Page 29 of Wrong Door

“Maybe,” Miles said, looking regrettably at the pot of coffee he’d not be able to enjoy. “But you’ve just helped us find a big piece that will help us find out for sure.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Miles had Pruitt on the car’s Bluetooth speaker before they cleared Leslie Marks’s block. Though it was nearing 3:30 in the morning, the car suddenly felt filled with energy and something like progress. Miles and Vic spent the next two minutes filling her in on what they’d learned. And while Miles made his way out of the neighborhood, Pruitt used the description and the directions Marks had given them to nail down a location.

“Oh, this has got to be it,” she said just thirty seconds later. “I’m looking at a map of the area right here. There’s a small storage unit facility about three blocks away from the campus.”

“Can you send the exact address?” Vic asked.

“Yes, right after this call.”

“And can you get started on a warrant?” Miles asked. “We need to get into the unit.”

"I can do my best…but it is 3:30 in the morning. I've got a judge I can reach, but it's going to take a little time at this hour. But if I explain it’s related to a Kane case, I think it’ll get expedited. I'd call it forty-five minutes to an hour for the paperwork to clear."

"Fine," Miles said. "We'll sit on it until the warrant's through."

"I'll have it to you as fast as I can. I'm calling now. And I’ll send the address.”

The address came through to both of their phones just five seconds later. Vic plugged it into her phone and directed Miles through streets that were still and dark, the live oak canopy overhead dense enough to close out most of the dark sky. Vic’s instructions led them around the SCAD campus and fifteen minutes later, they were coming toward a narrow service road that ran behind a row of commercial properties. From here, the lights of the campus and its surrounding buildings several blocks away looked almost ghostlike in the night.

The service road emptied onto a strange, industrial-looking two-lane and then the storage units came into view. They were fortunate in that it was not a run-of-the-mill storage facility where there was a front office and, usually, a fence or other form of barrier blocking the place off. Miles figured someone simply owned the property and rented the storage units out on a sort of unofficial basis—maybe even someone from the college.

The garage units were at the back of the lot, a row of eight, their roll-up doors facing an alley wide enough for a vehicle to turn in. Miles pulled in and cut the headlights and sat. He looked to the last one on the right, buried in shadow. The door was padlocked, a heavy model he could see from where he parked, the hasp flush-mounted into the door frame. There were no windows in the unit and no exterior light above the door. The adjacent units were just as dark.

Miles got out and looked around Cord’s unit. There were grime and a collection of old, dead leaves around the base. He shone a flashlight on the lock and saw that it was an older model. He made a loop around the unit but was unable to find any real indication that it had been either neglected forever or had been recently used.

He returned to the car, hating that they had to wait on the warrant. He wondered if they could go ahead and bust in anyway, knowing that the warrant was pretty much a sure thing. He was sure that sort of thing would be frowned upon. He was about to ask Vic about it when his phone rang. She saw that it was Pruitt and answered right away.

“The warrant is approved,” she said. “And yes, it was thirty-five minutes. That is indeed probably some sort of record. But no one is screwing around when it comes to this Kane stuff.”

“Thanks, Pruitt.”

Miles ended the call and they both got out of the car. Vic was carrying a lockpick set she’d taken from the trunk but the padlock didn’t respond to anything Vic had with her, and it became apparent within two minutes that it was not going to. Miles looked at the door, at the hasp, and at the way the door frame was constructed. The door itself was a standard residential roll-up, the aluminum panels fitted into a track on either side. The hasp was the problem, bolted through the frame at three points, the kind of installation a person put in when they were serious about what was behind it.

He looked at Vic. She had already moved to the left side of the door and was examining the track.

The track's lower bracket was mounted to a concrete sill with four bolts, and the concrete around two of them had cracked over time and been patched without full structural replacement. Vic tested the bracket with the heel of her hand and it gave slightly. The repaired concrete failing to hold the way the original had.

"Here’s our weak spot," she said.

Miles took a single stride back and then surged forward with a kick. The noise of it boomed through the silent lot like hollow thunder. It took three kicks concentrated at the lower left corner where the track met the sill before the bracket gave way. The track pulled free and the door folded inward along the bottom edge. The whole assembly buckled just enough to create a gap they could get through, making the lock pretty much useless.

Miles went in first, ducking under the warped lower panel. He clicked his flashlight on and as his eyes started adjusting to the light, he noticed the smell. It was the same smell he’d noticed at Gaston Street: present, identifiable, and belonging entirely to the past. It was not strong, barely even a ghost of an aroma, really. It was the residue of an enclosed space that had held chemical materials for an extended period and then been emptied.

And then, when his eyes had adjusted to the light, he saw something he had not been expecting.

The unit was empty.

The concrete floor showed the ghost marks of where things had stood: rectangular outlines left by containers and equipment, half-circles where buckets or cans had been sitting, and a collection of accumulated grime. There were paint splotches on the floor in several places, just the casual residue of a working painter's space. There were more splotches on the walls, thin streaks and dried drops at varying heights that had accrued over years.

Miles moved the flashlight across the walls slowly. There was nothing on them. No wheels, no notation sheets, no charts. Whatever had been here had been taken down some immeasurable time ago.

In the far-left corner, half behind the vertical support post, lay a single brush. He went to it and crouched down. It was a medium flat, the bristles stiff with dried paint that had not been cleaned out. The paint dried into the bristles was a deep viridian. He photographed it in place without touching it.

He was straightening when the flashlight beam crossed the back wall again, and he stopped.

In the right rear corner, on its face in the concrete, was a canvas. It had been so perfectly propped against the wall, that he’d not seen it at first. Vic apparently had, though, because she was moving directly toward it.