“I have a name that was given to me by two different auction houses, but I’ve never met the man personally.Gregory Ashford."
"How did the auction houses give you his name?I'd have thought buyer information was confidential."
"It is, formally.But the Indigenous art world is small enough that information moves sideways.Auction houses rely on gallerists like me to consign work and bring in buyers.In return, when someone new starts bidding aggressively, they'll drop a name—not on the record, but over drinks, at previews.A courtesy call.'Someone's moving into your territory, thought you'd want to know.'That's how I heard the name.Twice, from two different houses."
"What can you tell us about him?"Kari asked.
"He's a retired pharmaceutical executive, lives outside Santa Fe somewhere.He started buying Indigenous art about two years ago and he’s been escalating—both the volume and the price points.He bought a Redhouse painting at Sotheby’s last spring for a hundred and ten thousand.That’s thirty percent above what I’d have valued it.And at the Scottsdale auction, he bought three Honanie pieces in a single lot.”
Kari kept her face neutral.“Three pieces.”
“At prices that made no commercial sense.He was overbidding by significant margins, which tells me he wasn’t buying for investment.He wanted the objects themselves, and he was willing to pay whatever it took to get them.”
“Have any of the artists mentioned him?”
Sheffield looked at the gallery wall, then back at Kari.“Linda did.About six months before she disappeared.She called me and said someone had approached her directly—not through a gallery, not through her studio, but at a coffee shop in Española where she went most mornings.He wanted to buy her entire body of work.Everything.Not just what was available on the market—he wanted the pieces in her personal collection, the ones she’d never intended to sell.Works she considered sacred.”
“What did she say to him?”
“She said no.She was angry about it, actually.She told me the man seemed desperate, that he kept raising his offer and getting more agitated when she wouldn’t agree.She described it as...”Sheffield paused, searching for the word.“Unsettling.”
“Did she describe the man physically?”
“Older.White.Well-dressed.She said his hands shook.”
The same description.The same tremor.Kari exchanged a glance with Attcity, who was writing in his notebook with the focused concentration of someone who understood what he was recording.
“I should have paid more attention,” Sheffield said.His voice had dropped.The composure was still there—the posture, the steady gaze—but behind it, the grief he’d been managing had moved closer to the surface.“When Leonard disappeared, I thought of Ashford.I even mentioned it to the FBI agents who interviewed me.But they seemed more interested in Leonard’s personal life, his finances, whether he had enemies.I don’t think they followed up.”
Kari checked the interview transcripts later and confirmed it.Sheffield had mentioned Ashford by name in his first FBI interview.The lead had been noted but not pursued—a single line in a field report, categorized under “collector activity” and never assigned for follow-up.
Marshall’s team hadn’t missed the name.They’d deprioritized it.A wealthy collector overbidding at auctions wasn’t suspicious behavior in a world where wealthy collectors overbid at auctions all the time.Without the context Kari had gathered—the gallery visits, the personal questions, the tears, the tremor, the desperation that escalated over months—Ashford was just another rich man buying art.
With that context, he was something else entirely.
“I need everything you have on Ashford,” Kari told Sheffield.“Auction records, gallery purchases, any correspondence, any secondhand information from other dealers.And I need the names of anyone else who’s had direct contact with him.”
“I’ll have it for you by tomorrow.”Sheffield stood, and for a moment the gallery owner’s polish fell away and Kari saw the man underneath—tired, grieving, angry at himself for not connecting the dots sooner.“Find him, Detective.Before he does this to someone else.”
Outside, the afternoon sun was low enough to cast long shadows down the side street.Attcity walked beside her in silence until they reached the car.
“Ashford’s name was in the file the whole time,” he said.
“Buried in a paragraph that nobody read twice.”
“Marshall’s going to be upset.”
"Marshall's going to run his name through every database we have access to.And then we're going to find out where Gregory Ashford lives and what's inside his house."Kari got in the car and pulled the door shut."Call Soto.Tell him I need a full background on Gregory Ashford—real estate, financials, and medical records, if he can get them.Everything."
Attcity was on the phone before she’d started the engine.
CHAPTER TEN
Truth-tellers and liars had one thing in common: they both revealed more than they intended.Paul had learned this over hundreds of interrogations, and it was the first thing he thought as Amy Trujillo started talking.
Amy Trujillo wasn't lying.She sat across from Paul and James at her kitchen table in a small house on a residential street in Farmington, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea she wasn't drinking, and told them about the man she'd lived with for two years.Her eyes were raw, and her voice was steady, and she answered every question without hesitation, which told Paul she'd been waiting for someone to ask the right ones.
“The FBI agents who interviewed me were polite,” she said.“Professional.But they weren’t interested in Nathan’s work.They wanted to know about his finances, his relationships, whether he had any conflicts with people on the reservation.They kept coming back to Ben Tsosie—did Nathan ever mention that name, did they have any connection, any history.”She shook her head.“Nathan didn’t know any tribal police.He worked for a geology firm.He drove out to survey sites and came home covered in dust.That was his life.”
