CHAPTER ONE
The document on Miles's screen was two hundred and forty pages long, and he had been staring at it for the better part of an hour without absorbing much of it.
It was loaded with information: names, places, theories, backgrounds.
But for him, in that moment, it may as well have been nothing more than a huge word search puzzle.
The document was one part of the task force's compiled intelligence on potential Elementalist disciples.
To say it was thorough was an understatement.
It had to be. There were behavioral profiles and financial cross-references…
social network analyses and flag summaries dating back three years, all organized into a format that was easy enough to navigate, but still overwhelming.
Miles had his own section to review, a subset of cases involving individuals with chemistry or materials science backgrounds who had come to the task force's attention through indirect channels.
He had read the same profile twice this morning without really retaining it.
Through the glass wall of the lab, the rest of the division moved at its usual pace.
Reports were being handed off, equipment was being checked, and the quiet procedural rhythm of the building carried on around him.
He had been back at Quantico from Austin for ten days and had more or less rejoined that rhythm.
Lab reports, a debrief with Hayes that lasted two hours and covered ground he had already covered in Austin.
There had also been a session with Dr. Mitchell in which he said the things he was supposed to say and Mitchell wrote notes and nodded in the way that told Miles she wasn't being fooled.
After two days with these reports, he had stepped away from the busyness of the conference rooms and offices.
Here, back in the lab, he felt a bit more comfortable.
Ever since stepping up as a field agent in the face of these Elementalist cases, he’d had to put his lab work behind.
He hadn’t realized just how much he’d missed it until he’d retreated here two days ago—just him, the reports and the occasional text or call from Vic and Sarh Kim.
They were both just checking in on him, aware that these Elementalist cases were wearing on him.
Sarah was more comforting and warmer about it, maybe because there was still something building between the two of them.
Vic took things from more of a professional standpoint, but she also knew when to leave things.
Still, Miles had seen her watching him a few times in the past week in a way that made him feel almost untrustworthy.
It was almost as if Vic was waiting for him to snap, believing that he really wouldn’t be able to hold up under this sort of pressure.
And really…maybe she was right. First of all, there were the nightmares.
They’d been happening since the case in Los Angeles, and they had started happening more and more since Austin.
The nightmares were not dramatic. They didn’t feature any of the cinematic terror he might have expected from the things he had seen.
No, they were quieter than that, more subtle.
And for some reason, that seemed to make them worse.
He would dream of a room he recognized from a case, and it would always be empty.
With a muddy sort of dream logic, he would understand that the murders had already happened, that this room had been someone’s final view of the world.
And with that understanding, the place would be filled with a rumble of thunder before Gabriel Kane walked inside.
They would stand there, staring one another down, until the room would slowly start to catch on fire.
At that point, the room would change. Sometimes it was Celestine's studio on South Congress. Sometimes it was Kane’s old lab.
Once it was a hotel hallway he didn't recognize at all, which bothered him more than the ones he did. He had not mentioned the nightmares to Dr. Mitchell. He’d nearly mentioned them to Sarah but had decided not to.
The Sarah thing was its own category of problem, and it was one he had been handling by not thinking about it directly.
What he felt for her was simple enough to identify but complicated enough that he wasn’t able to put a name to it.
Lust? A crush? Love? He had no idea. He was aware that she had become important to him in a way that went beyond the professional, and that this was happening less than seven months after Elena had passed away.
There were times when he simply thought he wasn't ready. And when he tried to look deeper to understand why he wasn’t ready…
well, that was when he tried to dive right back into the motions of normalcy, scrolling through two hundred and forty pages without reading them.
His phone buzzed, causing him to blink in surprise. God, he’d really zoned out there for a moment. He glanced at the screen and saw that it was Assistant Director Hayes.
Come down to my office asap, the text message read.
Usually, he was nervous or uncertain whenever Hayes called. This morning though, just an hour and a half into the day’s work, he welcomed the break in the monotony. Miles pushed back from the desk and went down the hall.
Hayes's office door was open, so he went right inside without knocking and took the chair across the desk.
Hayes was already looking at something on his own monitor; a reading posture Miles had come to recognize as one that meant Hayes had found something he considered worth the interruption.
Actually, over the past two months or so, it seemed to Miles that Hayes only contacted him or Vic when it was absolutely necessary.
"Good morning, sir," Miles said. “Do you have something?”
"I do,” Hayes said, finally looked directly at Miles.
“I got a query this morning from Savannah PD.” He turned the monitor slightly so Miles could see the open email chain.
"A local painter died in her studio two days ago.
The initial ruling from the attending physician was accidental exposure, occupational hazard, something in the pigments or solvents arena.
The family pushed for a second opinion, though, and the ME who picked it up ran a full tox panel.
" He paused, then pulled up a digital toxicology report.
"There were heavy amounts of hexavalent chromium found. Chromium six."
Miles sat forward. "What were the levels?"
"That's where it becomes our problem." Hayes pointed to the report, tapping his screen. "The ME's language in the summary says, and I'm quoting here, 'levels inconsistent with any known occupational or environmental exposure scenario.'"
Miles stood up, leaned over a bit, and read it himself.
He was well aware that Hexavalent chromium was a known carcinogen with established occupational exposure limits.
It would often show up in painters and ceramicists and people who worked with certain dyes and coatings.
It was not unknown in studio environments.
But the concentration in the tox panel was not a studio exposure number and certainly not the sort of number you arrived at by accident.
"How was it administered?" Miles asked.
"The ME's still working that out. They’re looking at inhalation as the primary route based on the lung presentation, but she hasn't ruled out dermal or ingestion.
Some of the materials in the studio had pigments that contained chromium compounds, which is consistent, but the ME's opinion is that whatever the source was, it was not the painter's own supplies. "
"Meaning someone put it there."
"That's where she's leaning, yes. Savannah PD opened a homicide inquiry this morning.
They've got a detective on it, but she reached out to the Bureau because she'd flagged the element angle and wanted to know if it rang any bells.
" Hayes leaned back in his chair and looked at Miles and said, "I'll leave it to you to determine whether it rings any bells. "
Miles handed the monitor back. "Chromium."
"Element twenty-four," Hayes said, and that one comment said what neither of them had actually given words to. This was absolutely what an Elementalist case would look like.
"Does Vic know?" Miles asked.
"She's in the briefing room. I texted her right after I texted you. I've already looked at flights. There's one out of Reagan at 12:15 that'll put you in Savannah by a little before four. I can have you on it."
"Yes," Miles said. He was already thinking about the tox panel, about the ME's language, about the lung presentation and the chromium compounds in the studio.
More than that, he was already stuck on the idea of how someone had put enough hexavalent chromium into a room to kill someone without making it obvious.
“Can you forward me all of that?” he asked, pointing to Hayes’s computer.
“Yeah, I’ll do it right now. I’ll send over the Savannah PD’s report as well. And hey, Miles?”
Miles stopped at the door. “Yes?”
"How are you holding up?" Hayes asked. His tone was even, neither pointed nor soft.
“I’m okay.”
“Things with Dr. Mitchell are going well?”
“As well as they can, I guess,” he said. Miles wasn’t sure why, but he felt exposed and a little angry at having Hayes mention his visits to Dr. Mitchell.
"You know…if you ever feel like this is all just too much, you can speak up. I know it’s been a lot…especially for someone who isn’t accustomed to always working out in the field in such a capacity.”
He nearly asked if Vic had said something to him—if she’d brought a concern to him. But that wasn’t a can of worms he wanted to open up, so he kept it to himself. “I think I’m doing okay for now, sir,” he said.
Hayes nodded once, in a way that acknowledged the statement without endorsing it. "Get to it then. And be safe out there.”
Miles exited the office and made his way down the hallway, to the briefing room.
He wasn’t surprised to see that Vic was already there when he pushed the door open.
She was sitting at the far end of the table with her jacket over the back of the chair and her laptop open.
She looked up when he came in and read something in his face because she straightened slightly and closed the laptop.
"I take it we’re going somewhere?" she said.
"Savannah," Miles said. "A painter died in her studio and the ME found massive amounts of Hexavalent chromium."
"Chromium?"
"Yeah. Hayes has us on a 12:15, out of Reagan."
“Jesus,” she said, looking at her watch. “That’s just an hour and a half from now.”
He nodded, smiled, and said, “Then I guess we’d better get moving.”