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.
Miles moved to the table and looked at the water in the tray without touching it.
It was slightly discolored, but not dramatically—not in a way that would register as wrong to anyone who worked with floral foam regularly.
The foam itself leached a faint yellowish tint into the water it soaked in.
Miles supposed this was normal but that would be a question for someone who knew flowers much better than he did.
He photographed the tray and the bricks and then looked at the stack of unused foam on the far end of the table.
He crouched slightly and looked at the nearest brick from the side.
The foam was the dense green variety used universally in the industry.
He looked at the surface carefully. Along two edges of the brick, the color was slightly deeper than the interior, a marginally darker green.
He then walked back over to Hale and looked at his hands again.
Maybe that green hue on his hands hadn’t been from just stems and leaves.
Surely this man handled that floral foam constantly, cutting it to shape, pressing stems into it, soaking the bricks, moving saturated bricks from tray to display.
If so, that would mean his skin had contact with it for hours every working day.
"The foam," Miles said.
Vic came to stand beside him. She looked at the tray, at the bricks, at Hale's hands. "You think this is what did it?” she asked. “Is this the equivalent of the cleaning agent you pointed out in Ostroff’s studio?”
“I’m not sure. Some simple lab tests could tell us, though. If this is the case, it would be cumulative dermal absorption.”
“Meaning?” Pruitt asked from the other side of the room.
“Meaning that just like the cleaning agent, this wasn’t a single exposure event.
It probably occurred over several days of handling foam that had been treated.
Combined with inhalation from the soaked material sitting in a warm enclosed space, that would certainly do the trick.
" He looked at the refrigerated case at the back, its compressor running, circulating the air in the shop in a slow, continuous cycle.
"If I am right, he's been absorbing this for days without knowing it. The skin presentation, the hemorrhaging, the timeline, it all fits a sustained exposure pattern rather than an acute one. But again…it’s just a theory.
The ME and a basic lab test will tell us for sure. "
“Let’s say you’re right,” Pruitt said from across the room. "Someone would have had to treat the foam before he used it.”
"Or treated the soaking solution, which would migrate into the foam every time he prepped it," Miles said.
He looked at the container of water on the shelving unit above the table, a large plastic vessel with a spigot that was clearly used to fill the soaking tray.
He photographed it without touching it. "That's the more likely point of introduction.
One container, treated once, and every brick he soaked after that carried the compound. "
Vic looked at the container. "How long would a container like that last him?"
"Depends on his volume. I’d assume a busy florist goes through significant amounts of foam. A week, maybe two. Was this a popular shop?” he asked, looking to Pruitt.
“Sort of. People mostly came for Mr. Hale. Sort of supporting small business, you know?”
Miles stepped back from the table and looked at the room as a whole, the way he had looked at Nadia's studio.
"The delivery mechanisms are pretty similar, if I turn out to be right.
The solvent in Ostroff's studio, and the soaking solution here. The compound is the same, and the principle is the same. It would have been something he touches every day, something integral to his work and that he’d have no reason to examine or suspect. "
Pruitt looked at him, nodding. "Two victims, two different methods, but the same compound and approach."
"In the same city," Vic said. "And we've only been here five hours."
Miles took a deep breath and immediately regretted it. The metallic undercurrent in the air was stronger near the worktable, and his eyes had begun to feel dry and slightly irritated. It was a weird throwback to all the time he used to spend in the lab with an assortment of chemicals and solvents.
He looked at Vic almost apologetically and said, "I'm going to step out for a minute."
He went back through the shop, past the dahlia display and the refrigerated case. He couldn’t quite peg why, but the riot of color now seemed almost constricting and suffocating as he passed through. He hurried past it and walked through the front door onto Broughton Street.
The evening air was warm and carried the usual mix of any city: car exhaust and restaurant smells scattered everywhere. But here, in Savannah, there was also the faint salt edge of the coast a few miles out. He stood on the sidewalk and breathed it in, letting his eyes adjust to the cooler air.
Vic came out a minute later. She stood beside him and said nothing, waiting. He was glad that she had come out but also glad that she wasn’t speaking just yet. After a few more seconds, it was Miles who broke the silence.
"This isn't opportunistic," Miles said. "Either of these scenes.
You can't introduce a chromium compound into a flower shop's soaking supply on a whim.
You have to know that the shop uses that supply, know the volume of foam he goes through, know the concentration required for a sustained dermal exposure to reach a lethal threshold over a realistic working period.
" He looked at the lit window of the shop, at the spring arrangement still cheerfully facing the street.
"And Ostroff is the same. You have to know she uses a brush cleaner, where she keeps it, and how often she uses it. You’d also need to know the studio well enough to swap a container without anything looking disturbed. "
“So, you think the killer knows his victims personally?”
“I think, at the very least, that he spent time with these people before he went through with his plan. Or he spent time watching them very closely.”
Vic was quiet for a moment. "Which means there may be others he's already watched and researched."
"Yes," Miles said. "And we have no way of knowing yet how far along he is with any of them. Just like the other cases. So once again, we’re trapped in this damn loop."
“At least we know the loop well,” Vic said.
“Yeah, but you’d think by now we’d know how to either prevent ourselves from falling into it…or break the damn thing apart once we’re in it.”
With that, he turned and back inside where Detective Pruitt was still taking pictures of a dead man’s flower shop.