CHAPTER NINETEEN
The conference room had started getting crowded by five that afternoon as Pruitt managed to get officers and assistants to help with compiling the list Vic had suggested.
By about ten that night, it had taken on the feel of a space being lived in rather than worked in.
Takeout containers were stacked near the door.
Laptops were open at every seat. The whiteboard was filled past the point of easy readability; Pruitt having added a second column when the first ran out of space.
So far, the list had fifty-three names.
Pruitt's team had built the initial version from business license records, pulling every registered operation in the city whose primary activity involved color in a professional context.
Painters and galleries had been the easy ones.
Then muralists, of whom there were more than Miles had anticipated.
There were also textile artists, a dye works on the east side of the city, two ceramicists whose work was primarily glaze-focused, a color consultant who worked with interior designers across the low country.
One of the officers was taking an especially hard look at a floral design school on Drayton Street and a photography studio that specialized in fine art printing.
There had also been a heated discussion as to whether or not interior design should be included, and it was ultimately decided it should not.
"We'll be past one hundred names by morning," Pruitt said, looking at the board. She said it without alarm, just accounting for where they were. "I've got three officers cross-referencing against social media to catch the ones who operate informally, no business license."
Miles was at the far end of the table with his laptop, working through what the forensic team had sent over from Gaston Street in the past two hours: high-resolution images of every notation sheet on the walls, catalogued and numbered.
He had been reading through them systematically, building a picture of how Cord's methodologies and beliefs had developed over time.
The earliest versions were simpler, rougher in their methodology, closer to intuition than to the pseudo-scientific framework the later versions had become.
His index had been refined over years, sharpened by whatever reading and observation Cord had been doing.
It started to look more refined, the language becoming more technical, and the conclusions more specific.
It was patient, maddening work. It was the work of someone who had a long time and a fixed point and no particular reason to hurry. Someone like Kane, actually.
Vic was two seats down, running Cord's name against employment records and academic databases.
She had confirmed the non-renewal at SCAD and pulled the basic outline of his academic history.
She had been building his profile incrementally for the past several hours, checking each piece with heavy scrutiny before moving to the next.
It was 12:16 in the morning when Miles stood up to get a cup of coffee. An as he got to his feet, his phone buzzed on the table. He glanced down at it and saw that he had received another text from Agent Hahn.
This guy is really trying a little too hard, Miles thought.
Miled picked it up and read it. Word by word, he was starting to think that maybe Hahn wasn’t too bad after all. The text read:
Was running a supplementary search tonight.
Your suspect Russell Cord was flagged in the task force database.
Former SCAD adjunct, color theory background, two-year employment gap.
Flag was generated four months ago. Never assigned, never followed up.
Notation says resource constraints, pending review. Thought you'd want to know.
Miles assumed Hahn had access to all case records on Cord, based on the reports and updates they had periodically been sending to AD Hayes.
And if Hahn had that information, Miles supposed he had given Cord’s name to a broader pass through the database using the parameters he had developed after the Parsons arrest. Cord had come up as a former SCAD adjunct with a documented interest in color theory and a two-year gap in his employment history that had never been explained or followed up on in the original flag.
The flag itself had been generated four months ago but not yet assigned to anyone.
And Miles understood why; on the surface, Russell Cord didn’t seem like much of a threat…
not if a two-year gap in employment initially seemed to be the only flag.
His name had been sitting in the task force database for four months with a notation that read resource constraints, pending review.
They’d had his name and no one had acted.
Miles was both embarrassed and infuriated while also managing to understand that there was simply no way everyone could be thoroughly investigated.
Miles looked over to Vic, caught her eye, and gave her the phone. She read the message and set the phone down between them. She didn’t say anything immediately, and he could see her working through everything he’d just felt.
"He's already in the system," Miles said.
"For four months," Vic said. “That’s pretty damned close to the beginning.”
Miles pulled his laptop toward him and opened the task force database through the secure portal.
It took a bit of digging, but he found it: Cord's file was there, sparse and incomplete, the kind of file that had been created because a flag was triggered and then never substantially added to.
The flag notation was brief: name generated through academic conference cross-reference, color theory background, employment gap unaccounted for, no known direct contact with subject, review pending.
There was a single attachment, labeled as “Conference Entry.”
Miles opened it up and read it. It had come from a color science and perception symposium, held in Atlanta three years ago.
Cord had been listed as an attendee in the conference's published proceedings.
And that is what linked him to Kane. Kane had been alleged, through a secondary source, to have been present at the same conference, not as a registered attendee but as someone who had been seen there by a person later identified as a Kane associate.
The connection between Cord and Kane through that conference was indirect and inferential, and had been considered too thin to prioritize given the volume of similar flags being generated at the time.
“You looked into the employment gap, right?” Miles asked Pruitt.
From her place at the dry erase board, she nodded.
“Yeah. Cord left SCAD for a while before the non-renewal. He was gone for two years and when he came back it was on a reduced adjunct position. The final non-renewal ended his connection to the institution entirely. The two-year gap in the middle of that timeline has never been explained and no one has found records of what he was up to during that time.”
“You think SCAD might know?” Vic offered.
“I can make a call and ask.”
Miles stayed on the taskforce database, pulling up the timeline Ortega's team had compiled on Kane's network recruitment activity and set it beside the Cord file on his screen.
The overlap was surprisingly clear. The two-year period when Cord had dropped out of any traceable professional activity corresponded almost exactly with the window of time in which the bureau believed Kane's network had been actively recruiting.
“The timeline is almost perfect,” he said. “But based on what we found in his home, I believe the belief was already there.”
“What do you mean?” Vic asked.
“The earliest entries in those manifesto pages were dated nearly four years back…
so they predate the gap in Cord's employment record by several months.
The chromatic depletion framework, the color indexes, all of it was developing before he ever encountered Kane's network.
Kane didn't give him the idea." He looked at the conference entry again, the Atlanta symposium where Kane was thought to have been.
"Kane found someone who already had the architecture built and handed him the permission to use it. "
"And the chemistry," Vic added.
"And the chemistry. They would make a perfect team.
The specificity of the chromium compounds, the delivery mechanisms, the calibrated concentrations.
That's not something a color theory lecturer works out on his own from art supply research.
" Miles looked at the empty jars on the forensic photographs from Gaston Street, further building his theory.
"Someone taught him that, or pointed him at the resources, or both. "
He sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment, running it all through his head.
The belief system had been Cord's, genuinely, developed over years before anyone found it useful.
The obsession was real and it had been his all along.
But somewhere in a two-year gap that no employment record explained, the obsession had been met by something external, something that gave it shape and direction and the specific technical capability that had killed three people in Savannah with methods that required knowledge a color theorist had no business knowing.
Kane had not created Russell Cord. He had found him and finished molding him.
Miles looked at the task force file again, at the notation about resource constraints and a pending review. "Hahn found this running a search that wasn't part of his assignment," Miles said.
"He’s working it, too?" Vic said.
Miles nodded, still not completely sure how he felt about it.
But really, deep down, he understood that he was only being hesitant about Hahn because for right now, it seemed that he was inadvertently filling the same role Sarah would have filled.
And he was already feeling her absence in this case in a way he had not expected.
“I don’t think Hayes or Ortega has officially assigned him to it,” Miles said.
“Based on what I’m gathering, he may have just sort of stumbled onto it.
” Thinking of Hahn, he picked up his phone and typed a reply.
Good work. This helps a lot. Send everything you have on the flag to me directly. He sent it and set the phone back down.
Pruitt stepped forward and said, “No luck with SCAD. What’s going on? Can you catch me up?”
Miles sighed, slightly embarrassed to admit such a thing, and said, "Cord was flagged in our system four months ago.
He was cross-referenced with Kane in regard to a conference in Atlanta.
But because it had not yet been fully proven that Kane was indeed at the conference, the lead wasn't followed up.
" He looked at the whiteboard, at the growing list of names in Pruitt's clean columns.
"He's a Kane disciple. The color theory isn't incidental to the case. It was the thing Kane liked about him. It’s why Kane chose him.”
Pruitt absorbed this without visible reaction. Then she looked at the board. "Which means the list is now not just a list of potential victims…"
“But maybe a list of potential suspects, too,” Vic finished.