She stood by the SUV for a moment before making the call.Ashford had killed three people because he was losing his mind and believed—with the absolute certainty of a man whose reality was dissolving—that he could preserve himself by becoming one with the art he loved.Monstrous.Tragic.And in a way that Kari could feel but not yet articulate, connected to what she was about to do next.
Because the people who’d killed her mother had done it for the opposite reason.Not to preserve something beautiful, but to protect something profitable.Not out of desperate love, but out of calculated interest.Ashford’s crime was a kind of madness.Devco’s was a kind of sanity—the cold, rational decision that a human life was worth less than what lay beneath the ground she’d walked on.
Both kinds of killing ended the same way.A person gone.A family broken.A silence where a voice had been.
“I need to make a call,” she said.
She walked to her car and dialed Daniels.He answered on the first ring.
“It’s done,” she said.“Ashford confessed.Forensics confirm.Marshall’s closing the case.”
“How fast can you get here?”
“Where’s here?”
“The reservation.Helen’s house.We’re planning the next move and we need Marshall on board.”A pause.“We need you, too.All of you.This is the endgame, Kari.”
She looked at the mountains, dark against a sky that was fading from blue to violet.The art murders were over.Three families would get answers, imperfect and terrible as those answers were.Three artists would be remembered for their work, not for how they died—if the world was fair, which it usually wasn’t, but sometimes could be pushed in that direction.
Now the other case.The older one.The one that had been running beneath everything since before Kari had become a detective, since before she’d understood what her mother had been doing all those years, piecing together a conspiracy in the margins of her own life.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” she said.“And I’ll bring Marshall.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Kari hadn’t been on the reservation in three weeks, and the land hit her the way it always did after an absence—not as scenery but as recognition.The mesas rising from the desert floor like something the earth had said out loud.The light at this hour, late afternoon, turning everything to copper.The smell through the open window of dust and sage and the particular dryness that meant home in a way no other place ever would.
Marshall drove her own car, a Bureau sedan that looked wrong on the dirt roads but handled them without complaint.She’d agreed to come after a forty-minute conversation in the field office parking lot during which Kari had laid out the conspiracy in broad strokes—the lithium deposit, the land acquisition, the twenty years of murders, the FBI corruption.Marshall had listened without interrupting, asked four questions, and then said, “Show me.”
Now she was going to see it.
Helen’s house appeared at the end of the dirt road, a single shape against the flat horizon.Two vehicles were already parked outside—Daniels' rental and James’s truck from Flagstaff.A third vehicle, unfamiliar, sat at the far end: a white sedan with government plates that Kari guessed belonged to Nadine Begaye.
Ben was on the porch.
He stood when he saw Kari’s rental pull in behind Marshall’s sedan, and for a moment neither of them moved—Kari in the driver’s seat, Ben on the porch, three weeks and three hundred miles compressing into the space between them.Then she got out of the car and walked toward him and he came down the steps, and they met in the yard in the late copper light.
He looked thinner.The ankle monitor was invisible under his jeans but she knew it was there.His eyes moved across her face with a quick, thorough look—a man cataloging changes—checking for damage, finding none, allowing himself to exhale.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
They didn’t embrace.They weren’t those people, not in front of others, not when there was work to do.But Ben’s hand found hers and held it for three seconds—a pressure that said everything an embrace would have said, compressed into a gesture that nobody watching from the porch would have noticed.
Marshall came around her sedan carrying a laptop bag and a leather folder.Ben released Kari’s hand and extended it to Marshall.
Marshall smiled politely.“Detective Tsosie.Claire Marshall, FBI Art Crime.”
“I know who you are.Kari speaks highly of you.”
“She speaks highly of you, too.Which is why I’m here instead of filing my post-case reports in Albuquerque.”Marshall looked at the house, the vehicles, the empty landscape surrounding them.“This is your secure location?”
“It’s a friend’s house.She’s in Phoenix for the winter.”
“Defensible?”
Ben blinked.“It’s a house on a reservation, not a forward operating base.”
