CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Kari had served warrants on meth labs, on domestic abusers barricaded in trailers with loaded shotguns, on a man in Chinle who’d killed his neighbor over a property line and spent three days sitting on his porch with the body visible through the screen door.
None of those had prepared her for Gregory Ashford’s front gate.
The estate sat in the Sangre de Cristo foothills northeast of Santa Fe, behind a wall of coyote fencing and a wrought-iron gate that opened onto a gravel drive lined with pinon trees.
Marshall had assembled a team of eight—herself, Kari, Attcity, Soto, two forensic technicians, and two tactical agents who stayed near the vehicles as a precaution.
The warrant had taken two days to secure.
Marshall’s application ran forty-three pages.
A woman met them at the gate: mid-thirties, dark hair in a bun, wearing scrubs. She identified herself as Maria Sandoval, Ashford's private nurse. No doubt the auction assistant, Bechtel, had mentioned.
Sandoval looked at Marshall’s credentials, then at the warrant, then at the line of vehicles in the drive, and her face went through a sequence of emotions that ended somewhere near resignation.
“He’s having a good morning,” she said. “Please don’t upset him.”
The house was large without being ostentatious—territorial style, thick adobe walls, vigas and latillas overhead, construction designed to keep cool in summer and warm in winter.
The entry hall opened into a great room with a wall of windows facing the mountains.
The furnishings were expensive and spare.
A Steinway grand piano sat in one corner with a layer of dust on its lid.
Ashford was in the great room, seated in a leather armchair, reading a book. He looked up when Marshall entered and his expression moved from confusion to polite interest, the practiced hospitality of a man who’d spent decades receiving visitors in expensive rooms.
“Good morning,” he said. His voice was clear, cultured, East Coast by origin. “Are you here about the roof? Maria called someone about the leak.”
“Mr. Ashford, I’m Special Agent Claire Marshall with the FBI. We have a warrant to search your property.” Marshall kept her voice even and unhurried. “These agents are going to look through your home. You’re welcome to remain here while they work.”
“The FBI.” Ashford set his book down. Kari noticed it was upside down—he’d been holding it open to a random page. “Is this about the foundation? I’ve told Richard the paperwork is in order.”
“It’s not about a foundation, Mr. Ashford.”
“Well, come in. Come in.” He gestured broadly, the host overriding whatever confusion was beneath it. “Maria, could you bring coffee? We have guests.”
Sandoval looked at Marshall, who nodded. The nurse left for the kitchen, and Marshall directed her team. Soto and the forensic technicians took the main house. Attcity would work with Kari on whatever lay beyond the great room. The tactical agents remained outside.
Marshall stayed with Ashford, establishing a rapport while the search proceeded.
Kari could hear her voice as she moved through the house—calm, conversational, asking simple questions that Ashford answered with varying degrees of coherence.
Some responses were lucid and detailed. Others trailed off mid-sentence or circled back to things he’d already said.
He asked on two further occasions if they were there about the roof.
Kari and Attcity found the gallery on the lower level.
A staircase off the main hallway led down to a heavy wooden door with a keypad lock. The door was unlocked—Sandoval, anticipating the warrant, had opened it for them. Kari went through first and stopped.
The room was vast. It must have been the entire footprint of the house—a purpose-built underground gallery with climate control, professional lighting, and the faint hum of a dehumidification system.
The walls were white. The floor was polished concrete.
And every surface, every wall, every corner held Indigenous art.
Kari counted as she walked. Thirty-seven paintings.
Fourteen sculptures on pedestals. Eight display cases of jewelry.
Weavings mounted behind glass. Pottery in lighted niches.
Kachina figures arranged on shelves in rows of twenty, thirty, more.
The collection was enormous and eclectic—work spanning a century, multiple nations, every major medium—but it was organized with a specificity that went beyond curation.
Each piece had a label. Not the discreet museum-style cards that listed artist, title, date, and medium.
Ashford’s labels were handwritten, dense with text, some running to multiple pages pinned beside the artwork.
Kari leaned in to read one—a card beside a Redhouse painting, one of three in the gallery.
The handwriting was cramped and difficult, but legible.
Ashford had written a detailed analysis of the painting’s composition, colors, and brushwork.
Below that, he’d transcribed passages from an interview with Redhouse about his creative process.
Below that, he’d written something more personal—a paragraph describing what he felt when he looked at the painting, how the image of the dancer seemed to move when he stared at it long enough, how he believed the painting contained a fragment of Redhouse’s consciousness that would survive long after the painter himself was gone.
Kari read the final lines: If I can hold this image in my mind, it becomes part of my memory. And if it becomes part of my memory, then Leonard lives inside me. The painting is a door. I need to learn how to walk through it.
She straightened and looked at Attcity, who was reading a similar card beside a Tafoya sculpture. His face was still, the way it went when he was absorbing something that would take time to process.
“There are notes like this for every piece,” he said.
They moved through the gallery systematically, photographing each artwork and its accompanying label.
The notes became more disorganized as they progressed—earlier cards were neatly written and analytically structured, while later ones showed deteriorating handwriting, repeated phrases, and passages that circled the same ideas without advancing them.
The disease’s progression documented in real time, pinned to the walls of a private museum nobody else had ever seen.
The back section of the gallery was different. A partition separated it from the main space, and behind it Kari found what she’d been looking for.
Three walls. Three artists. Redhouse, Tafoya, Honanie.
Each wall was dedicated to a single artist, and each was covered not just with artwork but with photographs, newspaper clippings, exhibition catalogs, printed interviews, and handwritten notes that formed a dense collage.
At the center of each wall was a large photograph of the artist—not a formal headshot but a candid image, apparently taken without the subject’s knowledge.
Redhouse painting in his studio, captured through a window.
Tafoya working clay at an outdoor table, photographed from a parked car.
Honanie at his workbench, the angle suggesting the photographer had been standing in the doorway of the workshop.
Surveillance photographs. Ashford had been watching them.
Below each central photograph, Ashford had written a statement that read like a dedication.
For Redhouse: Your hands remember what your mind creates.
I want to hold what you hold. I want to see the dancer the way you see him—from the inside, as he moves through you and becomes paint and color and permanence.
For Tafoya: You make the clay remember its first shape.
The woman becoming the bird, the bird becoming the sky.
If I could feel what you feel when the clay takes form, I would never forget anything again.
For Honanie: Each cut in the silver is a prayer.
You told me that. I carry it with me. When the memories go, I want the prayers to be the last thing I lose.
Kari photographed everything. The dedications, the surveillance photos, the dense collages of obsessive research. She worked quietly and methodically, because the work required it and because the alternative was to stand in this room and feel something she couldn’t afford to feel right now.
Gregory Ashford was a murderer. He had killed two people and almost certainly a third. He had strangled them, preserved their bodies, and staged them in the wilderness like installations in a gallery only he could visit.
And he had done it because his mind was dissolving and he believed—with the desperate, irrational conviction of a man watching himself disappear—that by recreating their art with their bodies, he could absorb some fragment of their creative spirit and carry it with him into the darkness that was coming for him.
It was monstrous. It was also the saddest thing Kari had ever seen, in a career that had shown her no shortage of sadness.
She finished photographing the back section and found Attcity at the gallery entrance, waiting for her.
He didn’t say anything. They walked upstairs together, into the natural light of the great room, where Marshall was sitting across from Ashford and listening to him describe, with perfect clarity and evident passion, the history of Hopi overlay silverwork.
The old man didn’t know why they were there. By tomorrow, he might not remember that they’d come at all.
Kari caught Marshall’s eye and nodded once. Marshall excused herself and stepped into the hallway.
“We have enough,” Kari said. “Surveillance photographs of all three victims. Handwritten statements describing his obsession with their creative processes. Original artworks by all three in his collection, including pieces that match the staging at the crime scenes. And the gallery notes document a deteriorating mental state consistent with the timeline of the killings.”
“Forensics?”
“Soto needs to process the gallery—fibers, soil, biological trace. If there’s a preservation workspace somewhere on this property, we need to find it. Basement, outbuilding, storage unit. Somewhere he held the bodies.”
“I’ll expand the warrant.” Marshall pulled out her phone. “Good work, Blackhorse.”
Kari looked back through the doorway into the great room, where Gregory Ashford had picked up his upside-down book and was reading it again, his lips moving slightly, his trembling hands gripping the pages of a story he couldn’t follow.