Page 4 of Wrong Door

"Why?" Vic asked. It wasn't a challenge, just a direct question.

Pruitt considered it for a moment. "The levels on the initial labs were high. Not dramatically, not in a way that would automatically trigger a second look, but enough that the sister wanted a second opinion. I requested the ME's office take it over. The ME, Dr. Beaumont, ran the full panel and we found that the hexavalent chromium concentration in Nadia's system was not a paint exposure number. It wasn't even close."

"What was Dr. Beaumont's opinion on the route of exposure?" Miles asked.

"Primarily inhalation. The lung presentation was consistent with that. But she noted some dermal indicators as well, which suggests the source material may have been present in the environment at high enough concentrations to allow for both simultaneously." Pruitt glanced at him in the rearview mirror "She thinks someone introduced a concentrated chromium compound into the studio environment, likely before Nadia was even there.”

Miles thought about the scene—the painter at her sink, the metallic smell she had probably noticed and dismissed. He thought about an unknown time of closed-room exposure with a source she had no reason to suspect.

"Is the studio currently sealed?" he asked.

"Yeah, it has been since about six o’ clock yesterday morning. Nothing's been touched since the body was removed.”

Pruitt turned onto a narrower street where the buildings were much closer together. The tree canopy overhead was dense enough to block out most of the sky. "When the ME’s results came back and I was pretty sure this was going to be a Kane case, I went ahead and pulled everything from the studio's lease history, as well as Ostroff’s supply receipts going back two years. I also have a small list of the names of anyone who had access to the space." She slowed the car as they entered a residential stretch with parked cars on both sides. "I can get you all of that, too, if you need it."

They made a slow pass along the block. The studio was the ground floor of a two-story brick building, its front windows dark, a strip of yellow crime scene tape stretched across the door. A small handwritten sign on the glass that had probably advertised hours was still there, slightly askew. The building sat on a corner lot with a large oak in front, its branches spread wide over the sidewalk, strung with Spanish moss that moved in the faint breeze.

Miles looked at the building as Pruitt parked. The windows were large, the kind that let in the good directional light a painter needed, and they were positioned facing north, which told him something about why Nadia Ostroff had chosen and arranged her space. He filed that away because he was quickly learning that in cases like these, even the smallest of details could turn out to be important.

"What do you know about chromium compounds?" he asked Pruitt. "Before the ME's report, before all of this?"

"Not much, honestly. But enough to know they're used in pigments and industrial processes. The ME told me a bit, too.”

"Then let me catch you up to seed," Miles said as they got out of the car.

Pruitt nodded, as she killed the engine. She then stepped out onto the street without a word, and Miles and Vic followed.

CHAPTER THREE

Pruitt opened the studio door with a key that she pulled out of her pocket with something like a quiet respect. Once the door was opened and Pruitt stepped inside, Miles stood in the doorway for a moment before going in. He took a second to observe the space from the threshold, letting the room present itself before he started expecting to find answers. The afternoon light came through the north-facing windows in long, flat panels, that fell gently on the floor where Nadia Ostroff had died.

The room was large for a studio space, maybe four hundred square feet, with twelve-foot ceilings and exposed brick along the far wall. A utility sink occupied the left corner near the door. The largest easel stood roughly in the center of the room, and three smaller ones were arranged at intervals along the right wall, each holding a canvas in some stage of completion. The worktables were cluttered but somehow orderly, and the shelves above them held a dense arrangement of containers, tubes, jars, and equipment that seemed to be organized by category. Brushes were placed in order of size. Mediums had been separated from pigments. Solvents in heavy containers sat along the bottom shelf.

“Here you go,” Pruitt said, offering them both a pair of crime scene gloves without being asked. It was almost as if she had pulled them out of thin air, like some bizarre magic trick. “Help yourselves,” she said.

Miles took a pair gratefully and slid them on. With a small glance over to Vic, he turned back toward the room and went to work.

He moved to the utility sink first. It was a deep, commercial-grade basin. The porcelain was stained with the accumulated residue of years of paint, grime and different cleaning agents. A wire drying rack sat beside it with eleven brushes still arranged on it, undisturbed. He counted them and noted the sizes and looked at the residue in the bristles of the three that hadn’t been fully rinsed. The color in them was consistent with the palette on the canvas at the center easel, a mix of blues and raw sienna.

It looked like Ostroff had been cleaning up just before she died. He began to work backward from the brushes and the palette and reconstruct roughly where she was in her routine when the exposure began compounding faster than her body could manage. For instance, the three brushes that hadn't been fully rinsed told him she had been working in blues and raw sienna, which matched the palette on the center easel. The ones on the drying rack were clean, which meant she had gotten through most of the set before she went down. The turpentine jar on the sink ledge had been used recently, the solvent inside clouded with suspended pigment; the rag beside it was stained in the same color family as the brushes. She had been in the middle of the clean-up process. The three unrinsed ones were mid-range, numbers six through eight.

While he thought he had a clear picture of her last few minutes, he wasn’t sure what it all meant. Or if it even meant anything at all. So, he moved to the shelves.

The solvents were on the bottom shelf as he had noted from the doorway, four containers in a row. Three of them were commercial products, their labels intact and identifying them as the standard mineral spirits and odorless turpentine that were fairly common is art spaces like these. The fourth container was different, though. It was the same type of vessel as the others, the same style of rectangular plastic container with a screw cap, but the label had been removed and replaced with a handwritten one in blue pen. The handwriting read "brush cleaner" in plain block letters.

Miles crouched in front of it and studied it closer. The other three containers had the printed manufacturer labels that came from art supply stores, with product information and safety warnings and barcodes still intact. This one didn’t. It had been relabeled. That was not impossible as an innocent explanation; painters sometimes decanted products into different containers or relabeled things for their own organizational purposes. But the handwriting on this label didn’t match the handwriting on any of the other labels Miles could see on the surrounding shelves, where Nadia had labeled things in a loose, looping script that was easy to identify. The block letters on the brush cleaner container were careful and deliberate and looked nothing like her hand.

He photographed it in and was about to move on when Vic came to stand beside him and looked at the shelf. "That one’s different," she said.

"The label's not hers." He held the container up and turned it toward the light. The liquid inside was clear, which was consistent with a solvent. It was also consistent with any number of aqueous chromium compound solutions. "She would have used this every session. Rinse the brushes, set them on the rack. Repeated dermal contact and inhalation every time she worked." He set it back down, frowning. "There’s a chance someone could have swapped it…someone who knew where she kept her cleaning supplies and which container to replace it with.”

"And knew she wouldn't notice the difference," Vic said. “I mean, why would an artist make a point to look at a tube of paint they think is the same as the one they use on a consistent basis?”

"It's clear, and it doesn't have a strong smell at the concentrations that would still be effective,” Miles said. “If you're not looking for it and you're used to the chemical smell of your own studio, you wouldn't register it."

“Any idea how long she’d have to be exposed to it before it would kill her?”

“Not sure. A day or two, maybe? Maybe a few more.” He looked back to Detective Pruitt, who was standing patiently by at the doorway. “Detective, can you bag this cleaner up and have someone in forensics or a lab look it over? I’m pretty sure this is what would have killed her.”