Page 30 of Wrong Door

It was roughly twelve by sixteen, smaller than the harbor scene in Ostroff's studio. He could see from a few feet away that the edges of the stretcher bars were scorched, the wood blackened along two sides and one corner. The char extended slightly onto the canvas face where the burn had caught the edge of the primed surface before stopping. Someone had held a flame to it, or had placed it near one, and had stopped before it went fully.

Miles crouched beside it with Vic and looked at the charred edges. The burn had gone far enough that the bottom-right corner of the canvas was destroyed, the material reduced to a fragile lattice of ash. The rest of it appeared intact beneath the facing-down position.

Slowly, Vic turned the canvas around so they could see what was on it.

It was a Savannah landscape. Sure, it could have been any place, but Miles knew without a doubt that it was Savannah. He recognized the geography, the particular relationship of the marsh to the tree line, the specific quality of coastal Georgia light on water in what looked like late afternoon. The composition was oriented toward a stretch of open marsh with a stand of long-leafed pines at the horizon and the sky above them going from a deep, luminous gold at the waterline up through amber into a blue that was not quite the blue of daylight or the blue of full dusk but the specific, brief register between them that lasted perhaps twenty minutes and that most people who saw it didn’t have a name for.

It was beautiful.

Miles could see the deliberateness in the color choices, the layering, the way each passage of the painting was built from specific decisions about hue and saturation and value that reflected not just skill but genuine understanding. The color in the piece was extraordinary.

This man could paint. Whatever Russell Cord was before Kane found him, or before the belief had sharpened into method and the method into three dead people, he had been the real thing.

He thought about the painting in Nadia Ostroff's studio, the one Cord had turned face-down on the concrete floor. He thought about what it had meant to Cord to do that, and what it had meant for Cord to stand in a garage at some point before he disappeared and hold a flame to the corner of his own best work and then stop. Had he, at some point, thought he was just as guilty as everyone else at what he perceived as theft?

"He tried to burn it," Miles said.

"I know. But he changed his mind in the end. Maybe he was that attached to it."

“We should update Pruitt,” Miles said. “Get forensics out here just in case there’s DNA or hair fibers. We need to go."

He looked at the painting for another few seconds before he left—the marsh, the pine line, the light between late afternoon and dusk that Cord had translated through paint. And for a moment, he thought he understood Russell Cord as a man before Kane had dug his hooks in.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The precinct at 6:40 in the morning suddenly felt like a sort of prison for Miles. They'd had the storage unit, thinking they were so close to finding the one huge lead that would help them secure Cord. And for it to not only be mostly empty but also provide him with a brief glimpse of Cord as an adoring painter rather than a killer had proved useless. Even though there was an officer elsewhere in the building working with the storage center manager to try to get security footage, Miles felt like they were back to square one. Sitting back behind a laptop in the hopes of uncovering digital dirt felt like a huge loss.

The conference room that had been theirs through the night now felt stale and somehow stagnant—all lost ideas and the smell of coffee. Miles was munching on a donut he had taken from a box someone had brought in, not because he was hungry, but because he knew he needed to eat. Vic sat across from him, her tablet set flat on the table in front of her and a cold, forgotten cup of coffee to her left.

Pruitt stepped away from the white board and nearly collapsed into a chair at the table. There were marker stains on her hands from where she had been continually adding names to her list of people who made a living with color.

"The list stops at three hundred and forty-two," Pruitt said. "And that's not including anyone who may just be artists by hobby only." She looked to her marker-stained hands, her eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion. "We've got painters and gallery-represented artists as the most important group; they'd be the most visible to someone like Cord. Then we have photographers, then textile artists. There's a stained-glass studio on Waters Avenue I almost left off and then put back on because the work is entirely color-driven, and it seemed like the kind of thing that would register on Cord's index." She started to massage her temples as she continued to list things off. Two photography studios that specialize in fine art printing, a dye works, three muralists currently under active city commission, and a floral design school on Drayton Street. Every landscape firm in the city. I stopped counting garden centers when I got to twelve."

"There's no version of a protection detail that covers this," Vic said. She was not asking for confirmation; she was stating the constraint so they could all stop pretending it wasn't there. “I think you’ve done all you could.”

"I know,” Pruitt said. “And what’s worse is that even if I pulled every available officer in the district and dedicated them to nothing else but going through this list, we could cover maybe forty locations with any kind of continuity. And that assumes Cord is targeting fixed locations rather than individuals, which his previous victims suggest he is not."

Miles was looking at the list, slowly scanning through the categories, reading names without reading them, looking at the structure of the list rather than its content. “Any chance this is digital somewhere?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’s on the database. There was an officer adding each name as I came up with one. This,” she said, gesturing to the whiteboard, “was for my own sanity, honestly.”

Miles continued to study the list, trying to find the logic in it that would tell him where to look, which category of person would sit highest on Cord's list. Which type of work would be classified as the most egregious form of chromatic extraction in Cord's view? He had been in that house on Gaston Street. He had stood in the middle of thirty color wheels and four years of notation. He had read the manifesto pages. He understood the framework better than anyone outside of Cord himself, and he was looking at more than three hundred names with no known way of narrowing it.

He supposed painters were the obvious answer. Cord had started with a painter, and the rationale was explicit in the notation: painters constructed the mechanism of extraction deliberately, the language had been that precise. But he had moved immediately to a florist, and then to a gardener, and the logic of each choice had been internally consistent within the framework without being predictable from the outside.

“And there’s no family in his background check?” Miles asked, though he knew the answer. He’d looked at the report at least six times himself. “No next of kin?”

“Nothing,” Pruitt said. “Both parents deceased, no siblings. Both grandparents also deceased. No ex-girlfriends, nothing.”

Miles picked up his coffee and drank from it and looked at the whiteboard. Over in the margins, right along the frame, were the victims’ names: Ostroff, Hale, Odom.

Painter, florist, gardener, Miles thought. What are we missing here?

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” Pruitt said, “I’m retiring to the break rom for a half hour nap. You guys good for now?”

They both nodded, though Miles still felt that they had taken a huge loss. When Pruitt was gone, Miles pulled out his phone and pulled up one of the several pictures he’d taken of the painting back at the storage unit. Looking at it, he thought about Cord standing in that space with a flame at the corner of his own best work and then stopping. Had that been a failure of resolve or a moment of clarity or simply the decision of a man who could not destroy the one thing he had made that was worth keeping?

He had no idea, and he didn’t know how to find the answer.