CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The conference room that had been theirs through the night now felt stale and somehow stagnant—all lost ideas and the smell of coffee.
Miles was munching on a donut he had taken from a box someone had brought in, not because he was hungry, but because he knew he needed to eat.
Vic sat across from him, her tablet set flat on the table in front of her and a cold, forgotten cup of coffee to her left.
Pruitt stepped away from the white board and nearly collapsed into a chair at the table. There were marker stains on her hands from where she had been continually adding names to her list of people who made a living with color.
"The list stops at three hundred and forty-two," Pruitt said.
"And that's not including anyone who may just be artists by hobby only.
" She looked to her marker-stained hands, her eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion.
"We've got painters and gallery-represented artists as the most important group; they'd be the most visible to someone like Cord.
Then we have photographers, then textile artists.
There's a stained-glass studio on Waters Avenue I almost left off and then put back on because the work is entirely color-driven, and it seemed like the kind of thing that would register on Cord's index.
" She started to massage her temples as she continued to list things off.
Two photography studios that specialize in fine art printing, a dye works, three muralists currently under active city commission, and a floral design school on Drayton Street.
Every landscape firm in the city. I stopped counting garden centers when I got to twelve. "
"There's no version of a protection detail that covers this," Vic said. She was not asking for confirmation; she was stating the constraint so they could all stop pretending it wasn't there. “I think you’ve done all you could.”
"I know,” Pruitt said. “And what’s worse is that even if I pulled every available officer in the district and dedicated them to nothing else but going through this list, we could cover maybe forty locations with any kind of continuity.
And that assumes Cord is targeting fixed locations rather than individuals, which his previous victims suggest he is not. "
Miles was looking at the list, slowly scanning through the categories, reading names without reading them, looking at the structure of the list rather than its content. “Any chance this is digital somewhere?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s on the database. There was an officer adding each name as I came up with one. This,” she said, gesturing to the whiteboard, “was for my own sanity, honestly.”
Miles continued to study the list, trying to find the logic in it that would tell him where to look, which category of person would sit highest on Cord's list. Which type of work would be classified as the most egregious form of chromatic extraction in Cord's view?
He had been in that house on Gaston Street.
He had stood in the middle of thirty color wheels and four years of notation.
He had read the manifesto pages. He understood the framework better than anyone outside of Cord himself, and he was looking at more than three hundred names with no known way of narrowing it.
He supposed painters were the obvious answer.
Cord had started with a painter, and the rationale was explicit in the notation: painters constructed the mechanism of extraction deliberately, the language had been that precise.
But he had moved immediately to a florist, and then to a gardener, and the logic of each choice had been internally consistent within the framework without being predictable from the outside.
“And there’s no family in his background check?” Miles asked, though he knew the answer. He’d looked at the report at least six times himself. “No next of kin?”
“Nothing,” Pruitt said. “Both parents deceased, no siblings. Both grandparents also deceased. No ex-girlfriends, nothing.”
Miles picked up his coffee and drank from it and looked at the whiteboard. Over in the margins, right along the frame, were the victims’ names: Ostroff, Hale, Odom.
Painter, florist, gardener, Miles thought. What are we missing here?
“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” Pruitt said, “I’m retiring to the break rom for a half hour nap. You guys good for now?”
They both nodded, though Miles still felt that they had taken a huge loss.
When Pruitt was gone, Miles pulled out his phone and pulled up one of the several pictures he’d taken of the painting back at the storage unit.
Looking at it, he thought about Cord standing in that space with a flame at the corner of his own best work and then stopping.
Had that been a failure of resolve or a moment of clarity or simply the decision of a man who could not destroy the one thing he had made that was worth keeping?
He had no idea, and he didn’t know how to find the answer.
The defeatist thoughts made him realize that no matter how hard they worked and no matter how many leads they found, it was always like this.
They caught the killer after the third death or the fourth, always after, and then they went home without knowing where Kane was.
And now, here in Savannah, it was even worse.
Cord had a head start and there was no way of knowing how many others he had already poisoned.
It could be anyone on Pruitt’s list…or it could be people that weren’t on the list at all.
And with the absolute lack of any real leads, all of the bureau resources in the world may not help them wrap this one.
"Miles."
Vic's voice made him jump a bit, yanking him out of his thoughts. She was watching him from across the table with the direct, patient attention.
“Yeah?”
"Talk to me," she said.
“About what?”
"You've been zoned out for the past fifteen minutes. Do you need a break?"
He thought about deflecting and assessed the return on it and decided against it.
"No, I’m just looking at this list and I can't find a way in.
We can't predict who he picks next and even if we could, he likely planted the chromium days or weeks ago and it would be too late anyway.
And while I'm sitting here not finding a way in, he's out there with a month's rent paid and his equipment packed and three people already dead.
" He stopped and saw that she was waiting patiently, giving him the floor. He figured if he’d already started, he may as well finish.
"Kane is still out there," Miles said. "We catch these disciples after three or four murders every time, and Kane just waits and produces another one. Cord was in our system for four months and it didn’t matter. We had him flagged and he’s killing anyway.” He looked at the whiteboard and said, "It feels like we're running in place. "
Vic was quiet for a moment, processing it all as she sipped from her cold coffee. "You're not wrong about the bigger picture," she said. "We haven't caught Kane yet. That's true. Well…I mean, we did one time, but he managed to get out.”
“Another strike,” Miles muttered.
"But we're not chasing Kane right now. We're in Savannah, and there is a man here who has not finished what he started, which means no matter how bleak it might seem, we do still have a chance to stop him.”
Miles got to his feet and stretched his back, finally taking his eyes away from the board.
"All right," he said. “So…we know that we can't catch him by chasing him.
He's been invisible in this city for weeks, even on security cameras it seems. He moved through Nadia Ostroff's studio and Hale's supply chain and Patrice Odom's garden without producing a useful witness until we already knew his name.
If chasing him through a list of more than three hundred names is how we get to him, then so be it. "
Pruitt had come back into the room at some point and was standing near the door, listening without interrupting.
"He can't be predicted, and his method of murder is planted long before the actual death," Miles said. He was working through it now, the shape of it assembling from what he knew about the color wheels and the canvas he had carried out of the garage in the pre-dawn light. "He is genuinely, irresistibly drawn to color and light. He’s obsessed with it. And that painting from the storage unit proves it. All the studying and color theory…it paid off. And if it’s color that he’s trying to preserve or save… "
“What?” Pruitt asked.
“I don’t know,” Miles said. “If we can’t chase him, maybe we bring him to us. Lure him out somehow.”
“How?” Pruitt asked. “By painting? Arranging flowers?”
“No,” Vic said, her eyes widening as she now hitched on to the idea. “It would have to be something big. Something grand and in-your-face. Something he’d not be able to miss and feel drawn to.”
Miles turned to Pruitt, snapped his fingers, and said, "A public demonstration.”
“Of…of art? Like an art show?”
“Sure. Sort of. But…something that would be hard to miss. Like…chromatic science framed as an art installation.”
“Like a celebration of some kind?”
“Maybe. But how would we—”
The idea had fully latched itself to Miles’ brain now and with each word he spoke, more of it came into view. And though he understood it seemed like a ridiculous idea, he thought that might be what it was going to take in order to catch Cord.
“Your list proves that Savannah is a city that loves its art,” he said. “So, we can somehow stage an event or to sort of frame something as a celebration of art or light…something like that.”
“We’d still need to get the word out, though,” Vic said. “And who the hell would fund it?”
“Not sure. We can make some calls and figure out those sorts of logistics.”
Vic shrugged and said, “Theoretically, it could work.”
“We could get local media to cover it.” Miles watched Pruitt's expression, noting that she was actually excited about this crazy idea, too. “Holy shit, this might be easier than you think. Looking for all of those names, I came across at least ten small, private art groups dedicated to up-and-coming artists in the area. I could reach out to them and have one of them pretend to put it on. They could send out announcements on social media…something like a sporadic, guerilla-style art exhibit along the riverfront. With a local art group claiming it as their own, I don’t think Cord would think it would be suspicious. Spontaneous things like this are put on all the time…art, music, whatever.”
“Perfect,” Miles said. "It would have to be the kind of event that would be extremely difficult for a man with Russell Cord's relationship to color and chromatic theory to stay away from."
Pruitt had started pacing as she pulled her phone from her pocket.
"I need to call my captain. If we're doing this, I need resources and I need them fast." She was moving toward the door and talking as she went.
"It's a good idea. It's a genuinely good idea and being so early in the morning, we’d have the entire day.”
“Do you think local PD resources would be able to pull it off?” Vic asked.
“No way to know without trying,” Pruitt said, placing the call and stepping out of the door.