CHAPTER THIRTEEN
During his nearly eleven months as a field agent, yanked out of the lab and asked to chase down Kane’s disciples, Miles had quickly learned that some of the best information often came from speaking to witnesses or the friends and family members of the victims. He understood the value of it, and he was happy to keep doing it for as long as the work required.
But for this specific case, he was starting to get the feeling that conversations weren’t going to lead to a big break.
He couldn’t quite describe why. The killer's logic was internal and elaborate and he was just different enough from the others to make Miles feel uneasy.
No manifestos, sort of hidden meaning or understanding of the chemical he was using as his weapon that felt almost intimate.
Still, he knew they had to work the list, to keep eliminating potential suspects.
That was why he came out of Conrad Pell’s small floral warehouse feeling that they’d wasted time, but in a strangely productive way.
The wholesale operation Conrad Pell ran out of Garden City occupied a converted warehouse set back from the road behind a gravel lot.
It smelled, even from the parking area, of the wet, green smell of cut stems and cold water.
The smell here was industrial in scale, impersonal, the raw material before it became anyone's careful arrangement.
"That was clean," Vic said.
"Very clean." Miles agreed as he unlocked the car.
Pell had not been what he expected, though the alibi had done most of the work before Miles had even finished processing the man himself.
It was immediate and specific, the kind that didn't need much pulling at.
He had been in Charlotte for four days at a wholesale trade show, the dates bracketing the window in which Hale's soaking supply would need to have been treated. He had easily been able to produce the conference registration, the hotel receipt, and the names of six industry contacts who had seen him there without being asked for any of it. As for the bitterness about Hale, he’d not tried to conceal it, which was also consistent with someone who knew they had a bulletproof alibi.
Pell had leaned back in his chair when Miles brought up the nastiness between the two and looked at him with the flat calm of a man who had nothing to hide.
"He said I overcharged him," Pell said. "I didn't. The invoice was correct and he knew it was correct and he refused to pay it anyway because he figured I needed his business more than he needed mine.
" He said it without lowering his voice.
"I stopped his orders for six weeks. We settled eventually but not before he'd told half of Broughton Street his version of it. "
"When did you last see him?" Miles asked.
"Four, maybe five months ago at a trade event. But we didn’t speak.”
And that had been that. The Charlotte story was strong, but he figured they should do their due diligence and check on the names and times Pell had given them.
Now, as he started the car, he was about to look over to Vic to ask if she could type in Warren Bly’s address. But before he could ask, his phone rang.
He looked at the screen and said: "Pruitt." He answered and held the phone between them., placing it on Speaker. "You're on speaker, Detective,” he said. “Agent Stone is here as well.”
"Good." Pruitt's voice was direct, and Miles thought he detected a hint of urgency as well. "I got a hit on the incident reports."
“What kind of hits?” Vic asked.
"I ran the description your bookstore owner gave us: a white male, forties, slight build, canvas hat.
It was run against local complaint filings and incident reports for the last six months in the Broughton Street district.
I was looking for anything that put that description in proximity to Hale's shop or the general area and found that there was a noise complaint filed six months ago. The complainant was in the Starland District, though not Broughton. But the description from the report matches, and the person who actually field the complaint itself is what’s important. "
"Go ahead," Miles said.
"The complaint was filed against a community garden on the south end of the Starland District. It’s been there for about six or seven years, and it’s run by a volunteer group.
The complaint alleged that the garden's weekend activities constituted a noise disturbance—specifically a Saturday morning gathering.
The city looked at the complaint but found no basis for it, on the grounds that the garden is well within any reasonable noise ordinance.
So, it was dismissed." She paused for a moment, the sort of pause that made Miles feel that the big reveal was coming next.
"But the language in the complaint is what flagged it for me,” Pruitt went on.
“He didn't just say it was too loud. He wrote that the garden was, and I'm reading directly here, conducting activities harmful to the chromatic environment of the surrounding neighborhood. "
The car was quiet for a moment as Miles and Vic shared a look.
"Chromatic environment," Vic said.
"That's the phrase he used,” Pruitt confirmed. “The city treated it as eccentric and closed it out. I might have done the same thing six months ago."
“What’s the name on the complaint?” Miles asked.
"The complainant's name is Russell Cord. He's forty-seven. He lists himself in the filing as a color theorist—whatever the hell that is—and a former lecturer."
"Former lecturer where?" Miles asked.
"Savanna College of Art and Design. I looked it up and saw that his contract wasn’t renewed two years ago.
I'm still pulling the details on that, but what I have so far is that the non-renewal was not entirely routine. There were complaints from students and at least one formal review. I’ve requested access to those records; I’m just waiting to hear back. ”
“This could be big, Detective Pruitt," Vic said. “Thanks.”
“Hold on, there’s more. Specifically, there are two more dismissed complaints he tried to file, both filed within the past eighteen months.
One was against a muralist working on a commissioned piece on the side of a building in the Thomas Square neighborhood.
Cord's complaint alleged that the mural was, and again I'm quoting, an act of chromatic appropriation from the public visual field.
The second complaint was against a plant nursery on Waters Avenue, which he described as operating as a commercial chromatic extraction enterprise.
" She said it all in a mostly even tone, but Miles heard the weight she was placing under it.
"All three complaints were dismissed. But I also found a correspondence history with the city council.
He's been writing to them for approximately three years.
The letters are long and the language in them is consistent across all of it…
this idea of chromatic pollution, chromatic energy being removed from the shared environment by commercial and creative operations. "
Miles sat with that for a moment. A painter. A florist. A community garden that had been the subject of a formal complaint from a man who wrote to city council about chromatic pollution. Maybe, he supposed, these complaints and letters to the city council were Cord’s form of manifestos.
"Where is he?" Miles asked.
"I have a residential address, a building on Gaston Street. I've driven past it but I haven't approached. I wanted you and Vic there." She said this not as a deference but as a tactical judgment. "I can meet you in half an hour."
"We'll be there," Miles said, already backing out of the lot. "Send the address."
"I’ll do it as soon as we end the call."
Pruitt ended the call. Miles had not completely forgotten about the planned visit to Warren Bly.
For now, it seemed that Russel Cord was the hot ticket.
True to her word, Pruitt sent the address via text just five seconds later.
He plugged it into his GPS and turned out of the gravel lot onto the road and headed south.
The Bly visit was already receding as a priority, not dropped altogether, but delayed.
He’d been driving for perhaps five minutes toward Cord’s address when his phone buzzed again from its place in the cupholder.
He glanced at the screen at a red light, assuming it would be Pruitt with more information.
Instead, he saw a DC-area number He quickly checked it and saw that Agent Hahn had texted him… which he found odd and out of place.
It read: Hey, it’s Agent Hahn. Was looking into active Kane cases and saw you and Stone were on the chromium case in GA. Anything I can run from here?
Miles typed back a quick response as the red light remained steady. I don't think so but thanks for checking in. He set the phone back in the cupholder as the light changed.
“That was weird,” he said.
“Who was it?” Vic asked.
“Agent Hahn.”
"Hahn?" Vic asked.
"Yeah. He asked if we needed help. If he could run anything from Quantico.”
Vic smiled knowingly. “He landed that Parsons arrest,” she said. “Not to say I fault him for it, but I bet he’s trying to angle to make another big move. Trying to make a name for himself.”
“Yeah, I don’t blame him,” Miles said. Yet, it occurred to him that until recently, it had been Sarah who had sent messages like that. He wondered how her meeting had gone and how deep the waters were going to be for the first day or two of her new position.
Vic tapped at her phone and said, “I’m looking up some more stuff on Russell Cord,” she said. “There’s an old faculty profile from SCAD, which has been archived. And it doesn’t look like he has much of a web presence. His LinkedIn profile lists him as a former color theory lecturer."
“Is it just me or does that sound like a made-up job?” Miles asked.
Vic nodded but she was too deep into her digging to be distracted. "Looks like he published two papers through SCAD's academic press before the non-renewal. They’re both on what he calls ‘chromatic depletion in urban environments’."
Miles said nothing, though he was thinking about the face-down painting on the floor of Ostroff's studio. It occurred to Miles that if the killer felt so strongly about this, why not destroy the paintings? Why not rid the world of them?
He wondered if maybe there was a degree of appreciation there. If it was Cord, a former color theorist, it would make sense…a deluded sort of sense, but Miles could at least understand the logic behind it. The killer believed these people were somehow robbing the world of its colors.
And he was willing to remove lives from that very same world in order to protect it.