CHAPTER TWO
A woman not too far away from the luggage area spotted them before Miles had fully oriented himself in the space. She was in her early forties, compact and straight-backed, with close-cropped natural hair and a badge clipped to her belt. She came forward without hesitation, studying them.
"Agent Sterling, Agent Stone?" she said, extending her hand.
“That’s us,” Vic said, stepping forward and shaking first.
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Detective Lena Pruitt.
I’m running the case here in Savannah." Pruitt wore a dark blazer over a gray shirt, and her badge clipped to her belt.
When Miles and Vic came through the baggage claim doors with their bags, she spotted them before they spotted her and came forward with a measured directness.
"I appreciate you both coming down fast,” she said.
"Can you take us directly to the crime scene?" Miles asked.
"Absolutely. The car's out front. I’ll fill you in on the way."
Pruitt walked them through the airport, and they stepped outside into the Savannah afternoon.
The air was warm and thick, with humidity and smelled of something green and faintly brackish that Miles had always associated with coastal cities built near water.
Pruitt's car was an unmarked sedan parked at the curb in a zone that technically required a permit, but the placard on the dash had taken care of that.
She unlocked it and they loaded their bags into the trunk and got in, Vic in the passenger seat and Miles in the back.
Pruitt pulled out of the airport loop and onto the highway before she said anything further.
The road ran straight and flat through a wide stretch of tidal marsh.
The grasses were a shade of deep, saturated green in the afternoon light, broken up by channels of dark water that caught the sky in long, still reflections.
“I have to say," Pruitt began, and Miles noticed a slight adjustment in her tone, "I've been reading everything I can find on the Elementalist cases. The Kane investigation…. all of it. I’ve even dug deep into how the hell he managed to escape from prison.” She glanced at Vic and said, "I followed the Austin case, too. The neon sign angle was well reported, at least the basics of it. God, I can’t imagine how exhausted you guys must be. "
"Eh, you sort of get used to it," Miles said from the back.
"I get that." Pruitt's eyes went back to the road. "What I'm saying is, when the ME came back with chromium six at those levels, I knew what I was looking at. Or at least I had a strong theory." She said it matter-of-factly, without any particular effort to seem impressive.
"What can you tell us about the victim?" Miles asked.
"Nadia Ostroff, forty-four,” she said right away.
“She had a studio space in the Starland District, which is a neighborhood on the south end of downtown.
Arts community, galleries, that kind of area.
She'd been there about six years." Pruitt moved into the left lane to pass a slower vehicle and moved back.
"She was well regarded locally. Savannah landscapes mostly, some coastal imagery.
But she put this weird spin to it all, sort of like a Twin Peaks and David Lynch sort of vibe, you know?
She showed regularly at two galleries in the city and had collectors as far up as Charleston and Atlanta.
She had no criminal history, no civil disputes, no restraining orders, nothing that would point toward a targeted act. "
"Any family?" Vic asked.
"She went through a divorce about four years ago. Her ex-husband lives in Athens. He re-married and I spoke to him at length on a Zoom call yesterday, He’s been cooperative, and his alibi is airtight. But you’re welcome to look at my notes.”
“No hostility between the two of them?” Vic asked.
“No…there was no indication of anything adversarial between them. She has a sister in Savannah, and a grown son in college up in North Carolina. The son flew back when we notified him. He's staying with the aunt."
"Who found her?" Miles asked.
"The sister. Nadia was supposed to meet her for dinner and didn't show and didn't answer her phone. The sister went to the studio around 9:30 and found her on the floor. According to the sister, the studio door was unlocked, which apparently was not unusual when Nadia was working late."
Miles watched the city beginning to take shape ahead of them, the road rising slightly over the marsh and its grid of church spires and rooftops emerging from the canopy of live oaks that covered it like a second skyline.
"What about the initial medics on the scene and the eventual ME’s findings?” Miles asked.
"The paramedics who responded noted the pigments and solvents found in some of the paints inside the studio, and the attending went with occupational exposure as the most likely explanation.
It's not an unreasonable first read if you don't push on it. Painters work with chromium-based pigments all the time. But the family pushed the issue, which I was a fan of.”
"Why?" Vic asked. It wasn't a challenge, just a direct question.
Pruitt considered it for a moment. "The levels on the initial labs were high.
Not dramatically, not in a way that would automatically trigger a second look, but enough that the sister wanted a second opinion.
I requested the ME's office take it over.
The ME, Dr. Beaumont, ran the full panel and we found that the hexavalent chromium concentration in Nadia's system was not a paint exposure number. It wasn't even close."
"What was Dr. Beaumont's opinion on the route of exposure?" Miles asked.
"Primarily inhalation. The lung presentation was consistent with that.
But she noted some dermal indicators as well, which suggests the source material may have been present in the environment at high enough concentrations to allow for both simultaneously.
" Pruitt glanced at him in the rearview mirror "She thinks someone introduced a concentrated chromium compound into the studio environment, likely before Nadia was even there.”
Miles thought about the scene—the painter at her sink, the metallic smell she had probably noticed and dismissed. He thought about an unknown time of closed-room exposure with a source she had no reason to suspect.
"Is the studio currently sealed?" he asked.
"Yeah, it has been since about six o’ clock yesterday morning. Nothing's been touched since the body was removed.”
Pruitt turned onto a narrower street where the buildings were much closer together.
The tree canopy overhead was dense enough to block out most of the sky.
"When the ME’s results came back and I was pretty sure this was going to be a Kane case, I went ahead and pulled everything from the studio's lease history, as well as Ostroff’s supply receipts going back two years.
I also have a small list of the names of anyone who had access to the space.
" She slowed the car as they entered a residential stretch with parked cars on both sides.
"I can get you all of that, too, if you need it. "
They made a slow pass along the block. The studio was the ground floor of a two-story brick building, its front windows dark, a strip of yellow crime scene tape stretched across the door.
A small handwritten sign on the glass that had probably advertised hours was still there, slightly askew.
The building sat on a corner lot with a large oak in front, its branches spread wide over the sidewalk, strung with Spanish moss that moved in the faint breeze.
Miles looked at the building as Pruitt parked.
The windows were large, the kind that let in the good directional light a painter needed, and they were positioned facing north, which told him something about why Nadia Ostroff had chosen and arranged her space.
He filed that away because he was quickly learning that in cases like these, even the smallest of details could turn out to be important.
"What do you know about chromium compounds?" he asked Pruitt. "Before the ME's report, before all of this?"
"Not much, honestly. But enough to know they're used in pigments and industrial processes. The ME told me a bit, too.”
"Then let me catch you up to seed," Miles said as they got out of the car.
Pruitt nodded, as she killed the engine. She then stepped out onto the street without a word, and Miles and Vic followed.