CHAPTER TWENTY
They planned for two days.
Marshall drove back to Albuquerque to draft the warrant through the Denver field office, communicating with Daniels by the encrypted channel he’d established weeks ago.
James worked the satellite imagery, cross-referencing Ben’s hand-drawn layout with the six-month-old photographs to identify new structures and estimate security patterns.
Daniels coordinated with his contact at the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, confirming the timeline: the evidence package would be delivered in person in Washington four days from now, with or without the physical samples from the Devco site.
With the samples, the case was overwhelming.
Without them, it was persuasive but vulnerable.
Ben paced. He’d drawn every map he could draw, described every detail he could remember, answered every question Daniels and James had asked twice over.
The ankle monitor confined him to the reservation, which meant he couldn’t accompany the team onto Devco’s land.
This fact sat in the room like a fourth wall that nobody mentioned because mentioning it wouldn’t change it.
On the second evening, the plan was set.
Marshall would secure the warrant the following morning.
Daniels, James, and Kari would approach the Devco property from the south after dark, where a wash provided natural cover from the perimeter road.
The primary objectives were core samples from the active mining sites, photographic documentation of the extraction operations, and any records recovered from the expanded facility near the old airfield.
Marshall would coordinate the response—tribal police, local authorities, and her own agents from the Art Crime team, repurposed for an operation well outside their usual mandate.
They’d be staged twenty minutes away, ready to move in if the team on the ground called for support or if the evidence warranted an immediate seizure of the property.
Ben would stay at Helen's house with a radio, guiding Kari through the airfield using the maps they'd built together—his memory of the trailer and the escape route, James's satellite overlays filling in the rest. He didn't know the interior of every building.
He didn't know where the cameras were or what security rotations looked like now.
But he knew the ground between the perimeter and the trailer, and the satellite imagery gave them enough of the larger layout to plan a route.
His voice in her ear would have to be enough.
The biggest flaw in this plan, Kari discovered during the second evening, was time.
The plan called for a coordinated approach—three people moving together through unfamiliar terrain in the dark, collecting evidence at multiple sites, then converging on the airfield facility.
Three people meant three sets of footsteps, three profiles to conceal, three opportunities for a security patrol to spot movement.
It meant moving at the pace of the slowest member, which would be James, who was sixty-three and hadn’t done fieldwork in a decade.
It meant every minute on the property was a minute that multiplied the risk for everyone.
One person could move faster. One person could reach the mining sites, collect the samples, and get to the airfield while the security rotation was still on the far side of the property. One person with a radio and a guide who knew the layout could be in and out before anyone knew she was there.
She didn’t raise it at the planning table.
She knew what Daniels would say—that solo operations were reckless, that the risk was unacceptable, that they couldn’t afford to lose anyone at this stage.
He’d be right about all of it. He’d also be wrong, because the coordinated approach carried its own risks, and Kari had been calculating odds on operations like this since her years with Phoenix PD, and the math favored speed and stealth over numbers.
After the others had gone to bed—Daniels in Helen’s guest room, James on the couch, Marshall back in Albuquerque—Kari sat on the porch in the dark and listened to the desert.
No wind tonight. The stars were dense and low, the way they only appeared out on the reservation, away from city light.
She could see the Milky Way arcing overhead, the galaxy’s spine curving across the sky, and she thought about her mother sitting on a porch like this one, not so long ago, making decisions about how much to risk and who to protect.
The screen door opened behind her. Ruth came out in a housecoat and slippers, carrying two mugs of tea. She handed one to Kari without a word and sat in the other chair, the one with the blanket folded over its arm.
They sat in silence for a while. Ruth drank her tea in small sips, her eyes on the horizon where the mesas were black shapes against the slightly less black sky. Kari held her mug and let the warmth soak into her palms.
“You’re not sleeping,” Ruth said.
“No.”
“Because you’re thinking about tomorrow.”
Kari looked at her grandmother. Ruth’s face was half-visible in the faint light from the kitchen window—the deep lines around her eyes, the set of her mouth, the steady gaze that had been reading Kari’s face since before Kari could read anything at all.
“I’m thinking about a lot of things.”
“You’re thinking about going alone.”
Kari didn’t answer. She hadn’t told anyone. She hadn’t written it down or said it aloud or even fully committed to it in her own mind. But Ruth was looking at her the way she’d looked at her in the kitchen yesterday—seeing past the surface to whatever was running beneath it.
“How did you know?”
“Because your mother had the same face when she was about to do something she didn’t want anyone else involved in.
She’d get quiet. She’d stop arguing. She’d agree with the plan and then do something different.
” Ruth set her mug on the arm of the chair.
“Anna kept people at arm’s length because she thought distance was the same as safety.
She thought if she was the only one at risk, she was protecting everyone else. She was wrong.”
“Shimásání—”
"She went alone, and she died alone, and we didn't know what had happened to her until it was too late to do anything but grieve.
" Ruth's voice was steady. Not angry. Not pleading.
Just clear, the way water is clear when it's deep enough to see the bottom.
"I'm not going to tell you what to do. You're a grown woman and a detective and you've earned the right to make your own decisions.
But I'm going to tell you what I know, which is that your mother's greatest mistake wasn't investigating dangerous people.
It was believing she had to do it by herself. "
The desert was silent around them. No insects, no wind, no traffic. Just the two of them on a porch at the edge of the reservation, with the stars overhead and the dark land stretching out in every direction.
“If I bring Paul and my father onto that property, I’m putting them in the path of people who’ve killed seventeen others,” Kari said. “Paul’s not a field agent anymore. He’s fifty-eight years old. And my father hasn’t carried a weapon in twenty years.”
“And if you go alone and something goes wrong, who comes for you?”
“Ben will have the radio. Marshall has a team staged—”
“Twenty minutes away. You said that yourself. Twenty minutes is a long time when someone’s shooting at you.”
Kari remembered the night at her house. The automatic weapon fire tearing through the walls.
The windshield shattering. The terrible, specific knowledge that the person inside wanted her dead and had the tools to accomplish it.
Ben’s voice on the phone—Stay on the line, stay down—and the sirens that had taken twelve minutes to arrive, each minute marked by gunfire and the diminishing space between herself and a bullet.
“I survived that,” she said.
“You survived because you were lucky and because Ben called it in and because whoever was shooting was sloppy. You told me that yourself.” Ruth picked up her mug and took another sip.
“Don’t count on the same luck twice. Don’t count on facing sloppy people next time.
And don’t walk into the desert alone and expect the desert to bring you back just because it has before. ”
They sat with that. Kari drank her tea. It was chamomile, the kind Ruth made from flowers she grew and dried herself, and it tasted the way the reservation smelled after rain—earthy, specific, a flavor that belonged to a place.
“Your mother was brave,” Ruth said. “She was also stubborn and proud and she confused being alone with being strong. Don’t make that confusion, Kari.
The people in that house came here because they chose to.
Paul, your father, the lawyer, the FBI woman.
They know what they’re walking into. You don’t get to make that choice for them by leaving early and going by yourself. ”
Kari looked at the sky. The Milky Way hadn’t moved, because it never did, because the galaxy operated on a timescale that made human decisions look like what they were—brief and small, consequential only to the people making them.
“I hear you,” she said.
Ruth looked at her for a long time. Then she finished her tea, set the mug on the porch railing, and stood. She put her hand on Kari’s shoulder—a brief, firm pressure—and went inside.
Kari stayed on the porch. She listened to the silence, and she thought about her mother, and she thought about the plan, and she thought about the people asleep in the house behind her who had chosen to be here.
Ruth was right about Anna. Right about distance and safety and the confusion between being alone and being strong. Right about all of it.
But Ruth didn’t know about the bodycam.
Kari had bought it three days ago in Albuquerque—a small unit that clipped to a vest strap, recorded locally to a memory card, and could broadcast a live feed to a paired device within a two-mile radius.
If she went in alone, wearing the camera, Ben could see everything she saw.
He could guide her through the airfield in real time, not from memory but from a live image.
And if she encountered Devco’s security, if something went wrong, the camera would capture it—evidence that couldn’t be lost or suppressed, transmitted to Ben the moment it happened.
One person, moving fast, with a camera and a radio and a guide who knew every corner of the facility.
She’d tell Ben in the morning. He’d try to talk her out of it. He’d fail, because he’d understand the logic even as he hated it, and because he’d know that being the voice in her ear was better than being nowhere at all.
She’d go an hour before the agreed-upon time. The others would follow on schedule, Daniels and James and Marshall’s team, and by the time they reached the property, Kari would already have what they needed. Or she’d be in trouble, and they’d come for her.
Either way, she wouldn’t be alone. Not completely. Not the way Anna had been.
That would have to be enough.