He was right.She knew he was right.And she hated it.
“Can I talk to him?”
“Not yet.He’s in federal custody, which means they control access.I’m going to make calls and find out where they’re holding him, and I’ll work on getting him a lawyer.A good one.Someone from outside the system.”
"Paul, the evidence—whatever they've manufactured—it's going to be good.These people staged my mother's death as an exposure and got away with it for twenty years.If they framed Ben, they did it right."
"Then we'll have to be better."Daniels' voice had the quiet steel in it that she'd learned to trust over the years.It was the voice he used when the odds were long, and the work was necessary, and complaining about either was a waste of time."I'm calling your father next.He and I will start pulling this apart.You focus on your case and stay where you are."
He hung up.
Kari stood alone in the windowless room with her hand still on the table and the case files spread around her.Three Indigenous artists, two dead, one missing.A killer who turned bodies into art.And now Ben—in handcuffs, in a federal vehicle, being driven somewhere she couldn’t reach.
She wanted to throw the phone.She wanted to get in her car and drive north until she found whatever building they'd put him in, walk through the door, and make someone explain what was happening.She wanted to do something that matched the scale of what she was feeling, something loud and immediate and physical.
Not read a file.
But for now, that was the only option available to her.
So she sat down, pulled the Honanie file toward herself, and opened it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Kari couldn’t focus on the Honanie file, but it wasn’t for want of trying.
For three hours after Daniels' call she’d sat in the workroom and read witness statements and timeline reconstructions and forensic analyses.But none of it had stuck.The words moved across the page and through her mind without leaving a mark, because every few minutes her thoughts pulled south, toward wherever they were holding Ben, and the effort of dragging them back was burning through her concentration like fuel she couldn’t afford to waste.
At six o'clock, she gave up, stacked the files neatly, and drove back to the motel.She bought a sandwich from a gas station and ate half of it sitting on the bed.The other half went back in the bag.She checked her phone four times in twenty minutes.Nothing from Daniels.Nothing from Ben—not that he'd be able to call from federal custody, but she checked anyway, the way you check a door you know is locked.
She was in the shower when the phone rang.Getting to it, she nearly pulled the curtain rod off the wall, leaving wet footprints across the carpet.
“What do you have?”
Daniels didn’t waste time on greetings either.“Whitmore’s body was found yesterday morning in an arroyo about fifteen miles south of Farmington.Single gunshot wound to the chest, nine-millimeter round.Ben’s service weapon is a Glock 22—.40 caliber—so it doesn’t match.But the weapon they’re tying to the murder is Ben’s old backup, a Glock 19.Nine-millimeter.”
Kari sat on the edge of the bed, water dripping from her hair onto her shoulders."Ben's old backup went missing from the evidence room.The custodian flagged it during an inventory check after the security upgrade."
“He told you that?”
“He mentioned it.Said it had probably been misfiled, or would turn up when someone ran the right form."
“The FBI claims," Daniels said carefully, "that the Glock 19 was recovered at the scene, forty yards from the body, wiped but not thoroughly enough—they found a partial print on the magazine that matches Ben.They also found DNA at the scene.Hair, and what they’re calling biological material consistent with skin cells on a rock near the body.And then there’s the money.A wire transfer of fifty thousand dollars into an account at First Nations Bank in Shiprock, opened two months ago in Ben’s name with his Social Security number.The deposit came from an offshore account routed through the Cayman Islands.”
Kari closed her eyes.The frame was exactly what she’d feared—not a crude setup, but an engineered one, built with real materials and real data, designed to survive the first round of scrutiny and probably the second.
“Ben didn’t open that account.”
“Of course he didn’t.But someone had his Social Security number and enough personal information to do it for him.And fifty thousand dollars in a cop’s account, coming from offshore—that’s what a jury remembers.Everything else goes out the window.”
“How did they get his DNA?”
"That's what I'm trying to figure out.The gun I understand—someone with access to the station could have taken it during the security system upgrade last month.Ben's prints on the magazine make sense if the weapon was his; he would have loaded it at some point.But planting hair and skin cells at a crime scene… that takes planning.They either collected biological material from Ben's home, his vehicle, his desk, or they had someone close enough to take it directly."
The implication sat between them.Someone with access to Ben’s personal space.Someone inside the department, or at least inside his life.
“How’s he doing?”Kari asked.
“I talked to Yazzie.He said Ben walked out of the station like he was heading to lunch.Didn’t say a word, didn’t resist, didn’t react.Yazzie’s exact words were ‘the calmest arrest I’ve ever seen.’”
