From Vigil’s studio they drove to Canyon Road, the half-mile stretch of galleries that formed the commercial heart of Santa Fe’s art market.Kari and Attcity worked their way down the street, stopping at galleries that had shown any of the three victims’ work.The conversations followed a pattern: shock and grief over the murders, effusive praise for the artists’ work, careful reluctance to speculate about who might have done it.
But at the third gallery—a high-ceilinged space called Tierra Sagrada specializing in contemporary Indigenous work—the owner, a white-haired woman named Elaine Kerr, told Kari something that changed the shape of the day.
“I had an unusual interaction about five months ago,” Kerr said.They were in her office behind the gallery floor, a cluttered room lined with catalogs and price lists.“A man came in asking about Raymond Honanie’s overlay work.That wasn’t unusual in itself—Raymond’s pieces move fast, and collectors are always looking.But this man wasn’t asking about availability or price.He wanted to know how Raymond described his own creative process.Whether Raymond had ever talked about what the patterns meant to him personally.Whether there were interviews or artist statements I could share.”
“Did you give him anything?”
“I gave him a copy of a catalog essay Raymond had written for a show we did two years ago.It was a beautiful piece of writing—Raymond describing how Hopi overlay technique connects to prayer and intention, how each cut in the silver is a meditation.”Kerr paused.“The man read it right there in the gallery.Standing in the middle of the room, reading every word.When he finished, he had tears on his face.”
“Was it this man?”Kari repeated Vigil’s account—older, white, well-dressed, trembling hands.
“That sounds right.Older, yes.Expensive clothes.I don’t remember the tremor specifically, but he was...agitated isn’t the right word.Moved.Like someone hearing a piece of music they’d been looking for their whole life.”
“Did he buy anything?”
“He tried.He wanted to buy everything of Raymond’s that we had—four pieces, total value around sixty thousand dollars.He wanted to take them that day.I explained that two were on hold for another collector and the other two were consigned, meaning I’d need the artist’s approval to release them.He became very insistent.Not rude, exactly, but persistent in a way that made me uncomfortable.He said he needed them.Not wanted—needed.And when I told him it would take a few days to arrange, he left without giving me a name or contact information.”
"He never came back?"
"No.I expected him to—that kind of urgency, I assumed he'd call within a day or two.But nothing.I still have all four pieces."
Kari looked at Attcity, who had been taking notes in the small leather notebook he carried.
“Same pattern,” Attcity said quietly.
It was.Someone moving through the Santa Fe art world, seeking not just the artwork but the artists’ relationship to their own work.The creative process, the spiritual dimensions, the personal meaning behind the craft.Someone collecting not objects but understanding—building an intimate knowledge of how each artist thought, what they intended, what they poured of themselves into the work.
They visited four more galleries.At two of them, dealers remembered a similar figure—older, white, well-dressed, intensely interested in the artists’ creative philosophy rather than the commercial value of their work.At one, a dealer recalled the man asking specifically whether Linda Tafoya had ever described the physical sensation of sculpting—what it felt like in her hands when the clay took the shape she’d envisioned.
By late afternoon, Kari had six independent accounts of a man who matched the same general description, visiting galleries and studios across Santa Fe over a period of roughly four to six months before the first disappearance.No one had a name.No one had taken a photo.No one had thought it strange enough at the time to mention it to anyone else—collectors were eccentric, and the art world tolerated eccentricity as long as the money was good.
Kari and Attcity drove back to Albuquerque with the windows down and the sun dropping toward the Jemez Mountains on their left.Attcity was quiet, processing what they’d gathered.Kari was doing the same, but her mind kept pulling at the edges of something she couldn’t yet name.
The tremor.The tears.The insistence on buying everything immediately, the agitation when told he’d have to wait.The distinction between wanting and needing.And the questions—always about the artist’s inner life, never about the market value or the investment potential.
This wasn’t a collector in any conventional sense.A collector wanted to own the work.This man wanted to own the experience of creating it.He wanted to get inside the artist’s mind, to understand the act of making art from the inside out.
“Attcity,” she said.“The man Kerr described—the tears, the desperation, buying everything at once.Does that sound like a collector to you?”
He thought about it."No.It sounds like someone who's desperate."
Kari looked at the road ahead, the asphalt shimmering in the heat, and turned that over in her mind.Desperate.A man who needed rather than wanted.Who trembled and wept and couldn't wait for paperwork.
Whatever was driving this killer, it wasn't patience.It was need.The careful staging of the bodies, the weeks of preservation, the painstaking recreation of the artwork—all of that suggested control.But the behavior in the galleries suggested the opposite: a man coming apart, unable to wait, unable to walk away empty-handed.
Two contradictory profiles.Unless they weren't contradictory at all.Unless the careful staging was the compensation, the desperate attempt to create permanence by someone who could feel permanence slipping away.
She didn’t have the answer yet.But the shape was getting clearer.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Photographs lied.Kari knew this from years of working crime scenes.
Not deliberately—a good crime scene photographer captured everything the lens could see, every angle and surface and spatial relationship.But a photograph couldn’t capture how a place felt.The silence of a clearing where something terrible had happened.The way the air sat differently on the skin, as if violence left a residue that settled and stayed.
The call came at seven-fifteen in the morning, three days after Kari and Attcity had canvassed Canyon Road.A hiker named Gary Pollard had found a body in the Jemez Mountains while following a trail through a side canyon northeast of the caldera.He’d called 911, then sat down on a rock and waited for someone to arrive, and when the Forest Service rangers got there and saw the staging, they called the FBI.
Marshall drove.Kari rode shotgun, Attcity and Soto in the back.The drive from Albuquerque took ninety minutes, most of it on a two-lane road that climbed through piñon and juniper into the higher elevations where ponderosa gave way to mixed conifer.Nobody talked much.Marshall checked her phone at stoplights.Attcity stared out the window.Soto read something on a tablet, his reading glasses balanced on the tip of his nose.
