CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The drive from Odom's garden to Whitmore House took a little less than ten minutes.
Miles spent most of it thinking about the notation sheets on Russell Cord's walls, the dense pages of handwriting that were now being catalogued and photographed in their entirety back on Gaston Street.
Pruitt's team would go through all of it, and he was holding onto the possibility that somewhere in those pages, in the margins of a color wheel or the closing lines of one of the manifesto entries, Cord had written something that functioned as a list. A name, an address, a description of a target he had been watching.
He knew that it was possible that there was nothing, that Cord had been careful enough to keep the operational details of his planning separate from the ideological record he had left behind.
Miles didn't know yet and not knowing was its own specific weight to carry.
Whitmore House sat at the end of a long brick drive off Abercorn Street, set back from the road behind a double row of live oaks that were old enough that their canopies had grown together overhead.
They formed a tunnel of shade that the afternoon light came through in broken, shifting patterns.
The house itself was antebellum, three stories of pale stucco with a wide veranda across the front and a cupola at the roofline that caught the sky above the tree canopy.
The grounds extended around all four sides of the structure, visible from the drive as a series of distinct garden spaces connected by gravel paths, each one cultivated to a different period-appropriate standard.
Beyond the house, Miles spotted a larger informal garden in the English style, the plantings taller and more naturalistic than the formal spaces at the front.
They were halfway up the stone steps when the front door opened. They were greeted by a woman in her late forties, with reading glasses on a lanyard around her neck and the contained, managing expression of someone who was trying to keep it together.
"Agents Sterling and Stone?" she said.
"That's right," Miles said.
“Yes, a Detective Pruitt called about five minutes ago to make sure someone was available to talk to you. I’m Cecelia Hartman, one of the managers. Come on in.”
She led them through the main hall. It consisted of a wide corridor with pine floors and period furniture arranged along the walls,.
From there, they entered into a side room that was clearly staff territory rather than the public-facing part of the house.
The room was large but held only a round table, six chairs, and a sideboard with a coffee maker.
The room smelled of old wood, coffee, and something faintly floral.
Miles thought that was probably just the nature of a house where fresh arrangements moved through on a regular schedule.
Hartman gestured toward the chairs and they sat. She poured coffee without asking and brought the cups to the table and sat across from them, her hands folded in front of her.
"Ms. Hartman, do you know why we’re here?" Vic asked.
“Yes. I knew before Detective Pruitt called. When Alice, Patrice’s neighbor, called the police, she called us next.
She was a weekly visitor and was very distraught.
It was through the staff before I could get ahead of it.
" She looked up apologetically and added, "I'm not sure it would have mattered.
These things move fast in a small community. "
Miles nodded. "How long had Patrice been with the estate?"
"Twelve years this past March." Hartman said it without having to think about it, which told him something about how she held her staff in her mind. "She came to us from a landscape firm in Charleston. We were lucky to get her."
"What did she do here, specifically?" Vic asked.
"Everything, really, when it came to the grounds.
" Hartman settled back slightly in her chair.
"She redesigned the informal garden in her first two years.
Completely reconceived it from the original plan, which had become historically inaccurate through years of ad hoc planting decisions.
She researched the period, sourced the appropriate varieties, oversaw the installation herself.
After that, she managed all of it: the formal parterre, the kitchen garden, the seasonal beds.
She knew the soil chemistry of every section of the property.
She knew which beds got afternoon shade in July and how that changed what you could grow in them.
" She looked back into her coffee cup and Miles was pretty sure she was trying not to cry.
"She was not someone who treated this as a job with hours," she finished.
"Did she have any conflicts with anyone here?" Miles asked. "With colleagues, with vendors, with anyone connected to the estate?"
Hartman looked at him directly. "None that I was ever made aware of.
And I would have been made aware. Patrice was not a person who generated that kind of friction.
I've been sitting in my office since I found out, trying to think of a single person who would have wanted her harmed. " She shook her head. "I can't."
“Would it be okay if we spoke to a few more employees?” Miles asked.
“Of course. Anything you need, it’s yours.”
“Could you show us where to start?”
She nodded, got to her feet, and said, “This way.”
Hartman walked them back to the main hall and pointed them toward a side door that opened onto the grounds, and they took it. “Anyone who worked closely with Patrice would be on the grounds today. And please…just remember we all just found out and some are quite sad about her passing.”
“Of course,” Vic said. “Thank you.”
Outside, the estate opened up around them.
An antiquated walkway ran along the left side.
It was bordered by trees and flowerbeds.
Beyond this, the gravel path curved around the rear of the house toward the informal garden, which was visible from where they stood as a deeper, lusher space.
The kitchen garden sat behind a low wall to the right, its beds practical and dense, staked tomatoes and herb rows and what looked like a cutting garden at the far end.
A man was working in the side yard between the kitchen garden wall and the path, crouched over a bed of low plantings with a hand tool.
He was in his thirties, and he looked up when he heard them on the gravel and stayed crouched for a moment, assessing, before he straightened and pulled off one glove.
Miles showed his badge. "Special Agent Sterling, FBI. This is Agent Stone. Do you have a moment to talk?”
“Yeah, I guess.” He eyed them both again and asked, “Is this about Patrice?”
“It is,” Miles said. “can I get your name?
"Darius," he said.
“And did you work with Ms. Odom?”
"Yeah. Four years." He said it in the flattened way of someone who had already heard the news and was still in the early stage of carrying it. "What do you need to know?"
They asked the same questions they’d asked Hartman, focusing in on the chance that Patrice Odom may have had enemies here at the estate.
Darius found that laughable and shared his time with Patrice with them.
He described her as kind, hilarious, and a walking encyclopedia of all things related to flowers and other plants.
They thanked Darius for his time and found a second groundskeeper within just thirty seconds.
This one had been visibly crying. A quick round of introductions revealed that his name was Vernon; he had been at Whitmore for seven years.
He had indeed worked closely with Patrice off and on.
He was quiet for a moment after Miles finished asking about unfamiliar visitors or anything out of the ordinary in the past several weeks.
His eyes went wide for a second and then he began to nod. “Yeah, actually. I’d say maybe two weeks ago, give or take a day.” He was looking at the middle distance, toward the gravel path that ran along the side of the house toward the rear garden.
“And what did you see?” Miles asked.
"I was working the front parterre, and I noticed a man at the garden gate. The one on the south side, the wrought iron gate off the side path. It's not a public entrance, but people stop there sometimes to look in. Tour visitors, mostly."
"What did you notice about him?" Miles asked. “What made him stand out?”
"He was sketching. He had a notebook, the kind with a hard cover.
He was standing at the gate drawing, like very into it.
I watched him for a couple of minutes from across the parterre.
" Vernon's expression was neutral, reconstructing rather than editorializing.
"We get architecture students all the time.
SCAD students, students from other programs. They come to sketch the historic buildings and the formal gardens.
It's common enough that I didn't think anything of it, but this was an older guy. Just had a weird vibe, you know?"
"Can you describe him?" Vic asked.
"He was a white guy in his forties, on the thin side. He was wearing a canvas hat with a wide brim, pulled down. Maybe one reason he stood out was because he was wearing a dark jacket, even though it was warm. He was there for maybe twenty minutes and then he walked back toward the street."
“Did he have any interactions with Ms. Odom?” Vic asked.
“If he did, I didn’t see it.”
Miles had brought to mind the description from Margot Finney at the bookstore on Broughton Street—the man she had seen arguing with Desmond Hale two weeks ago. The description was pretty much the same, right down to the canvas hat.
Vernon looked at the path toward the south gate. "I did see Patrice walk past that side of the garden at one point while he was there.”
“Was the man watching her?”
“I don’t know for sure. I mean…he could have been. Like I said, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it because it didn’t seem like that big of a deal at the time.”
“Do you remember where Ms. Odom went during this time?”
“She went into the greenhouse, and I went back to what I was doing."
They asked a few more questions of Vernon, but there was nothing else of use.
Miles thanked him and he and Vic walked back toward the front of the property, taking the long way around along the gravel path that ran past the south gate.
Miles stopped at the gate and looked through the wrought iron at the rear garden beyond it.
From this position, he had a clear view of the main planting beds and the greenhouse entrance.
He figured anyone could observe anyone working in the near half of the garden for as long as you wanted without entering the property or attracting attention.
Especially if you were holding a notebook and looked like a student.
He turned and looked at the street. It was a quiet block with parallel parking on both sides. About a quarter of the block on the opposite side consisted of a parking lot for visitors to the estate.
There wasn’t quite enough evidence to support such a theory, but he was becoming certain that Cord had been here, watching Patrice Odom move through the garden while her gloves were probably already treated and sitting wherever she stored them.
They walked back to the car in silence and when they were inside, he took the driver’s seat without starting the engine for a moment.
He thought about what they had, and what they didn't. They had a third confirmed victim who fit the pattern precisely.
There was also a witness description that put their suspect at Whitmore House roughly two weeks ago.
By now, there would be a BOLO, and they also had a house on Gaston Street full of color wheels and odd writings that may or may not be manifestos.
“Seems like the description fits the one from the bookstore,” Vic said.
“I was thinking the same thing. And I also think Cord is very organized.
"He has a head start, and we don't know how long it is.
The rent buys him a month from two weeks ago.
That's two more weeks before anyone is legally looking at that property for nonpayment.
Maybe three if you have a lenient landlord.
" He looked at the front of the estate, at the live oak canopy over the long brick drive.
"We need a list," Vic said.
“What kind of list?”
“Anyone in Savannah whose livelihood centers on color,” Vic said. “Painters, florists, gardeners, muralists…anyone who works with color professionally in a visible way."
Miles nodded, thinking about the color wheels on Cord’s walls, with index numbers and their red circles. "That list is not going to be short."
"No," Vic said. "It's not. But until we can find something hiding in all of that scribbling back at his address, it might be all we have…trying to find people who might attract him and hoping to save their lives.”
“That’ll take forever, though,” he said, but he knew she was right.
“Then I guess that means we’d better haul ass.”
Miles finally started the car. He pulled away from the curb, and the estate's oak canopy receded in the mirror. He started back toward Pruitt’s precinct, while somewhere in the city or beyond it Russell Cord was still ahead of them by a margin Miles was too afraid to think about.