Page 7 of Wrong Door

Vic looked at Miles, scrutinizing him. "You don't seem convinced of something. What is it?"

"I'm not sure, really. Finch has the grievance, the access history, and apparently a chemistry background he was using to threaten Nadia professionally." He looked at the bagged container again and said, "It fits together. That's exactly what's bothering me. It almost feels too easy.”

Vic didn't argue with that. She knew the pattern of these killers and these cases as well as he did. "Well, maybe this will be the case where we get a break…where the first clear sign is the only sign we need.”

"Yeah, maybe," Miles said, though he already didn’t buy it. In fact, this first step felt so easy to him that he couldn’t help but wonder if they were purposefully being led astray.

CHAPTER FIVE

The fountain at the center of Forsyth Park caught the last of the day's light at a specific angle that only lasted about twelve minutes. It was a very specific window of time, but he had learned to be there for it.

He sat on a bench at the edge of the fountain's spray radius, close enough to feel the occasional mist on the back of his hand. He watched the water rise and fall through the evening air. The light coming through it at this hour broke into a fine, scattered spectrum along the edges, not a full rainbow but the suggestion of one, a prismatic fringe where the water met the sun. He could see the violet more clearly that the other colors. He could always see the violet, which most people could not. This was something he had understood about himself for a long time and had eventually learned that though it seemed trivial, it was actually one of the most important things about him.

The park was quite active at this hour. There were couples on the walking paths, people with dogs moving along the outer perimeter, and a few joggers passing through. He watched them the way he always watched people in open spaces, cataloguing what he saw. The green of the grass was dense and saturated after the recent rain, the kind of green that existed in a specific register he thought of as living green, distinct from the dull, grayish green of dry seasons or the yellow green of a lawn going dormant. The azaleas along the south border were past their peak bloom but still held enough color to be worth looking at—a deep rose fading at the edges to something closer to coral. The oak canopy overhead was the deep, serious green of late spring, heavy with growth, the Spanish moss hanging in long curtains that moved slightly in the evening air and caught the light in a silvery way that was one of his favorite things about this city.

He saw all of it. He always saw all of it, and it was intoxicating in a way so many people missed out on.

This was his gift, and it was also his burden. He understood what it meant to see color the way he did. He understood it in a way that no one else around him appeared to, which had been isolating for most of his life. But over the years, he had come to understand where it truly came from once, he recognized the mechanism behind it...once he understood what was being done.

It made him think of Nadia Ostroff and what he’d been forced to do to her. She had sat in that studio of hers for six years, day after day, pulling color out of the living world and sealing it behind glass. Trapping it and manipulating it. She had created images of bright, vivid colors, often depicting harbors that breathed and moved and caught light differently at every hour of the day. In doing so, she had reduced such a scene to a fixed thing that hung on a wall in a climate-controlled gallery while people stood in front of it and felt, briefly, that they had experienced something special.

But they had not experienced anything. All they had done was look into a coffin. The color was in the coffin, and the living world outside was correspondingly diminished. The people who walked away from Nadia Ostroff's paintings went away a fraction more blind than they had been when they arrived, though none of them knew it. They moved on unaware because the theft was cumulative and slow; it had been going on for so long that the loss had become invisible.

This was the part that required the most patience to explain, and he had largely stopped trying to find the words. Even if people could understand it, they’d not want to hear it. Most people weren’t equipped to understand it, anyway. The chromatic energy in the world was not infinite. It was a resource, like any other, and it could be depleted, and the depletion was directional. It moved from the living environment into fixed objects, into paintings and dyes and printed surfaces, and the people responsible for that transfer were taking something from everyone else. They were making the world grayer. They were making it harder to see.

But he had done the calculations, and he understood the scale of it. He could feel it as he watched the light show on the fountain coming to an end, the angle shifting and the prismatic fringe along the water's edge narrowing. He watched attentively as it disappeared when the sun dropped below the tree line. He watched it go with intense focus, observing the transitions of light, the minute-by-minute change of color temperature as the sky moved from the blue-gold of late afternoon to the deeper, warmer register of early dusk. The sky above the park's southern end was going amber at the horizon, shading up through orange into a clear, deep blue at the zenith that he identified precisely, a blue with no green in it, a blue that sat almost in the violet end of the spectrum.

As dusk came, bringing the darkness of night to the world, he thought of the permanent darkness Ostroff now inhabited..

Nadia Ostroff, the painter, had been first. It had felt appropriate because painters were the most deliberate class of offenders. They constructed the mechanism of theft with full intent, calling it art, calling it beauty, and the people who bought and displayed their work inadvertently spread the depletion further. But the painter was the source, and you addressed problems at the source.

There were others coming. He thought about them calmly and in order, the way he thought about most things. He had it set in place and felt he had selected them well. Next there would be a florist who arranged color into configurations designed to be bought and taken indoors, removed from the living world and placed in a vase until they died and were thrown away, the chromatic energy they had contained now dispersed and lost. Then there was to be a gardener who cultivated color in private spaces behind walls, accessible only to the few and effectively privatizing what should have been shared with the world.

Both of them were operating on the same principle as Ostroff, whether they knew it or not. Intent was not required. The mechanism functioned regardless of whether the person understood what they were participating in. He supposed deep down, they couldn’t help it. But that didn’t make him any less determined to take them out, to remove them from this rich and colorful world.

He was not angry about this. He wanted to be clear with himself about that, as he sat in the park at dusk with the fountain behind him and the amber sky ahead. The anger had been present at the beginning, years ago, when the understanding was still forming and the scale of it was still becoming apparent. But he had moved through the anger and come out on the other side into something cleaner. He was not punishing anyone. He was correcting an imbalance.

He was doing Kane’s work of restoration, and when it was finished, the people in this city, would see colors they had not seen in years and would not know why the world had suddenly become so vivid.

But he would know. And that was enough.

He got up from the bench and walked south along the fountain's edge. His shadow fell long in the dusk light, and he didn’t look back as he headed off to continue his work.

CHAPTER SIX

Garrett Finch's studio occupied the upper floor of a narrow Victorian on West Jones Street, reached by an exterior staircase that ran up the side of the building and delivered you onto a small landing with a rusted iron railing. The door to the building was unlocked when they arrived at 6:45 in the evening, and Finch answered his own door before Miles had finished knocking.

“Um, yeah?” he asked. He had looked almost amused at first, perhaps happy to have visitors, but the expression soured when Miles showed his ID. They ran through introductions and gave him the synopsis of why they were there. Finch let them in without much resistance or fanfare.

His studio was more of a loft, and it was clear that he not only worked here but slept there from time to time as well. A small bed was tucked far away in the corner to the back, as if he was trying to hide it.

The studio space was large but felt smaller than it was because of how thoroughly it had been filled. Canvases were stacked four and five deep against every wall, the ones facing outward showing work that ranged from finished to barely begun. The works that were facing inward constituted a kind of archive that appeared to have no organizational logic. Tubes of paint covered the two worktables in the center in a dense, overlapping sprawl. Three easels occupied the center of the room at slightly different angles, as though Finch moved between them without settling on a preferred position. The floor was wood, once painted gray and now largely covered in drips and smears that had accumulated over years into an accidental record of everything he had ever mixed. The whole place had the feeling of a space that had been intensely lived in without ever being cared for. It smelled of turpentine and something else beneath it, something older and slightly damp. Miles figured it was the smell of the building itself coming through the walls.

Where Nadia's studio had been ordered beneath its creative surface, her materials organized and her space arranged with the deliberateness of someone who understood that the environment shaped the work, Finch's studio looked like the inside of a mind that never stopped moving long enough to sort itself out.

Finch himself had a broad, fleshy face and gray-streaked hair that he wore longer and uncared for. He was physically large, not in a fit way but in a way that suggested he liked to eat a little too much. He looked at Miles and Vic with the evaluating impatience of a man who considered most conversations a concession.

"Okay, so what can I help with?” Finch asked, taking a seat on a well-used folding chair.