CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Once the importance of what was inside had been discovered, the Hazmat team lead okayed three other people to enter.
One was Pruitt, and the other two were members of a forensic team.
The forensics team had been through the main room twice and moved upstairs, but Miles was still studying the color wheels and looking for more names.
He had been looking at the wheels from this lower angle for several minutes before it resolved into a pattern.
From a standing position in the center of the room you saw the totality of it, the sheer coverage, the density of the annotation.
From the floor, with a different sight line, the arrangement became visible.
The wheels with the highest drain index numbers were clustered along the front wall, the one that faced the street and caught the morning light first. As he moved toward the back and sides of the room, the index numbers dropped, the lower-urgency pigments receding away from the entrance.
It was not random. It was a priority system, organized so that when Cord walked into the room each morning, the first things he saw were the ones that concerned him most.
Miles photographed the room from the floor to capture the arrangement at the angle that made it legible, then pushed himself up and crossed to the shelving unit.
The forensic team had already logged the shelf contents and moved on.
The reference texts that had been on the bottom shelf were now stacked to the side, each one tagged.
Miles crouched in front of the unit and looked at what the removal of those books had revealed: the back wall of the shelf, which was now visible for the first time, and against it, lying flat and horizontal, a large-format watercolor pad.
It had been completely hidden behind the books.
You would not know it was there unless you took every book off the shelf and looked.
Somehow, it had gone overlooked, perhaps because it looked quite meager among everything else.
He pulled on a fresh glove, lifted the pad carefully by its corner, and carried it to the worktable.
He opened the cover and saw that the first page was a color study.
It was a rendering of a small section of what looked like a garden wall, painted in late afternoon light.
The color was good—genuinely good. It possessed the kind of observational accuracy that required both technical training and a talented eye.
He turned the page and this time saw a painting of a section of sky at dusk, the transition from blue to amber handled with restraint.
He turned again. Another study, this one interior, a table surface with objects on it, the shadows dense and warm.
He turned pages steadily. All studies, all accomplished, all annotated in the lower margins with the same small hand he had been reading on the walls all morning: pigment names, proportions, and beside each color passage, a drain index number.
Cord had been rating his own paintings by how much chromatic damage he believed he was doing in the act of making them.
Miles turned another page, and another. The studies continued for roughly two thirds of the pad.
Then a blank page.
He turned it.
The page on the other side was covered in handwriting, dense and close-lined, running from the top margin to the bottom with almost no space left unused.
The handwriting was the same small hand as the annotations but different in character, less controlled.
The letters slightly more compressed, the lines running at a faint downward angle by the time they reached the bottom of the page.
He read the date at the top. Nearly three years ago.
He turned the page and came to another page of text, dated two weeks after the first. This one had the same compressed quality to it, the same slightly downward drift of the lines.
He read it through. Then the next page. Then the next.
He stood at the worktable and read through all twelve pages without moving, without looking up.
When he reached the last page, he stopped.
Then he looked up. "Vic. I think I found the manifestos…"
“What?” she asked, shocked.
But the time she was by his side, he was sure of it.
Each entry was dated, the earliest nearly three years ago, the most recent from eight months back.
They were not addressed to anyone, and they did not read like arguments designed to persuade.
They read more like a man clarifying his own thinking, working through the logic of the belief system visible on the walls and arriving, each time, at the same conclusion by a slightly different route.
The language was controlled and without apparent anger.
He wrote about chromatic energy the way someone wrote about a physical property they had observed directly and documented carefully, without drama, with the confidence of a person who considered the observation settled.
The earliest entry described what Cord called his first awareness of the depletion, a moment in a graduate color theory seminar where he had looked at a reproduction of a Monet hanging. The entry read:
Today in Adler's seminar I understood something I have not been able to stop thinking about.
There was a Monet reproduction on the wall, the water lilies, the large one.
I have seen it many times. Today I looked at it and understood that the field it depicts no longer exists at that level of saturation.
Not because the pond changed. Because the painting took something from it.
I cannot yet explain the mechanism. I know only that I perceived it clearly and that the perception was not aesthetic. It was factual.
Miles read it twice. Then he turned to the next entry, dated eleven days later.
I have been trying to find the language for what I observed.
The closest I can get is this: color in the living world is not infinite.
It exists in quantities that can be measured and that can be depleted.
When a painter fixes color to a surface, the color does not duplicate.
It transfers. The source field loses what the fixed object gains.
I believe this is demonstrable. I am beginning to work out how.
The third entry was longer, the handwriting slightly more controlled than the first two, as though Cord had settled into the project of it.
He had begun constructing the index, the earliest version of it, still rough and intuitive, ranking colors not yet by compound but by what he called chromatic weight, his estimate of how much living-world saturation a given pigment consumed in its production and application.
The numbers in this early version bore only a loose resemblance to the precise drain index figures on the walls.
But the architecture of it all was the same.
Miles turned forward through the subsequent entries, reading selectively, tracking the development.
By the fifth entry the language had become more technical, the intuitive rankings giving way to calculations that referenced actual color measurement literature.
By the seventh, Cord was citing spectrophotometric studies and adapting their methodology to support the framework.
The tone throughout was level and without drama, the tone of a man who considered himself to be documenting observable fact and had no need to argue for it.
The most recent entry, eight months ago, described three people that it seemed Cord had been studying closely.
But at the end of each description, there were the words: PASS.
MOVE ON. There were no names, locations or even discernable features described about the people in the entry.
He wrote about them the way someone wrote about a decision already made, matter-of-factly, with the specificity of a man who had finished deliberating and moved into planning.
And in the end, the people had not fully interested him.
“I don’t know if I’d call these manifestos per se,” Vic said.
“Maybe not. But it’s the same sort of verbiage from some of the others. It’s leaning in that direction and maybe at least gives us an idea of why he—”
He was interrupted by a loud banging at the door…Pruitt again, no doubt.
“Sorry to bother you, agents,” she yelled. “But you might want to get out here.”
Miles nearly argued the point but decided maybe he did need some time out of this damned suit.
He knew it had only been an hour or so, but it felt like he’d been in it for half a day.
He started for the door, and Vic followed behind him.
When they stepped out onto the porch, the Savannah afternoon looked almost too bright.
Pruitt was standing at the bottom of the stairs, still wearing her N95 mask. “You might as well go ahead and take those suits off,” she said. “A call just came in…and it looks like we’ve got Victim Number Three.”
“How recent?” Vic asked.
“Not sure. The officer on site says it’s got to be at least a few hours.”
Miles started working to remove the suit right away. One of the members of the forensics team saw him struggling with and came over to assist.
“The crime scene is in the Ardsley Park neighborhood. Female, found in the back garden of the property.”
“Skin mottling?” Vic asked as she started getting out of her own suit.
“Yeah, the same that was flagged in the Ostroff and Hale cases. Plus, the victim is surrounded by flowers."
“Can you please call them back and tell the officers not to touch anything and keep the perimeter tight?” Vic asked.
“I already relayed all of that when I spoke with him.”
He ended the call and went to the base of the stairs. "Vic. Pruitt."
“You said Ardsley Park,” Miles said. “How far away is that?”
"That's about ten minutes from here."
"We can go now," Miles said. "But we found what might be this killer’s version of manifestos. They’re in an old watercolor pad. Can you make sure every single page is photographed?”
“Absolutely. You want me on the Ardsley Park scene when I’m done here?”
“If you have time, that would be great," Vic said.
They left the house on Gaston Street and got into Pruitt's car.
As they pulled away from the curb, Miles looked back once at the house, at the pale gray facade and the dead window boxes and the accumulated mail on the porch, and thought about the watercolor pad and the three names in the most recent entry, two of them clear and one of them folded into shadow.
He pulled up the photograph on his phone as Pruitt drove and tried again to read the third name.
The shadow from the paper fold ran directly across the last two letters and rendered them ambiguous.
He could make out the first several characters clearly enough.
He stared at it for another few seconds and then put his phone away, because there was a woman in a garden in Ardsley Park and the question of who else Cord had been planning for was going to have to wait ten minutes.
"The manifesto pages," Vic said from the backseat. She had been thinking through it in parallel. "He named three people. Eight months ago."
"Yes."
"Ostroff and Hale are accounted for."
"Yes," Miles said.
Miles chose not to say what all three of them were already thinking: a woman in a garden surrounded by flowers with mottled skin was probably not a coincidence. And if she had been killed in the same slow and methodical way as the others, there may be no way in hell they’d ever catch this killer.