Page 3 of Wrong Door

"I take it we’re going somewhere?" she said.

"Savannah," Miles said. "A painter died in her studio and the ME found massive amounts of Hexavalent chromium."

"Chromium?"

"Yeah. Hayes has us on a 12:15, out of Reagan."

“Jesus,” she said, looking at her watch. “That’s just an hour and a half from now.”

He nodded, smiled, and said, “Then I guess we’d better get moving.”

CHAPTER TWO

Savannah/Hilton Head International was not a large airport, and at 4:02 in the afternoon, it was almost eerily quiet. Compared to what they had run through at Reagan, the quiet murmur of it was unreal. The only real noise at all was coming from a family with three children that was camped out near the luggage carousel with a pile of luggage that suggested they had not packed lightly. The air inside smelled faintly of the food court one level up, something fried and sweet drifting down through the open stairwell.

A woman not too far away from the luggage area spotted them before Miles had fully oriented himself in the space. She was in her early forties, compact and straight-backed, with close-cropped natural hair and a badge clipped to her belt. She came forward without hesitation, studying them.

"Agent Sterling, Agent Stone?" she said, extending her hand.

“That’s us,” Vic said, stepping forward and shaking first.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Detective Lena Pruitt. I’m running the case here in Savannah." Pruitt wore a dark blazer over a gray shirt, and her badge clipped to her belt. When Miles and Vic came through the baggage claim doors with their bags, she spotted them before they spotted her and came forward with a measured directness. "I appreciate you both coming down fast,” she said.

"Can you take us directly to the crime scene?" Miles asked.

"Absolutely. The car's out front. I’ll fill you in on the way."

Pruitt walked them through the airport, and they stepped outside into the Savannah afternoon. The air was warm and thick, with humidity and smelled of something green and faintly brackish that Miles had always associated with coastal cities built near water. Pruitt's car was an unmarked sedan parked at the curb in a zone that technically required a permit, but the placard on the dash had taken care of that. She unlocked it and they loaded their bags into the trunk and got in, Vic in the passenger seat and Miles in the back.

Pruitt pulled out of the airport loop and onto the highway before she said anything further. The road ran straight and flat through a wide stretch of tidal marsh. The grasses were a shade of deep, saturated green in the afternoon light, broken up by channels of dark water that caught the sky in long, still reflections.

“I have to say," Pruitt began, and Miles noticed a slight adjustment in her tone, "I've been reading everything I can find on the Elementalist cases. The Kane investigation…. all of it. I’ve even dug deep into how the hell he managed to escape from prison.” She glanced at Vic and said, "I followed the Austin case, too. The neon sign angle was well reported, at least the basics of it. God, I can’t imagine how exhausted you guys must be."

"Eh, you sort of get used to it," Miles said from the back.

"I get that." Pruitt's eyes went back to the road. "What I'm saying is, when the ME came back with chromium six at those levels, I knew what I was looking at. Or at least I had a strong theory." She said it matter-of-factly, without any particular effort to seem impressive.

"What can you tell us about the victim?" Miles asked.

"Nadia Ostroff, forty-four,” she said right away. “She had a studio space in the Starland District, which is a neighborhood on the south end of downtown. Arts community, galleries, that kind of area. She'd been there about six years." Pruitt moved into the left lane to pass a slower vehicle and moved back. "She was well regarded locally. Savannah landscapes mostly, some coastal imagery. But she put this weird spin to it all, sort of like a Twin Peaks and David Lynch sort of vibe, you know? She showed regularly at two galleries in the city and had collectors as far up as Charleston and Atlanta. She had no criminal history, no civil disputes, no restraining orders, nothing that would point toward a targeted act."

"Any family?" Vic asked.

"She went through a divorce about four years ago. Her ex-husband lives in Athens. He re-married and I spoke to him at length on a Zoom call yesterday, He’s been cooperative, and his alibi is airtight. But you’re welcome to look at my notes.”

“No hostility between the two of them?” Vic asked.

“No…there was no indication of anything adversarial between them. She has a sister in Savannah, and a grown son in college up in North Carolina. The son flew back when we notified him. He's staying with the aunt."

"Who found her?" Miles asked.

"The sister. Nadia was supposed to meet her for dinner and didn't show and didn't answer her phone. The sister went to the studio around 9:30 and found her on the floor. According to the sister, the studio door was unlocked, which apparently was not unusual when Nadia was working late."

Miles watched the city beginning to take shape ahead of them, the road rising slightly over the marsh and its grid of church spires and rooftops emerging from the canopy of live oaks that covered it like a second skyline.

"What about the initial medics on the scene and the eventual ME’s findings?” Miles asked.

"The paramedics who responded noted the pigments and solvents found in some of the paints inside the studio, and the attending went with occupational exposure as the most likely explanation. It's not an unreasonable first read if you don't push on it. Painters work with chromium-based pigments all the time. But the family pushed the issue, which I was a fan of.”