CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
They did not remain quiet for long, though.
The initial activation produced a visible ripple through the people standing closest to the installation, a collective pause that moved outward as each successive layer of the filter cascade came into its full register.
The fluorescent compounds in the front panels lit from within, creating violet and cyan streams that overwhelmed the space within seconds.
The filter layers behind them refracted that output into progressions that moved across the color spectrum in a sequence Miles had planned down to the specific placement of each panel.
The secondary violet emission appeared three minutes later, at the interface between the second and third filter layers, providing the most extraordinary thing in the display.
It was not a color that appeared in the visible spectrum under normal lighting conditions in this intensity.
It was a violet so saturated and precise that it seemed to occupy its own register apart from the colors surrounding it.
A woman standing twenty feet from Miles held her phone up and took a photograph as she gasped.
Miles was not watching the display. He had stopped as soon as he saw that the display was going to work. Instead, he was looking at the crowd.
He had a position on the north end of the riverfront walk.
He was moving slowly, spending about ten seconds on each face that could have even remotely matched the Russell Cord's faculty photograph from the SCAD archive.
He moved without stopping, studying without being too obvious, and looking specifically for a canvas hat.
He was looking for a face in a crowd that had turned out to be much larger than anyone had expected.
The bodies were packed dense along the railing and spreading back along the walk and up the steps to the upper level where the parking structure offered a second vantage point.
Pruitt had four officers on the upper level and two at each end of the walk and six distributed through the crowd itself, all of them in plainclothes and with Cord's photograph on their phones.
The surveillance cameras from the parking structure had a line of sight down the full length of the walk, and Pruitt was coordinating from the operations position at the vendor cart.
He heard the soft murmur of conversation between the teams in the earpiece he had been given earlier.
Miles moved through the crowd slowly, keeping his body angle open, his eyes moving. He paid attention to each report from Pruitt and Vic, as well as the lead officer at the parking garage. But so far, there was nothing to report.
The display was producing gasps at regular intervals, particularly when the filter positions were adjusted to shift the cascade sequence.
This transition changed the entire color register of the installation over the course of about forty-five seconds, moving from the blue-violet end of the spectrum through green and into the warm reds and ambers before cycling back.
Each transition drew a different response from the crowd.
The violet phase was the one that produced silence.
The amber phase produced something warmer, people leaning toward each other, pointing.
He was on his second full pass of the northern section when Vic came in from the south on his earpiece. "South perimeter clear. I'm coming back through center." Her voice was level but excited.
"Northern section, second pass," Miles said quietly. "Nothing."
He had a complete view of the crowd from his current position at the railing.
His back was to the water, the installation directly ahead of him and the faces of six hundred or so people illuminated intermittently in the changing color of its output.
They all looked at it with an attentiveness that bordered on wonder, and Miles did his best to study as many of those faces as he could.
At 8:15, one of Pruitt's officers radioed a possible hit. He’d found a slight white male wearing a canvas hat, and he was standing at the north end of the walk near the steps.
Miles was already moving before Pruitt finished relaying it, cutting through the crowd at a pace that was slightly faster than the surrounding movement.
He reached the north steps in ninety seconds.
The man was in his sixties, heavyset in a way that made his slight build read differently up close. He looked at Miles with the mild irritation of someone who has been approached by a stranger at a public event and is waiting to find out why.
“Sorry,” Miles said. “I thought you were someone else.”
He moved on, completing three more full passes over the next hour.
Vic added an additional two. Pruitt's officers cycled through their assigned sections on a staggered rotation that ensured no part of the crowd went unwatched for more than four minutes at any point.
The cameras on the parking structure recorded continuously.
By 9:10 the crowd had thinned slightly as families with young children moved out.
But the core attendance held, drawn by the display, the warmth of the evening, and something different to be a part of.
But as 9:30 neared at it was almost time to shut the display down, one thing started to become clear to Miles…and it filled him with anger and a stinging sense of embarrassment.
Russell Cord was not there. Not that they could see. And if he was, then he was blending in far too well. Hell, maybe this had been a stupid idea.
At 9:50 the UV lamps were turned off per the operational schedule, and the filter cascade went dark.
The fluorescent compounds faded back to invisible in the ambient riverfront lighting.
The crowd response to the ending was a brief, collective applause.
Slowly, they began to disperse, moving back along the walk and up the steps and out toward the parking structure.
Others moved further into the downtown area, maybe on the way for dinner or drinks.
Miles continued to scan, hoping for a miracle.
By 10:15, the riverfront was largely empty.
Pruitt's officers had held their positions through the dispersal and were now also dispersing, angling into the crowd for one last hopeful look through the sea of faces.
Vic was at the operations position talking to Pruitt, and he could hear their conversation through his earpiece.
“Looks like it was a bust,” Vic said. “Sorry for the hassle.”
“No, it was a good idea. I was sure it would work.” Miles could see them from where he stood, their body language the controlled, neutral posture of two people managing a result they had been prepared for but had hoped not to arrive at.
When he, too, admitted to himself that this had bene nothing more than an enormous waste of time, Miles began breaking down the display.
It was methodical work and it gave him something to do with his hands while he thought through the failure of it all.
He worked from the front filters back, collapsing the panel frames and stacking them against the railing, coiling the power lines and returning the UV lamps to the transit cases the Atlanta vendor had left behind.
He worked without assistance because no one had offered any, and he had not asked.
Cord had not come. Or Cord had come and had been more careful than Miles had accounted for.
Maybe he had come and had assessed the crowd.
Maybe he’d spotted the surveillance from whatever distance his caution had kept him at.
Miles didn’t know which of those was true and it honestly didn’t matter, because both pissed him off.
He had banked on Cord’s obsession overriding caution, on a man's deepest fixation proving stronger than whatever discipline had kept him invisible for weeks.
But Cord was apparently smarter than this.
Or more disciplined, or both. Miles and the team had built the trap around what they thought would appeal to Cord and had underestimated his restraint.
He thought about Hayes, and then of the mayor's office, which had committed resources to this on his recommendation. He didn’t even want to think about what the conversation with Hayes would look like later tonight when he and Vic called to debrief.
He did his best to shove the thought away as he finished packing the transit cases. That was a problem for later.
He stacked the last case and stood up and looked at the empty riverfront, at the water beyond the railing black in the dark.
He picked up two of the transit cases and carried them toward the parking structure.
He was going to head back to the hotel, take a shower, and then call Hayes for the debrief.
After that, he was going to sleep, or attempt to, and in the morning, he was going to look at the problem from whatever angle was available after this one had failed.
Because somewhere, somehow, there had to be an answer.
Still, as he moved closer to the parking garage, the thought that had been sitting at the edge of everything all evening finally moved to the center: maybe when he and Vic got back to DC, he should ask Hayes to take him off the task force.
This was not a dramatic or melodramatic thought.
It arrived without self-pity, which made it harder to dismiss.
Eleven cases and he still could not get ahead of the killing, still could not find a way to stop these disciples before they reached their targets.
Maybe that meant the problem required a different kind of mind than his. Maybe the honest thing, the useful thing, was to say so out loud to Hayes and let someone better suited take the seat he had been occupying while he retreated back to his lab.
He had been telling himself for nearly a year now that he was the right person for this work. And all he had to show for it was a dead fiancée and a string of victims he’d been unable to save.