Ben didn’t answer immediately.She could hear wind in the background, which meant he was outside, probably on the porch of wherever he was staying with Ruth.“How bad?”
“Bad enough that we’re back to square one on getting it public.But something else came up.”She told him about Marshall’s call.About the missing artists, the staged bodies, the FBI asking for help.
“Take it,” Ben said, without hesitation.
“You sound like Daniels.”
“Daniels is right.You need to be around people, Kari.Not just for safety.You’ve been alone for two weeks and I can hear it in your voice.”
She didn’t answer that.
“Take the case,” he said.“Do what you do.I’ll keep your grandmother safe and I’ll be here when you need me.”
After she hung up, she noticed Daniels was already putting on his jacket.“I’ll check in when I have something.Use the secondary number if you need to reach me—I’m assuming my primary is compromised.”
“Paul.”He stopped at the door.“Thank you for trying.I know you put yourself out there.”
He nodded once, the way he did when words weren’t going to improve anything, and left.
Kari stood in the quiet room and looked at the laptop on the bed, the browser still open toArizona Republic’sfront page.A story about water rights.A story about a highway expansion.The same nothing that had been there all day.
She closed it.She packed her bag.She set the alarm on her phone for six and lay down on the bed with her weapon on the nightstand, the chain on the door, and the window cracked two inches against the heat.
Tomorrow she'd go to the FBI field office and listen to what Claire Marshall had to say about dead artists and staged bodies.She'd work the case, and she'd be useful, and she'd make allies in a building full of federal agents, some of whom might be honest.
And underneath all of it, like groundwater moving beneath the desert floor, the real work would continue.The lithium.The murders.The twenty billion dollars that had cost her mother’s life.
It wasn’t over.In fact, she sensed it was just beginning.
CHAPTER TWO
The FBI’s Albuquerque field office was a squat, sand-colored building on Luecking Park Avenue that looked more like a regional insurance company than the nerve center of federal law enforcement for half of New Mexico.Kari arrived twenty minutes early and sat in the parking lot with the engine running, watching agents come and go through the front entrance.Suits, lanyards, the particular walk of people who carried credentials and flashed them often.She’d spent enough time around federal buildings to recognize the culture, and enough time distrusting it to feel the tension in her hands on the steering wheel.
She was still deciding whether to go inside when her phone buzzed.A text from Ben:Good luck today.Don’t let them talk you into anything you don’t want to do.
She pocketed the phone and went in.
The receptionist directed her to a conference room on the second floor.The hallway smelled like industrial carpet cleaner and burnt coffee—the same smell every federal office in America seemed to share, as if it came standard with the lease.Kari found the room and paused in the doorway.
Three people were already inside.A woman stood at the head of a long table, arranging photographs on a corkboard propped against the wall.Two men sat on opposite sides of the table, laptops open, one of them eating a breakfast burrito over a napkin.
The woman turned.Mid-forties, dark hair pulled back, no jewelry except a plain watch.She moved like someone who’d been up for hours and had already crossed six items off a list.“Detective Blackhorse.Claire Marshall.Thank you for coming.”
“I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”
"Understood."Marshall gestured to the table."Sit wherever you like.This is Agent Tom Attcity" the man with the burrito, Navajo from the look of him, young, maybe late twenties—" and Agent Derek Soto"—older, heavyset, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.Neither stood.Attcity nodded.Soto gave a half-wave without looking up from his screen.
Kari took a chair at the near end of the table, positioning herself where she could see the door and the corkboard at the same time.An old habit she’d stopped trying to break.
“Before we start,” Marshall said, “I want to be clear about what I’m asking.This isn’t a jurisdictional transfer.You wouldn’t be leading the investigation—that’s my team’s job.What I need is a consultant.Someone who understands the cultural dimensions of these crimes and who has experience working violent cases involving Indigenous victims.Your name came up repeatedly when I started asking around.”
“Who’d you ask?”
“People I trust.That’s all I’ll say.”Marshall turned to the corkboard.Three photographs were pinned across the top—headshots, formal, the kind taken for gallery catalogs or press kits.Two men, one woman.Below each headshot, Marshall had pinned a series of crime scene photographs that Kari couldn’t make out from her seat.
“Four months ago, a Navajo painter named Leonard Redhouse disappeared from Santa Fe Indian Market.”Marshall tapped the first headshot.The man in the photograph was in his sixties, silver-haired, with deep lines around his eyes and a weathered face that spoke of decades in high desert.“Redhouse was one of the most respected Indigenous artists in the Southwest.His work sold for six figures.He’d been showing at Indian Market for thirty years.”
"I know the name," Kari said.She did not personally, but the way anyone who'd grown up on the reservation knew the names of artists who'd made it.His paintings hung in the Heard Museum, in the Smithsonian, in private collections worldwide.Ceremonial dancers rendered in colors so precise they looked like they might step off the canvas and start moving.
