Cameron, I think and cross to the door. It’s not a closet at all, but a dim cinder-block storage space. The walls are gray and porous and smell of damp. The air feels thick and moist enough to drink. To swallow in pieces. In one corner, above a small rusted utility sink, a small bird drops down from the rafters, startling me as it thrashes against the wall violently. The gray-white wings are a frantic blur. It’s come through a broken transom window and can’t get out.

I feel its struggle as if it’s hammering at my chest instead of cinder block. All of its panicked energy and hopelessness pointed at me. My pulse jumps as it flails against the concrete and then the rafters, looking futilely for the sky. Finally it stops on one of the cobwebby joists, its heartbeat thumping visibly. And then I notice several canvases have been stacked nearby, resting between the joists like rungs on a ladder. Almost instantly, I forget the bird and find a chair, careful not to disturb anything that might have fingerprints on it. It takes some effort to hoist the canvases down without falling, but when I do, I’m stunned; they have Jack Ford’s telltale swooping signature in the bottom right-hand corner. They must be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

My first thought is that Jack must have had some connection to this studio, which has been here for more than thirty years. He could have painted here, or simply used this room for storage. Then it occurs to me that dozens of artists must have used this space over the last few decades, and that any one of them might have been a collector of Jack’s work, and inadvertently left the canvases here. The level of dust on the paintings and the fact that they’ve been left here when the rest of the studio is swept bare leads me to suspect that they likely don’t have anything to do with the present, with Cameron or her abductor. But he was here, and she may have been as well. Obviously we’ll have to get a team in immediately to sweep for prints as well as fiber and hair samples, particularly in the storage area, which with the thickness of the walls and high inaccessible transom could easily have been used as a captivity cell. If Cameron had managed to discover a loose stone or some other object, she might have broken the window as an attempt to get someone’s attention. Maybe that’s why her abductor had moved her from this place, so no one could hear her scream if he took off her gag.