CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Oh, this has got to be it,” she said just thirty seconds later. “I’m looking at a map of the area right here. There’s a small storage unit facility about three blocks away from the campus.”
“Can you send the exact address?” Vic asked.
“Yes, right after this call.”
“And can you get started on a warrant?” Miles asked. “We need to get into the unit.”
"I can do my best…but it is 3:30 in the morning. I've got a judge I can reach, but it's going to take a little time at this hour. But if I explain it’s related to a Kane case, I think it’ll get expedited. I'd call it forty-five minutes to an hour for the paperwork to clear."
"Fine," Miles said. "We'll sit on it until the warrant's through."
"I'll have it to you as fast as I can. I'm calling now. And I’ll send the address.”
The address came through to both of their phones just five seconds later.
Vic plugged it into her phone and directed Miles through streets that were still and dark, the live oak canopy overhead dense enough to close out most of the dark sky.
Vic’s instructions led them around the SCAD campus and fifteen minutes later, they were coming toward a narrow service road that ran behind a row of commercial properties.
From here, the lights of the campus and its surrounding buildings several blocks away looked almost ghostlike in the night.
The service road emptied onto a strange, industrial-looking two-lane and then the storage units came into view.
They were fortunate in that it was not a run-of-the-mill storage facility where there was a front office and, usually, a fence or other form of barrier blocking the place off.
Miles figured someone simply owned the property and rented the storage units out on a sort of unofficial basis—maybe even someone from the college.
The garage units were at the back of the lot, a row of eight, their roll-up doors facing an alley wide enough for a vehicle to turn in.
Miles pulled in and cut the headlights and sat.
He looked to the last one on the right, buried in shadow.
The door was padlocked, a heavy model he could see from where he parked, the hasp flush-mounted into the door frame.
There were no windows in the unit and no exterior light above the door. The adjacent units were just as dark.
Miles got out and looked around Cord’s unit.
There were grime and a collection of old, dead leaves around the base.
He shone a flashlight on the lock and saw that it was an older model.
He made a loop around the unit but was unable to find any real indication that it had been either neglected forever or had been recently used.
He returned to the car, hating that they had to wait on the warrant.
He wondered if they could go ahead and bust in anyway, knowing that the warrant was pretty much a sure thing.
He was sure that sort of thing would be frowned upon.
He was about to ask Vic about it when his phone rang.
She saw that it was Pruitt and answered right away.
“The warrant is approved,” she said. “And yes, it was thirty-five minutes. That is indeed probably some sort of record. But no one is screwing around when it comes to this Kane stuff.”
“Thanks, Pruitt.”
Miles ended the call and they both got out of the car.
Vic was carrying a lockpick set she’d taken from the trunk but the padlock didn’t respond to anything Vic had with her, and it became apparent within two minutes that it was not going to.
Miles looked at the door, at the hasp, and at the way the door frame was constructed.
The door itself was a standard residential roll-up, the aluminum panels fitted into a track on either side.
The hasp was the problem, bolted through the frame at three points, the kind of installation a person put in when they were serious about what was behind it.
He looked at Vic. She had already moved to the left side of the door and was examining the track.
The track's lower bracket was mounted to a concrete sill with four bolts, and the concrete around two of them had cracked over time and been patched without full structural replacement.
Vic tested the bracket with the heel of her hand and it gave slightly.
The repaired concrete failing to hold the way the original had.
"Here’s our weak spot," she said.
Miles took a single stride back and then surged forward with a kick.
The noise of it boomed through the silent lot like hollow thunder.
It took three kicks concentrated at the lower left corner where the track met the sill before the bracket gave way.
The track pulled free and the door folded inward along the bottom edge.
The whole assembly buckled just enough to create a gap they could get through, making the lock pretty much useless.
Miles went in first, ducking under the warped lower panel.
He clicked his flashlight on and as his eyes started adjusting to the light, he noticed the smell.
It was the same smell he’d noticed at Gaston Street: present, identifiable, and belonging entirely to the past. It was not strong, barely even a ghost of an aroma, really.
It was the residue of an enclosed space that had held chemical materials for an extended period and then been emptied.
And then, when his eyes had adjusted to the light, he saw something he had not been expecting.
The unit was empty.
The concrete floor showed the ghost marks of where things had stood: rectangular outlines left by containers and equipment, half-circles where buckets or cans had been sitting, and a collection of accumulated grime.
There were paint splotches on the floor in several places, just the casual residue of a working painter's space.
There were more splotches on the walls, thin streaks and dried drops at varying heights that had accrued over years.
Miles moved the flashlight across the walls slowly. There was nothing on them. No wheels, no notation sheets, no charts. Whatever had been here had been taken down some immeasurable time ago.
In the far-left corner, half behind the vertical support post, lay a single brush.
He went to it and crouched down. It was a medium flat, the bristles stiff with dried paint that had not been cleaned out.
The paint dried into the bristles was a deep viridian.
He photographed it in place without touching it.
He was straightening when the flashlight beam crossed the back wall again, and he stopped.
In the right rear corner, on its face in the concrete, was a canvas. It had been so perfectly propped against the wall, that he’d not seen it at first. Vic apparently had, though, because she was moving directly toward it.
It was roughly twelve by sixteen, smaller than the harbor scene in Ostroff's studio.
He could see from a few feet away that the edges of the stretcher bars were scorched, the wood blackened along two sides and one corner.
The char extended slightly onto the canvas face where the burn had caught the edge of the primed surface before stopping.
Someone had held a flame to it, or had placed it near one, and had stopped before it went fully.
Miles crouched beside it with Vic and looked at the charred edges. The burn had gone far enough that the bottom-right corner of the canvas was destroyed, the material reduced to a fragile lattice of ash. The rest of it appeared intact beneath the facing-down position.
Slowly, Vic turned the canvas around so they could see what was on it.
It was a Savannah landscape. Sure, it could have been any place, but Miles knew without a doubt that it was Savannah.
He recognized the geography, the particular relationship of the marsh to the tree line, the specific quality of coastal Georgia light on water in what looked like late afternoon.
The composition was oriented toward a stretch of open marsh with a stand of long-leafed pines at the horizon and the sky above them going from a deep, luminous gold at the waterline up through amber into a blue that was not quite the blue of daylight or the blue of full dusk but the specific, brief register between them that lasted perhaps twenty minutes and that most people who saw it didn’t have a name for.
It was beautiful.
Miles could see the deliberateness in the color choices, the layering, the way each passage of the painting was built from specific decisions about hue and saturation and value that reflected not just skill but genuine understanding. The color in the piece was extraordinary.
This man could paint. Whatever Russell Cord was before Kane found him, or before the belief had sharpened into method and the method into three dead people, he had been the real thing.
He thought about the painting in Nadia Ostroff's studio, the one Cord had turned face-down on the concrete floor.
He thought about what it had meant to Cord to do that, and what it had meant for Cord to stand in a garage at some point before he disappeared and hold a flame to the corner of his own best work and then stop.
Had he, at some point, thought he was just as guilty as everyone else at what he perceived as theft?
"He tried to burn it," Miles said.
"I know. But he changed his mind in the end. Maybe he was that attached to it."
“We should update Pruitt,” Miles said. “Get forensics out here just in case there’s DNA or hair fibers. We need to go."
He looked at the painting for another few seconds before he left—the marsh, the pine line, the light between late afternoon and dusk that Cord had translated through paint. And for a moment, he thought he understood Russell Cord as a man before Kane had dug his hooks in.