CHAPTER THREE
Pruitt opened the studio door with a key that she pulled out of her pocket with something like a quiet respect.
Once the door was opened and Pruitt stepped inside, Miles stood in the doorway for a moment before going in.
He took a second to observe the space from the threshold, letting the room present itself before he started expecting to find answers.
The afternoon light came through the north-facing windows in long, flat panels, that fell gently on the floor where Nadia Ostroff had died.
The room was large for a studio space, maybe four hundred square feet, with twelve-foot ceilings and exposed brick along the far wall.
A utility sink occupied the left corner near the door.
The largest easel stood roughly in the center of the room, and three smaller ones were arranged at intervals along the right wall, each holding a canvas in some stage of completion.
The worktables were cluttered but somehow orderly, and the shelves above them held a dense arrangement of containers, tubes, jars, and equipment that seemed to be organized by category.
Brushes were placed in order of size. Mediums had been separated from pigments.
Solvents in heavy containers sat along the bottom shelf.
“Here you go,” Pruitt said, offering them both a pair of crime scene gloves without being asked. It was almost as if she had pulled them out of thin air, like some bizarre magic trick. “Help yourselves,” she said.
Miles took a pair gratefully and slid them on. With a small glance over to Vic, he turned back toward the room and went to work.
He moved to the utility sink first. It was a deep, commercial-grade basin.
The porcelain was stained with the accumulated residue of years of paint, grime and different cleaning agents.
A wire drying rack sat beside it with eleven brushes still arranged on it, undisturbed.
He counted them and noted the sizes and looked at the residue in the bristles of the three that hadn’t been fully rinsed.
The color in them was consistent with the palette on the canvas at the center easel, a mix of blues and raw sienna.
It looked like Ostroff had been cleaning up just before she died.
He began to work backward from the brushes and the palette and reconstruct roughly where she was in her routine when the exposure began compounding faster than her body could manage.
For instance, the three brushes that hadn't been fully rinsed told him she had been working in blues and raw sienna, which matched the palette on the center easel.
The ones on the drying rack were clean, which meant she had gotten through most of the set before she went down.
The turpentine jar on the sink ledge had been used recently, the solvent inside clouded with suspended pigment; the rag beside it was stained in the same color family as the brushes.
She had been in the middle of the clean-up process.
The three unrinsed ones were mid-range, numbers six through eight.
While he thought he had a clear picture of her last few minutes, he wasn’t sure what it all meant. Or if it even meant anything at all. So, he moved to the shelves.
The solvents were on the bottom shelf as he had noted from the doorway, four containers in a row.
Three of them were commercial products, their labels intact and identifying them as the standard mineral spirits and odorless turpentine that were fairly common is art spaces like these.
The fourth container was different, though.
It was the same type of vessel as the others, the same style of rectangular plastic container with a screw cap, but the label had been removed and replaced with a handwritten one in blue pen.
The handwriting read "brush cleaner" in plain block letters.
Miles crouched in front of it and studied it closer.
The other three containers had the printed manufacturer labels that came from art supply stores, with product information and safety warnings and barcodes still intact.
This one didn’t. It had been relabeled. That was not impossible as an innocent explanation; painters sometimes decanted products into different containers or relabeled things for their own organizational purposes.
But the handwriting on this label didn’t match the handwriting on any of the other labels Miles could see on the surrounding shelves, where Nadia had labeled things in a loose, looping script that was easy to identify.
The block letters on the brush cleaner container were careful and deliberate and looked nothing like her hand.
He photographed it in and was about to move on when Vic came to stand beside him and looked at the shelf. "That one’s different," she said.
"The label's not hers." He held the container up and turned it toward the light.
The liquid inside was clear, which was consistent with a solvent.
It was also consistent with any number of aqueous chromium compound solutions.
"She would have used this every session.
Rinse the brushes, set them on the rack.
Repeated dermal contact and inhalation every time she worked.
" He set it back down, frowning. "There’s a chance someone could have swapped it…someone who knew where she kept her cleaning supplies and which container to replace it with.”
"And knew she wouldn't notice the difference," Vic said. “I mean, why would an artist make a point to look at a tube of paint they think is the same as the one they use on a consistent basis?”
"It's clear, and it doesn't have a strong smell at the concentrations that would still be effective,” Miles said. “If you're not looking for it and you're used to the chemical smell of your own studio, you wouldn't register it."
“Any idea how long she’d have to be exposed to it before it would kill her?”
“Not sure. A day or two, maybe? Maybe a few more.” He looked back to Detective Pruitt, who was standing patiently by at the doorway. “Detective, can you bag this cleaner up and have someone in forensics or a lab look it over? I’m pretty sure this is what would have killed her.”
“Sure, I’m on it,” she said. “I’ll grab a big enough evidence bag from my car.”
Miles stood up, suddenly aware that if the cleaning solution wasn’t capped properly, they could also be exposed to the same thing that killed Ostroff. It made him want to work much faster. With that in mind, he turned toward the paintings.
They seemed to be everywhere. They covered the available wall space in a dense, overlapping arrangement.
Some were framed and some were not, some finished and some clearly studies or works in progress.
They were uniformly saturated in color, most showing water in shades of deep viridian, cadmium skies that almost looked like something out of faded, warped photographs.
The harbor scenes dominated, but there were street paintings as well, and some interior studies, and a series of smaller pieces along the back wall that looked like color experiments.
These looked to be pure fields of pigment in combinations she had been testing and held abundant traces of that David Lynch-like feeling Detective Pruitt had mentioned.
Miles stood in the middle of it all and turned slowly.
As he did so, he saw that one canvass had fallen over.
It was on the floor near the left wall, face-down on the concrete.
It had been positioned away from the other paintings with a deliberateness that was hard to attribute to an accident.
Everything else in the studio was vertical, either on an easel or hung on the wall or leaning against it with the painted face forward.
This one was down, its back to the ceiling—just a plain canvas stretcher and a strip of masking tape along one edge with a date written on it in Orstroff’s looping hand.
Miles crouched beside it and looked at the back, looking for clues of any kind.
When he was satisfied that there was nothing there, he turned it over.
It was a large piece, maybe twenty-four by thirty-six, and showed a Savannah street scene painted in the late-afternoon light.
The leaves on the trees glowed in an almost amber hue, and the building facades were warm and deep.
The color in it was extraordinary, not in a showy way but by the hand of someone who knew what they had created was very good. He looked at it for a long moment.
There was nothing on it other than the picture—no mark, no message, no alteration. The painting itself was intact, the surface undisturbed. He turned it over again and looked at the back, checked the stretcher bars, checked the masking tape label. But there was nothing.
"Why this one?" Vic said. She wasn't asking Miles specifically. She was thinking out loud, standing over his shoulder, looking at the painting the way she looked at things she hadn't solved yet. “Knocked over like that, it wasn’t an accident, right?”
“I was thinking the same thing. But the more I look at it, the more I think it could be just an accident.”
"It's the best one in the room," Miles said. “In my opinion, anyway.”
He said it because it seemed relevant, though he couldn't yet articulate why.
Every painting in the studio was vibrant and accomplished, but this one had something the others didn't. Miles was not an artist at all, but he had always appreciated paintings and sculptures.
To him, this painting had a quality of observation that went beyond technique.
It felt personal and just by looking at it, he could tell Ostroff had put a lot of time and passion into it.
He looked around at the other canvases, all of them facing outward, all of them showing their color to the room. Then he looked back at the one he had found face-down on the floor. "The killer put her best work down. It’s got to be on purpose, right? A message? Symbolic somehow?”
Vic looked at the surrounding paintings and then back at the floor. "Or like he was punishing it."
Miles set the painting back down the way he had found it and stood up.
He looked at the room again, the whole of it, trying to find the logic that connected the relabeled solvent on the bottom shelf to the face-down canvas on the floor.
He was in the middle of trying to figure this out when he heard a sound at the door.
He turned and saw a young woman standing in the doorframe.
She had pushed past the crime scene tape, one hand still barely touching it behind her.
She was in her early to mid-twenties, with a close-shaved head and full tattoo sleeves on both arms; the ink was dense and detailed from her wrists to where her t-shirt sleeves began.
She had a messenger bag over one shoulder.
She was looking into the studio with an expression that changed rapidly from surprise to something rawer.
As she took in the presence of Miles and Vic, she took one step back as though she was about to leave.
Miles was about to call out to her, but the woman went still again before he said anything.
She seemed to make a decision in that moment, though it didn’t appear to be an easy one.
She lowered herself into a crouch in the doorframe, her back against one side of it with her knees drawn up.
She then put her face in her hands and began to cry.
It was not quiet crying. It was the uncontrolled kind, the kind that arrives before a person can organize a response to it and the body it helpless but to respond.
Vic moved toward the door without hesitation, crossing the studio in a few strides. Miles watched her go and then looked back at the painting on the floor, the street scene with the amber moss and the warm facades, lying face-down on the concrete of the studio where it had been made.
He still couldn't find what the killer had wanted him to see in it. He wasn't sure yet whether that was because there was nothing to find—that the painting had accidentally fallen over of its own accord—or because he wasn't yet asking the right questions.