Page 5 of Wrong Door

“Sure, I’m on it,” she said. “I’ll grab a big enough evidence bag from my car.”

Miles stood up, suddenly aware that if the cleaning solution wasn’t capped properly, they could also be exposed to the same thing that killed Ostroff. It made him want to work much faster. With that in mind, he turned toward the paintings.

They seemed to be everywhere. They covered the available wall space in a dense, overlapping arrangement. Some were framed and some were not, some finished and some clearly studies or works in progress. They were uniformly saturated in color, most showing water in shades of deep viridian, cadmium skies that almost looked like something out of faded, warped photographs. The harbor scenes dominated, but there were street paintings as well, and some interior studies, and a series of smaller pieces along the back wall that looked like color experiments. These looked to be pure fields of pigment in combinations she had been testing and held abundant traces of that David Lynch-like feeling Detective Pruitt had mentioned.

Miles stood in the middle of it all and turned slowly. As he did so, he saw that one canvass had fallen over. It was on the floor near the left wall, face-down on the concrete. It had been positioned away from the other paintings with a deliberateness that was hard to attribute to an accident. Everything else in the studio was vertical, either on an easel or hung on the wall or leaning against it with the painted face forward. This one was down, its back to the ceiling—just a plain canvas stretcher and a strip of masking tape along one edge with a date written on it in Orstroff’s looping hand.

Miles crouched beside it and looked at the back, looking for clues of any kind. When he was satisfied that there was nothing there, he turned it over. It was a large piece, maybe twenty-four by thirty-six, and showed a Savannah street scene painted in the late-afternoon light. The leaves on the trees glowed in an almost amber hue, and the building facades were warm and deep. The color in it was extraordinary, not in a showy way but by the hand of someone who knew what they had created was very good. He looked at it for a long moment.

There was nothing on it other than the picture—no mark, no message, no alteration. The painting itself was intact, the surface undisturbed. He turned it over again and looked at the back, checked the stretcher bars, checked the masking tape label. But there was nothing.

"Why this one?" Vic said. She wasn't asking Miles specifically. She was thinking out loud, standing over his shoulder, looking at the painting the way she looked at things she hadn't solved yet. “Knocked over like that, it wasn’t an accident, right?”

“I was thinking the same thing. But the more I look at it, the more I think it could be just an accident.”

"It's the best one in the room," Miles said. “In my opinion, anyway.”

He said it because it seemed relevant, though he couldn't yet articulate why. Every painting in the studio was vibrant and accomplished, but this one had something the others didn't. Miles was not an artist at all, but he had always appreciated paintings and sculptures. To him, this painting had a quality of observation that went beyond technique. It felt personal and just by looking at it, he could tell Ostroff had put a lot of time and passion into it.

He looked around at the other canvases, all of them facing outward, all of them showing their color to the room. Then he looked back at the one he had found face-down on the floor. "The killer put her best work down. It’s got to be on purpose, right? A message? Symbolic somehow?”

Vic looked at the surrounding paintings and then back at the floor. "Or like he was punishing it."

Miles set the painting back down the way he had found it and stood up. He looked at the room again, the whole of it, trying to find the logic that connected the relabeled solvent on the bottom shelf to the face-down canvas on the floor. He was in the middle of trying to figure this out when he heard a sound at the door.

He turned and saw a young woman standing in the doorframe. She had pushed past the crime scene tape, one hand still barely touching it behind her. She was in her early to mid-twenties, with a close-shaved head and full tattoo sleeves on both arms; the ink was dense and detailed from her wrists to where her t-shirt sleeves began. She had a messenger bag over one shoulder. She was looking into the studio with an expression that changed rapidly from surprise to something rawer. As she took in the presence of Miles and Vic, she took one step back as though she was about to leave.

Miles was about to call out to her, but the woman went still again before he said anything. She seemed to make a decision in that moment, though it didn’t appear to be an easy one. She lowered herself into a crouch in the doorframe, her back against one side of it with her knees drawn up. She then put her face in her hands and began to cry. It was not quiet crying. It was the uncontrolled kind, the kind that arrives before a person can organize a response to it and the body it helpless but to respond.

Vic moved toward the door without hesitation, crossing the studio in a few strides. Miles watched her go and then looked back at the painting on the floor, the street scene with the amber moss and the warm facades, lying face-down on the concrete of the studio where it had been made.

He still couldn't find what the killer had wanted him to see in it. He wasn't sure yet whether that was because there was nothing to find—that the painting had accidentally fallen over of its own accord—or because he wasn't yet asking the right questions.

CHAPTER FOUR

They brought the young woman inside and found her a stool near the worktable. She had gotten herself mostly under control by the time she sat down, though her eyes were red and her voice, when she spoke, suggested that she had been doing this exact same kind of crying for most of the day. Vic had asked the woman’s name, but the woman was too busy catching her breath to answer properly.

Pruitt looked to both of them with a small frown. "This is Stasi Weaver,” she said. “She's one of Nadia's studio assistants. We spoke during the initial canvass." She looked back at Stasi and gave a smile that was meant to be comforting. "These are Special Agents Sterling and Stone, with the FBI."

Stasi nodded, pressing the back of her wrist briefly to one eye. "I knew the tape was there and I shouldn’t be here, but…but…” She stopped, making sure she wasn’t going to start weeping again. “But I just needed to be somewhere she had been, and this was the only place I could think of."

"It's all right," Vic said. She had pulled a stool over and was sitting at an angle to Stasi, not directly across from her. "How long did you work with Nadia?"

"For about two years. I came in twice a week, sometimes three times if she had a show coming up." Stasi looked around the studio, at the canvases on the walls, at the organized shelves. "I stretched canvases, cleaned up, helped her with framing and delivery logistics. Whatever she needed."

"And the relationship was good?” Miles said.

"It was the best job I've ever had." She said it simply, without embellishment. "Nadia was incredibly generous. Not just with pay, but with her time. She'd talk to me about the work, about why she made the choices she made, what she was trying to do with a piece. I'm a painter too, not at her level, but she never made me feel like I wasn't." She stopped and looked at her hands for a moment. Mies noticed a small smear of royal blue paint on the side of her index finger. "I don't know how else to describe her."

Miles let that settle before moving on. "Did she ever mention anyone she was having trouble with? Professionally or personally?"

Stasi thought about it and ended up shrugging. "The divorce was a while ago, and she didn't talk about her ex much. Not negatively." She paused. "There were a couple of things on the professional side of her life that I know bothered her, though."

"Tell us about those," Vic said.

"Garrett Finch was the bigger thing." Stasi's expression shifted, becoming less careful. "He's another local painter who has been around a while. Last spring, Nadia had a series that did really well. She sold out both showings and got some regional press. Garrett started telling people she had stolen his color palette."

“That’s an actual thing in the art world?” Miles asked.