Page 9 of Wrong Door

"I know it's a carcinogen," Finch said. He had stopped performing and now seemed to understand he had somehow been outsmarted. Judging from the look on his face, he did not like it one bit. "I know it's in some industrial processes,” he said. “But that's about the limit of it."

Miles nodded. He didn't push further because there was no point. The chemistry Finch was describing seemed to be nothing more than the knowledge of a painter who had read some articles and picked up a textbook or two. Miles strongly doubted that Finch was capable of synthesizing a targeted compound, calibrating a lethal concentration, and introducing it invisibly into a working environment. The gap between those two things was enormous and could not be crossed by independent study of the kind Finch had done.

"Thank you," Miles said. He looked to Vic, raising an eyebrow—a silent way of asking if she had anything to add.

She gave him a small smile before getting to her feet. She then looked to Finch and said, “Thanks so much. We'll be in touch if we need anything else."

“That’s all?” he asked, perplexed.

“For now, yes,” Miles said. “You’ve been a big help.”

Finch walked them to the door and then even followed them down the staircase to the street. He didn't say anything further, and Miles didn't either. Finch seemed confused but at the same time, it almost seemed as if he wanted Miles to keep quizzing him.

At the bottom of the stairs, Finch stopped and looked at Miles with something that was less combative than anything he'd shown inside.

"She was very talented," he said. "Whatever I said about her work in the past or whatever I accused her of...Nadia was genuinely talented."

Miles looked at him. "I know," he said. "We’ve seen her studio."

They left Finch and got into their car. Miles was pulling his seatbelt across his chest when his phone rang. He answered it and heard Detective Pruitt’s voice on the line.

“Agent Sterling, it’s Pruitt. It looks like we may have another body with the same cause of death as Ostroff.”

“Where?”

"Broughton Street," she said. "A florist named Desmond Hale. He's been found collapsed in his shop, and the responding officer is describing mottled skin and hemorrhaged eyes." She paused for one beat and let out a sigh. "And a metallic smell in the air."

Miles looked over to Vic and said, "We're on our way."

CHAPTER SEVEN

When Miles pulled the car into a spot across the street from Hale's Blooms, there were already two patrol cars on the scene. One cop was putting up crime scene tape while another was standing guard and making sure no pedestrians got a look inside.

Hale's Blooms occupied a narrow storefront on Broughton Street between a clothing boutique and a coffee shop. Its front windows were still lit from inside and dressed in an arrangement of spring flowers that faced the street in cheerful color. The OPEN sign on the door was still turned outward.

Pruitt met them at the door. She still looked a bit out of sorts, which Miles figured was an indication that she had only beaten them by a matter of minutes. Still, local PD had done a great job in establishing a perimeter on a busy commercial street where foot traffic was still moving by at a steady evening pace.

“Come on in,” Pruitt said, holding the door open for them.

They stepped inside, and Miles had to pause for a moment to take in the floral smells and the bright pops of color. The small space was dense with flowers, and managed to balance the line between small, family-owned, and typical retail space. The flower arrangements were set up with care, buckets, display cases, and tiered wire shelving arranged to make maximum use of a modest square footage. Miles spotted roses in several colors, dahlias in deep burgundy and coral and pale yellow. There were lots of flowers Miles didn't know the names of and the entire left wall had been artfully covered in a crawling ladder of ivies and vines.

The refrigerated case along the back held the more delicate inventory, its glass fogged slightly from the temperature differential with the warm shop air. The whole place was intensely, almost aggressively colorful. The smell of it was complex, sweet and green and faintly earthy all at once.

Beneath that smell, though, was something else. It was metallic and dry, sitting under the floral notes like a deadly secret someone had let slip and forgot to clean up. Miles picked up on it right away. It was chemical in nature and a much fainter version of the intrusive smell he’d noticed at Nadia Osroff’s studio.

Desmond Hale’s body was on the floor in the back half of the shop. His body was half-slumped against the base of the dahlia display, his left shoulder resting against the lowest tier of the shelving. His legs were extended at an angle that suggested he had not gone down quickly but had slid while trying to hold himself up. He was a lean man of about sixty or so. His hands were resting palm-up on the floor beside him, stained slightly green at the fingertips and along the creases of his palms. Probably from stems and leaves, Miles thought.

But the discoloration on Hale’s face and neck was something else entirely. The mottling Pruitt had described was a network of dark, irregular patches across his jaw and throat; the skin tone beneath them gone grayish and wrong. It had been slightly present on Ostroff, but not nearly at this level. Hale’s eyes were open, and the hemorrhaging in them was visible from where Miles was standing, the whites overtaken by a deep, sickly red.

Pruitt was already moving through the back of the shop with her phone up, photographing methodically.

"He was found by a customer," she said without stopping. "A woman came in to pick up a standing order at 7:10 and found the door unlocked and him on the floor. She called 911 and waited outside."

"How long has he been down?" Vic asked.

"The medical examiner's estimate will be more precise, but the responding officer thought at least an hour."

Miles looked at the floor around the body and then at the worktable behind it. The worktable was the functional center of the shop's back area, a wide surface at standing height covered with the tools and materials of the work: cutting boards, stem strippers, ribbon and wire, a row of floral foam bricks stacked at one end. Several of the bricks had been used and set aside, their surfaces punctured by stems in the pattern of arrangements in progress. A low tray of water sat at the corner of the table, and two more foam bricks were soaking in it, partially submerged.