Page 33 of Wrong Door

He patted his jacket pocket and nodded. “Yeah. I’ll put it in when I’m done here.”

She nodded and headed back the way she had come. She moved off along the riverfront walk, and Miles watched her go before looking back at the UV lamps still waiting in the ambient light.

The sun was dropping. The light off the water was changing register by the minute, the gold going deeper, the shadows of the surrounding trees on the upper walk lengthening across the pavement. Miles stood at the operations position and watched the sky and waited for the angle to shift. Somewhere in the crowd behind him a child pointed at the installation and said something he could just barely hear. The crowd noise was warm, and ordinary and the river moved behind all of it with complete indifference.

This might actually work, he thought. If it didn’t, he knew there would be questions and that upwards of thirty thousand dollars would have been wasted by the City of Savannah. But he couldn’t think that way.

This is going to work…

The thought arrived without

ceremony, and he didn’t push it away. He looked at the display and the riverfront. He looked at the growing, excited crowd and the amber sky, feeling his own smile creep tentatively onto his face.

This is going to work, he thought again.

It has to…

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The display came to life at 6:46, when the ambient light dropped below the threshold where the UV output could compete with it. When this happened, the section of the crowd closest to where Miles was standing went quiet in expectation.

They did not remain quiet for long, though. The initial activation produced a visible ripple through the people standing closest to the installation, a collective pause that moved outward as each successive layer of the filter cascade came into its full register. The fluorescent compounds in the front panels lit from within, creating violet and cyan streams that overwhelmed the space within seconds. The filter layers behind them refracted that output into progressions that moved across the color spectrum in a sequence Miles had planned down to the specific placement of each panel.

The secondary violet emission appeared three minutes later, at the interface between the second and third filter layers, providing the most extraordinary thing in the display. It was not a color that appeared in the visible spectrum under normal lighting conditions in this intensity. It was a violet so saturated and precise that it seemed to occupy its own register apart from the colors surrounding it. A woman standing twenty feet from Miles held her phone up and took a photograph as she gasped.

Miles was not watching the display. He had stopped as soon as he saw that the display was going to work. Instead, he was looking at the crowd.

He had a position on the north end of the riverfront walk. He was moving slowly, spending about ten seconds on each face that could have even remotely matched the Russell Cord's faculty photograph from the SCAD archive. He moved without stopping, studying without being too obvious, and looking specifically for a canvas hat. He was looking for a face in a crowd that had turned out to be much larger than anyone had expected. The bodies were packed dense along the railing and spreading back along the walk and up the steps to the upper level where the parking structure offered a second vantage point.

Pruitt had four officers on the upper level and two at each end of the walk and six distributed through the crowd itself, all of them in plainclothes and with Cord's photograph on their phones. The surveillance cameras from the parking structure had a line of sight down the full length of the walk, and Pruitt was coordinating from the operations position at the vendor cart. He heard the soft murmur of conversation between the teams in the earpiece he had been given earlier.

Miles moved through the crowd slowly, keeping his body angle open, his eyes moving. He paid attention to each report from Pruitt and Vic, as well as the lead officer at the parking garage. But so far, there was nothing to report.

The display was producing gasps at regular intervals, particularly when the filter positions were adjusted to shift the cascade sequence. This transition changed the entire color register of the installation over the course of about forty-five seconds, moving from the blue-violet end of the spectrum through green and into the warm reds and ambers before cycling back. Each transition drew a different response from the crowd. The violet phase was the one that produced silence. The amber phase produced something warmer, people leaning toward each other, pointing.

He was on his second full pass of the northern section when Vic came in from the south on his earpiece. "South perimeter clear. I'm coming back through center." Her voice was level but excited.

"Northern section, second pass," Miles said quietly. "Nothing."

He had a complete view of the crowd from his current position at the railing. His back was to the water, the installation directly ahead of him and the faces of six hundred or so people illuminated intermittently in the changing color of its output. They all looked at it with an attentiveness that bordered on wonder, and Miles did his best to study as many of those faces as he could.

At 8:15, one of Pruitt's officers radioed a possible hit. He’d found a slight white male wearing a canvas hat, and he was standing at the north end of the walk near the steps. Miles was already moving before Pruitt finished relaying it, cutting through the crowd at a pace that was slightly faster than the surrounding movement. He reached the north steps in ninety seconds.

The man was in his sixties, heavyset in a way that made his slight build read differently up close. He looked at Miles with the mild irritation of someone who has been approached by a stranger at a public event and is waiting to find out why.

“Sorry,” Miles said. “I thought you were someone else.”

He moved on, completing three more full passes over the next hour. Vic added an additional two. Pruitt's officers cycled through their assigned sections on a staggered rotation that ensured no part of the crowd went unwatched for more than four minutes at any point. The cameras on the parking structure recorded continuously. By 9:10 the crowd had thinned slightly as families with young children moved out. But the core attendance held, drawn by the display, the warmth of the evening, and something different to be a part of.

But as 9:30 neared at it was almost time to shut the display down, one thing started to become clear to Miles…and it filled him with anger and a stinging sense of embarrassment.

Russell Cord was not there. Not that they could see. And if he was, then he was blending in far too well. Hell, maybe this had been a stupid idea.

At 9:50 the UV lamps were turned off per the operational schedule, and the filter cascade went dark. The fluorescent compounds faded back to invisible in the ambient riverfront lighting. The crowd response to the ending was a brief, collective applause. Slowly, they began to disperse, moving back along the walk and up the steps and out toward the parking structure. Others moved further into the downtown area, maybe on the way for dinner or drinks. Miles continued to scan, hoping for a miracle.

By 10:15, the riverfront was largely empty. Pruitt's officers had held their positions through the dispersal and were now also dispersing, angling into the crowd for one last hopeful look through the sea of faces. Vic was at the operations position talking to Pruitt, and he could hear their conversation through his earpiece.

“Looks like it was a bust,” Vic said. “Sorry for the hassle.”