CHAPTER TWENTY
The Savannah College of Art and Design faculty directory was not a public document in any current form that Miles could find, but archived versions of it existed in several places online.
The only viable information Pruitt had garnered from her call with them had pointed them to a rough, old and badly-in-need-of-an-update alumni website, he found indexed faculty listings that went back decades.
From there, he was able to find a snapshot of the color theory department's adjunct roster from four years ago, the last year Cord had been listed.
It felt flimsy, but he was also pretty sure this was the best place to start if they were trying to locate Cord or to figure out how to locate his kill list.
There were nine names on it besides Cord's. Miles had been running them one by one against LinkedIn profiles, academic email addresses, and publicly available contact information, building a current location for each one. He’d been looking through it all for nearly half an hour when the name Leslie Marks came up.
Marks was listed in the archived directory as a senior adjunct in the color theory program.
She also had a current faculty page at the college that was active and recently updated.
Her contact information included a departmental email and, in a linked professional profile, a neighborhood association affiliation that put her residential address in the Midtown area of the city.
With this, Miles was able to cross-reference the neighborhood affiliation against property records and had a street address in four minutes.
"I have a former colleague of Cord's,” he said. “She’s current SCAD faculty, and she lives thirty minutes from here."
Vic set the cup down and said, "Do you think we reach out now?"
"She'll be the most current source we have on what Cord was like in his final semester.
" He was already closing the database window and pulling up the address on his phone.
"And she's thirty minutes away." Having said that, he realized he’d already made his decision.
As far as he was concerned, every minute that was wasted in a Kane investigation could be crucial.
Especially in this case, when the killer seemed to have a massive headstart.
“Yeah, I think we go now,” Vic said, picking up her jacket from the back of the chair.
They were out of the precinct and in their car ten minutes later.
The city at 3:00 in the morning was quiet in a way that felt specific to these older, Southern cities.
The streets were not empty so much as deeply settled, the trees lining the streets making the darkness under them complete in a way that the streetlights at the intersections only partially broke through.
The Spanish moss was invisible at this hour except where a light caught it and made it briefly silver.
Miles drove through the downtown grid and then north toward Midtown, following the GPS.
"How are you holding up?” Vic asked, out of the blue.
It was not a casual question, and it caught Miles off guard. He answered as well as he could though it wasn’t completely honest. "I'm fine," Miles said.
"Are the nightmares still screwing with you?"
He kept his eyes on the road; not sure he wanted to go here but also understanding that it was healthy. "Oh, I'm managing."
"That's not what I asked."
He was quiet for a moment. "They're less frequent than they were." This was true, technically. "I'm not losing sleep over it." This was less true, and Vic's silence suggested she knew the difference.
"And Agent Kim?" she said, offering a sly smile.
“Really, Vic?”
“Yes, really. I have never taken offense that you don’t open up to me about things, so I’m just glad you have her…in whatever capacity that may be.”
Miles looked at the road ahead, at the long corridor of oaks coming up on the left.
“Things are picking up,” he said. “We’re not dating in any real sense of the word, but we’re spending more time together.
And yes…it is nice to have someone to talk to about…
all of this Kane shit. Not that you aren’t absolutely a priority in that field, but… ”
“But you need to talk about it in a non-professional manner sometimes.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“While snuggling.”
The laugh that escaped him was a surprise, but it felt good.
It seemed that Vic took this as something of a victory because she didn’t say anything else.
The rest of the drive was quiet in the comfortable way that their silences generally were.
And he’d always heard that it was a good thing when partners didn’t have to fill every silence with conversation or the radio.
They finally arrived at Leslie Marks’ address just a bit after 3:00.
It was a two-story house on a residential block, set back from the sidewalk behind a small front garden that was visible in the faint glow of a nearby streetlight.
The neighborhood was the sort that had all of the houses close together.
There were few trees because there wasn’t enough room between the homes for them to grow.
When he rang the electronic doorbell, he grimaced.
He had never really gotten used to the idea of waking people up so late at night.
Surely, it terrified them…and then pissed them off.
Twenty seconds passed, and he buzzed the ringer again.
This time, a male voice came out of the electronic doorbell’s speaker.
“Who the hell are you? Do I need to call the police?”
“Sorry, sir,” Vic said, stepping forward. She showed her badge to the camera of the doorbell. “We’re FBI agents Stone and Sterling. And we do apologize for the late hour.”
“Bring that badge back a bit…let me see it,” said the voice.
Vic did as she was asked, giving a better view of her badge and ID. “Better?”
“What do you want?” the man snapped.
“We need to speak with Leslie Marks,” Miles said. “We need to ask her some questions pertaining to a very time-sensitive case.”
A light came on upstairs, followed by the faint sounds of movement from inside. Seconds later, the same male voice spoke up from behind the door. "Do you know what time it is?" he said.
"We do," Miles said. "I apologize for the hour. Is Ms. Marks home?"
"She's asleep. We're both asleep. Were both asleep."
“I assure you, this is very important. She’s in no danger but we believe she could help us with an urgent case we are working on.”
There was silence for three seconds, and then the door opened on a man in his fifties wearing a t-shirt and pajama pants.
His hair was pushed sideways from the pillow, his expression set firmly against being so rudely awaken.
Behind him, a short-statured woman was coming down a flight of stairs that led into the foyer.
“I’m Leslie Marks” she said. She was tightening a robe along her waist as she eyed the agents.
She was in her mid-fifties, with short silver-streaked hair and a face that was clearly tired but also intrigued.
She looked at Miles and Vic with the evaluating attention of someone accustomed to assessing new information quickly. "What’s going on?”
They both showed their badges again. “We need to ask you some questions about a former colleague of yours,” Miles said. “A Russell Cord.”
“Oh, I see. Well, come on in.”
Marks brought them through to the foyer, down a small hallway, and into the kitchen at the back of the house.
She put coffee on without asking whether they wanted it, which Miles appreciated, and she sat across the table from them while it brewed.
The husband sat at the kitchen counter on a stool, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“So, what do you need to know?” she asked.
“Just what you can remember about him when you worked together at SCAD,” Miles said.
“Has he…has he done something?”
Miles caught the tone she used when she asked this, as if she’d almost expected it.
“We don’t know for certain,” Vic said. “We’re hoping your answers might help us figure that out. So, what can you tell us about him?”
“Well, based on his behavior when he came back to SCAD after his hiatus, I’m not all that surprised that the FBI are asking about him. He just seemed…off when he came back.”
"Off how?” Vic asked.
"He was always intense," she said. "From the first semester I knew him, actually. But it got more noticeable after he spent that time away.”
“Do you know where he was during that two-year absence?” Vic asked.
“No clue.”
“And was he ever rude or aggressive?”
“No…he was never really unfriendly. Just very focused.
The color theory work consumed him in a way that went beyond professional interest. He was always drawing, always making notes.
You'd see him in the faculty lounge with his sketchbook, and he'd be annotating color swatches with calculations that weren't part of any assignment or course preparation.
" She paused for a moment, as if staring into the past to make sure she got the details right.
"In his final semester, there was a guest lecturer.
A chemist from the pigment industry who came to talk about chromium's role in historical and contemporary pigment formulation.
Standard material for that level of the program.
" She looked at the coffee maker as it gurled and spat, filling the pot.
"Russell became fixated on it. He attended the lecture three times, because the same speaker did two additional sessions for different cohorts.
He wasn't assigned to the other sessions. He just showed up."
"Did he say why?" Miles asked.
"He said the chromium angle confirmed something he'd been working on. He was not more specific than that, and I didn’t press him. And there was no reason he would have. We were colleagues, sure, but not friends."
“So, you never spent any time with him outside of work?”
“No. But I was invited to his garage a few times. Many of us were.”
Miles felt his senses heighten and little alarms flaring in his head. “What garage?”
"He rented a garage," Marks said, rolling her eyes as if the idea was silly.
"It was near the Savannah Arts Academy, on the west side. He kept it the whole time he was at SCAD, I believe.” She considered this for a moment, nodding as the memory came back to her.
"He was very particular about it. He said he needed somewhere for his materials, somewhere separate from his living space. He invited a few of us to see it at one point, made it sound like a studio space. But like I said…I never went. A couple of colleagues said they did go, once, and that it was full of his color work—charts, samples, equipment. Things like that. They thought it was eccentric, maybe a little pretentious.” She shrugged and added, “But that was the consensus on Russell, generally. "
Miles looked at Vic briefly and then back at Marks. "Would you happen to know where it is exactly?"
"Maybe. It’s been a while, you know, so you’ll have to forgive me. He described the location once when he was trying to get us to come."
“Just do your best,” Vic said. “If you can get us in the vicinity, we can figure out the rest.”
She nodded and spent the next two minutes walking them through how she thought they might get there.
She seemed confident that it was two blocks south of the Arts Academy, a row of rental garages behind a commercial property.
“And I know it was the last unit on the right. That’s what he called it: Last Unit on the Right. ” .
Miles had been typing directions on his phone and though they were a bit scattered, he felt confident that it was more than enough to find the garage.
“I’m sorry,” Marks said, “but is he in some sort of trouble?”
“Maybe,” Miles said, looking regrettably at the pot of coffee he’d not be able to enjoy. “But you’ve just helped us find a big piece that will help us find out for sure.”