Page 8 of Wrong Door

"First of all, we appreciate you making time," Vic said.

"I didn't have much choice, did I?" He said it without real hostility, more as a statement of fact. "What is it you need from me?” he asked, making it known that he’d like to hurry this awkward conversation along.

“When you were told Ostroff had died, you didn’t seem surprised,” Miles said.

He nodded and said, “I had a friend call me yesterday and told me all about it.”

“Were you surprised?” Vic asked

“Yeah, I guess. She was relatively young…healthy. You don’t think of people like that dying so suddenly. Even when it’s murder, you know?”

"How well did you know Nadia?" Miles asked.

Finch looked at the floor for a moment. When he looked back up, something in his face had shifted, the impatience retreating slightly into something he didn’t appear to have much practice managing. "We came up at the same time, more or less. We’d known each other over the years. Some of our work showed at some of the same galleries early on." He stopped and glared at them for a second and then said, "We had a falling out later on. I’m assuming that’s why you’ve come."

"Tell us about that," Vic said.

He shifted uncomfortably in the chair. "The palette dispute,” he said. “I believed she had studied my work closely enough to appropriate my approach, and I said so. I said so publicly, which in retrospect was not my finest moment." He said this not as an apology but as a tactical acknowledgment. "The issue was never resolved to my satisfaction. But it's also not relevant to whatever happened to her."

"Why do you say that?" Miles asked.

"Because I didn't harm her." He said it flatly, as if the mere idea was foolish. "I was angry with her for quite some time. I thought she had taken something from me, copied my technique for mixing certain colors. But being angry doesn’t mean I wished death upon her. And quite honestly, I'd appreciate not being made to feel like a suspect when I’ve done nothing wrong and you have no real reason to suspect me."

Miles saw that the hurt and what might even be a bit of grief was real. It was clear, though, that the discomfort of understanding that someone he’d once considered a friend had died truly did hurt him. For now, Miles decided to move on.

"Can you tell us about your background in chemistry?"

Finch straightened slightly, the familiar territory of his own credentials visibly burning away some of his anger. "I have a working knowledge of pigment chemistry,” he answered. “How compounds interact, why certain colors behave the way they do over time, the science behind what we're actually putting on a canvas. It's informed my practice significantly. And it’s because of that specialty that I took it personally that I believed Nadia was stealing my methods."

"Where did you study?" Vic asked.

"I did a semester of chemistry at SCAD. I started a second, but I didn't complete it." He uncrossed his arms and crossed them again, as if he was getting slightly nervous about something. "I've supplemented it extensively through independent study, though."

"So just a little over one semester," Miles said.

"Yes, that’s right," Finch said, sounding a little defensive now. "I may have presented it as more substantial than it was in certain contexts. If you need my transcripts to confirm, I can request them.”

"I don’t think that will be necessary," Miles said. "But I do want to ask you a few things about paint chemistry specifically. Is that okay?”

He watched Finch's face settle into the confidence of a man about to demonstrate something. “Yes, that’s fine.”

"If you were working with a chromium-based pigment and you wanted to understand the oxidation state of the chromium compound, how would you go about determining whether it was trivalent or hexavalent?"

Finch looked at him, clearly shocked. Miles couldn’t help it; he took a crude bit of pride in getting such a reaction. Finch had clearly not been expecting a visiting FBI agent to know so much about chemistry. Once he finally recovered, trying his best not to look too thrown off, he answered: "By the oxidation state."

"Chromium three versus chromium six,” Miles went on, watching as Finch continued trying not to look impressed. “How would you tell them apart in a practical context?"

"Well..." Finch shifted his weight. "You'd look at the color. Viridian is trivalent, for instance. Chrome yellow is a different compound entirely."

"And what if you had an unknown solution with no color reference?"

"You'd need to test it somehow." He said this with the slowing cadence of someone feeling the ground change beneath them. "You’d need to run some kind of analysis."

"What kind of analysis?"

Finch was quiet for a moment and now he was back to looking a little angry. "I'd have to look that up," he said.

"What about the toxicological profile of hexavalent chromium?” Miles pressed on. “Do you know the primary routes of exposure and the physiological mechanism?"