She stood and stepped back, letting the scene settle in her mind.Redhouse’s staging had been flawless—every detail of the painting reproduced with obsessive accuracy.Tafoya’s had been ambitious but precise.Honanie’s was close, very close, but imperfect.
A decline.Over four months, across three victims, it seemed like the quality of the killer’s work was degrading.Not dramatically—someone lacking a deep familiarity with the artists’ work would never notice.But Kari noticed, and the implication troubled her.
She found Marshall standing by the trailhead, phone against her ear, gesturing at a map one of the rangers was holding.
“I need to see the acquisition records for these specific pieces,” Kari said when Marshall finished her call.“Every necklace on that body was purchased somewhere.Auction house, gallery, private sale—there’s a paper trail.If we can find who bought them, we find our killer.”
“Soto’s already on it.He’s pulling auction records and gallery sales for Honanie’s major works going back five years.”Marshall looked at her.“You saw something else.”
“The staging is slipping.Redhouse was perfect.Tafoya was precise.Honanie has errors—small ones, but they’re there.The hand positioning is off by a few degrees.Two of the necklaces are in the wrong order.”
“Fatigue?Overconfidence?”
“Maybe.Or maybe something is happening to the killer that’s affecting his ability to execute.The gallery owners described a man with tremoring hands who was increasingly agitated over time.That’s consistent with what I’m seeing in the staging—someone whose precision is deteriorating.”Kari paused, choosing her next words.“This man isn’t going to stop.Whatever’s driving him, it’s getting worse.And as his control degrades, his behavior is going to become more erratic and more dangerous.”
Marshall absorbed this.“You think he’ll take another victim.”
“I think if we don’t find him soon, he’ll have no choice.He’s trying to preserve something, and it’s slipping away from him.Every staging is an attempt to hold onto whatever he’s losing.When this one doesn’t work—when the memory or the feeling or whatever he’s chasing fades again—he’ll need another one.”
The forensics team arrived, a white van pulling onto the shoulder behind the line of vehicles.Technicians in coveralls began unloading equipment—evidence cases, portable lighting, a body bag they wouldn’t need for hours yet.
Kari watched them work.Somewhere in a gallery archive or an auction house database was a name—the person who had spent tens of thousands of dollars acquiring Raymond Honanie’s jewelry, only to place it on the dead artist’s body in a mountain clearing.A name attached to a tremor, to tears, to a need that was eating through whatever control had kept the killings precise.
She was close.And so was the killer—close to his next victim, close to the moment when deterioration overtook discipline and the careful staging gave way to something messier and harder to predict.
Every minute she spent here was a minute the killer was using.And somewhere—in a workshop, a studio, a room she hadn't found yet—the clock on another person's life was ticking away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Paul Daniels hadn’t slept in thirty-one hours, and the coffee wasn’t helping anymore.
He sat at the kitchen table of the house where Ben had been keeping Ruth safe—Helen Chee’s place, west side of the reservation, a single-story ranch house with a view of nothing in every direction, which was exactly the point.Ruth was in the back room working at her loom, the rhythmic clack of the heddle providing a metronome that Paul had stopped hearing about four hours ago.James was across the table, reading on his laptop, his face lit blue-white by the screen.
They’d been at this since James arrived from Flagstaff the previous afternoon, driving straight from Canyon State with a bag of clothes and a hard drive containing everything he and Paul had compiled during their prior investigation.The kitchen table was covered in printouts, legal pads, and the remains of a dinner Ruth had made them eat—green chile stew, fry bread, second helpings insisted upon with the quiet authority of a woman who did not consider refusal an option.
“Walk me through the timeline again,” Paul said.
James pushed his glasses up and consulted a legal pad covered in his small, precise handwriting.“The FBI’s claim is that Ben killed Whitmore sometime between ten PM on Monday and two AM on Tuesday.That’s based on the ME’s preliminary assessment of body temperature and lividity.Whitmore’s body was found in an arroyo fifteen miles south of Farmington at approximately six AM on Wednesday, by a runner who uses the area for trail training.”
“And where was Ben during that window?”
“On the reservation.At this house, in fact.He was with Ruth from about eight PM on Monday until he left for the station the next morning around seven.Ruth confirms it.”
“Ruth’s his alibi.”
"Ruth and Helen's neighbor, a man named Frank Begay, who stopped by around nine-thirty Monday evening to borrow a socket wrench from Helen's garage.Ben let him in, they talked for a few minutes, and Begay left.That puts Ben here at nine-thirty."
“The drive from here to the arroyo south of Farmington takes—what?”
“Two hours minimum.Closer to two and a half after dark on reservation roads.”James had already done the math.“So if Ben left here at ten PM—which Ruth says he didn’t—the earliest he could have reached the kill site is twelve-thirty AM.He then would have had to commit the murder, stage the evidence, and drive back.Best case, he’s not home until four or five in the morning.”
“And Ruth says he was here all night.”
“She says she heard him in the kitchen around eleven making tea, and he was in the living room when she got up at five-thirty to start the loom.”
Paul tapped his pen against the table.The alibi was good but not airtight.A prosecutor would argue that Ruth, an elderly woman who loved Ben, could be mistaken about the exact times or could be lying to protect him.Frank Begay’s visit at nine-thirty established Ben’s location an hour before the kill window opened, but that still left time.Enough for reasonable doubt, maybe.Enough for certainty, no.
“Now the financials,” Paul said.“The account at First Nations Bank.”
