But that was the consensus on Russell, generally."

Miles looked at Vic briefly and then back at Marks. "Would you happen to know where it is exactly?"

"Maybe. It’s been a while, you know, so you’ll have to forgive me. He described the location once when he was trying to get us to come."

“Just do your best,” Vic said. “If you can get us in the vicinity, we can figure out the rest.”

She nodded and spent the next two minutes walking them through how she thought they might get there. She seemed confident that it was two blocks south of the Arts Academy, a row of rental garages behind a commercial property. “And I know it was the last unit on the right. That’s what he called it: Last Unit on the Right.” .

Miles had been typing directions on his phone and though they were a bit scattered, he felt confident that it was more than enough to find the garage.

“I’m sorry,” Marks said, “but is he in some sort of trouble?”