“He’s not our guy,” he said.
“No.But tell me why you think so.”
Attcity considered this."The staging requires someone who understands the art intimately—and Mendoza fits that.He's possessive about the artists, he has access to their personal materials, and he knows their processes.But like you said in there, he can't afford to collect at this level.And his reaction when you pushed on it told me the ethics speech was rehearsed—he's had to explain away the gap between his taste and his salary before."
“What else?”
“The possessiveness is different.Mendoza wants to own the narrative about these artists.He wants to be the authority, the gatekeeper, the one who decides what their work means.That’s ego, not obsession.The killer’s behavior—the tears in the gallery, the desperation, the need—that’s something Mendoza doesn’t have.Mendoza feels important when he talks about these artists.Our killer feels something closer to grief.”
Kari started the engine.“Good,” she said.“Now let’s go find Ashford.”
Back at the field office, Soto had the background report ready.Kari read it standing at the workroom table, Attcity and Soto flanking her, Marshall on the phone in the next room.
Gregory Ashford.Sixty-seven years old.Retired CEO of Ashford Pharmaceuticals, a mid-size firm he’d founded in the eighties and sold eight years ago for an undisclosed sum reported to be in the range of four hundred million dollars.Primary residence outside Santa Fe—a thirty-acre estate in the Sangre de Cristo foothills that he’d purchased five years ago.No criminal record.No civil litigation.Married and divorced twice, two adult children who lived on the East Coast.
And one medical detail that Soto had flagged with a yellow highlight: eighteen months ago, Ashford had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
Kari read the line twice.Then she looked at Attcity.
“Running out of time,” she said.
He nodded.Neither of them needed to say more.
CHAPTER TWELVE
James’s colleague at Canyon State worked fast.
Paul had expected days.Dr.Alan Peshlakai was a computer science professor who ran a forensic data recovery business out of a converted garage behind his house in Flagstaff.James had called him on the drive back from Farmington, and by the time they’d delivered the laptop at nine that evening, Peshlakai had already cleared his morning schedule.
Paul picked up the laptop at two the following afternoon.The password had been a twelve-character alphanumeric string that Peshlakai cracked with a dictionary attack modified by Whitmore’s personal data—birthday, college mascot, girlfriend’s name.Took him four hours.He’d imaged the drive first, working from the copy, leaving the original untouched for chain-of-custody purposes.The man was thorough.
Paul drove to the house where Ruth was staying and sat down at the kitchen table with James.Ruth was out—Ben's release on bail had come through that morning, and she'd gone to meet him at the courthouse in Window Rock with a bag of clean clothes and, James suspected, enough food to feed a family of six.The house was quiet for the first time in days.
The laptop’s contents were organized with the care of a man who knew he might need someone else to make sense of them.Whitmore had created a folder structure that read like an evidence file: dated entries, labeled photographs, spreadsheets, and a series of documents he’d titled simply “Record.”
Paul opened the first Record file.It was dated seven months ago.
Whitmore wrote the way he probably spoke—direct, technical, without embellishment.He described being assigned to a new survey area in the Four Corners region by his supervisor at Ridgeline Resources.The area was on land owned by a holding company his supervisor identified only as “the client.”The survey parameters were unusual: Whitmore was instructed to focus on subsurface lithium indicators—brine concentrations, clay mineral signatures, pegmatite formations—rather than the broader geological assessment that was standard for the firm’s contracts.
He hadn’t thought much of it.Lithium exploration was booming.Half the geology firms in the Southwest had pivoted to it as demand for battery materials drove prices up.But as the weeks went on, Whitmore noticed irregularities.
The second Record file, dated five months ago, described his growing concerns.Core samples were being collected on a schedule that didn’t match Ridgeline’s reported project timeline.Equipment was being moved onto the survey site at night.And the land itself—when Whitmore checked the property records—was adjacent to the Navajo reservation, in an area where mineral rights were contested.
Paul read that paragraph twice.Adjacent to the reservation.Contested mineral rights.This was the same land Devco Holdings had been acquiring through shell companies for two decades—the land Anna had mapped, the land Ben had trespassed onto, the land beneath which sat a lithium deposit worth twenty billion dollars.
The third Record was longer.Whitmore had started photographing the operation covertly—equipment, vehicles, license plates, faces.He’d taken soil and rock samples independently and sent them to a lab in Denver under his own name, paying out of pocket.The results confirmed what he’d suspected: the subsurface lithium concentrations were extraordinary.Not just commercially viable but among the richest deposits ever identified in North America.
He’d also found something else.Test holes that predated Ridgeline’s involvement by years—older bore sites, partially concealed, that showed someone had been exploring this deposit long before the current survey.The geological data from these older sites had been removed from public records.Whitmore had found traces of it only because one of the original survey reports had been improperly archived in a state database that nobody at Ridgeline knew existed.
“They’ve known about this deposit for at least fifteen years,” James said, reading over Paul’s shoulder.“Probably longer.The old test holes match the timeline Anna documented.”
Paul opened the folder of photographs.Dozens of images, geotagged and timestamped, showing heavy equipment operating on the survey site: drilling rigs, earth movers, storage containers.Several showed men in hard hats and high-visibility vests—workers, not security—going about their business with the routine efficiency of people who’d been at this for a while.One photograph showed a row of core sample boxes stacked beside a trailer, each box labeled with depth and grid coordinates.
“These are active extraction preparations,” Paul said.“Not exploration.They’ve moved past the survey phase into pre-production work.They’re getting ready to mine.”
“Which is exactly what Ben saw when they caught him on the property.”James pulled up a spreadsheet Whitmore had compiled—grid coordinates cross-referenced with sample results, each cell color-coded by lithium concentration.The highest concentrations formed a dense cluster that, when Paul overlaid the coordinates on a map, sat squarely beneath reservation land.“The richest part of the deposit is still on tribal land.They can mine the edges from their own property, but the core—the part that makes this worth billions instead of millions—requires access they don’t have.”
The final Record file was dated three weeks before Whitmore’s death.His tone had changed.The technical clarity was still there, but beneath it Paul could hear fear pressing against the words.
