CHAPTER FOUR
Five hours with the case files, and the killer was getting clearer.
Not his face. Not his name. But the shape of him—the outline of a mind that moved through the world in ways she was beginning to understand.
She sat in the workroom Attcity had set up for her, a windowless space down the hall from the main conference room that smelled like toner and stale air freshener, and spread the case files across two folding tables pushed together end to end.
She’d started with Leonard Redhouse. The file was thick—Marshall’s team had been thorough, whatever else they’d missed.
Crime scene photographs, forensic reports, witness statements from the gallery reception, Redhouse’s phone records for the two weeks before his disappearance, a timeline that accounted for his movements down to the hour on the day he vanished.
The forensics told part of the story. Redhouse had been strangled—manual compression of the carotid arteries, sustained pressure causing cerebral hypoxia and death.
No defensive wounds. No skin under his fingernails.
No bruising on his forearms or shins that would suggest a struggle.
Which meant either the killer had immobilized him before the strangulation, or Redhouse hadn’t known it was coming until it was too late.
The toxicology was more interesting. Traces of midazolam in his tissue—a benzodiazepine, fast-acting, commonly used for procedural sedation.
The concentrations were low enough that the ME had flagged them as uncertain, noting that decomposition could produce similar chemical signatures.
But Kari didn’t think the ME was wrong. She thought the killer had sedated Redhouse before killing him, which meant either medical knowledge or access to prescription medications.
She made a note and moved to the staging.
The crime scene photographs were high-resolution, shot from multiple angles with a measurement scale in each frame.
Kari arranged them in sequence—wide establishing shots, then medium range, then close-ups of the body’s positioning, the clothing, the surrounding area.
She put the reproduction of Ceremonial Dancer next to the closest matching photograph and studied them side by side.
The accuracy was extraordinary. Not just the body’s general pose but specific details—the angle of the right wrist, the splay of the fingers on the left hand, the degree of rotation in the torso.
Kari counted at least a dozen points of correspondence that went beyond what a casual observer of the painting would notice.
The feathers attached to the regalia were arranged in the same asymmetric pattern as the painting.
The beadwork on the tunic followed the same color progression—turquoise to white to red—that Redhouse had rendered in oils.
This wasn’t someone working from a photograph of the painting.
This was someone who had spent hours—days, probably—studying the original.
Someone who understood, not just what the dancer looked like, but what Redhouse had intended.
The positioning of the body captured something about the painting that a copy wouldn’t: the sense of arrested motion, the dancer frozen at the apex of a turn, the moment just before gravity and momentum took over and pulled him forward.
Kari sat back in her chair and looked at the photographs from a distance.
The staging told her several things about the killer.
Patient. Detail-oriented. Physically capable of transporting a body to a remote location and positioning it precisely, which required strength and stamina.
Knowledgeable about art—not superficially, but deeply, the way someone who collected or studied or created art would be.
And something else, something she’d said in the conference room that she was still turning over: the killer wasn’t just recreating the art. He was completing it.
Redhouse’s painting showed a dancer. The killer had turned a human body into that dancer.
It was an act of transformation—monstrous, certainly, but undertaken with a care and devotion that suggested reverence, not contempt.
The killer hadn’t defaced or mutilated Redhouse’s body.
He’d preserved it, dressed it, positioned it with the attention of a curator hanging a masterpiece.
The location—a sun-dappled clearing in the ponderosa pines—was chosen in the same way as a gallery chooses lighting.
She moved to Linda Tafoya’s file.
The sculptor’s case followed the same pattern with variations that Kari found more disturbing.
Tafoya’s work was three-dimensional—her transformation figures existed in space, not on a flat canvas.
Recreating one of her sculptures with a human body required an understanding of how the form looked from every angle, which meant the killer had either owned the original piece or had extensive access to it.
Kari flipped through the forensic report.
Same cause of death—manual strangulation.
Same traces of midazolam, this time in slightly higher concentrations.
Same lack of defensive wounds. But the staging was more ambitious.
The Valles Caldera site was remote, accessible only by a trail that required a four-mile hike from the nearest road.
The killer had carried or transported a preserved body four miles into the backcountry, then positioned it on a specific rock formation.
The physical logistics alone were significant. A body is dead weight in the most literal sense—awkward, heavy, resistant to being moved through rough terrain. Whoever had done this was either extremely fit or had help.
Kari pulled out the photographs of the dislocated joints and looked at them again.
The ME’s report noted that the dislocations were post-mortem, which was a small mercy.
But the clinical exactness of the manipulation was troubling.
The killer had known which joints to target and how much force to apply.
More medical knowledge, or at least anatomical knowledge.
She was reaching for the Honanie file—thinner than the others, since his body hadn’t been found—when her phone rang.
Daniels’ name on the screen. She answered.
“Kari.” His voice was wrong. Flat in a way that Daniels' voice only went when he was controlling it. “I just got a call from Captain Yazzie. Ben’s been arrested.”
She stood up. The chair rolled back and hit the wall behind her. “What?”
“FBI agents showed up at the station an hour ago with a federal warrant. They’ve charged him with the murder of a man named Nathan Whitmore.”
“Who is Nathan Whitmore?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m trying to find out. But Kari—they took his service weapon, they searched his desk, and they’re executing a warrant on his house right now. This isn’t a courtesy interview. They arrested him. Handcuffs, Miranda, the full treatment.”
Kari pressed her free hand flat against the table and leaned on it.
The crime scene photographs of Leonard Redhouse’s staged body stared up at her, and for a moment the two realities—the art murders and the conspiracy that had been eating her life for months—overlapped in a way that made the room feel unsteady.
“This is Devco.”
“Almost certainly. The timing alone—two weeks after you were briefed, two weeks after the attempt on your life. They’re neutralizing us one at a time.”
“I’m coming back.”
“No.” Daniels' voice sharpened. “That’s exactly what they want. Think about it. They frame Ben, they know you’ll drop everything and rush back, they know you’ll go to the station, the jail, wherever he is.
You’ll be emotional, you’ll be visible, and you’ll be predictable.
If there’s a second frame waiting—something that ties you to this Whitmore killing as an accomplice or accessory—walking into that situation is handing it to them. ”
Kari’s hand on the table was pressing hard enough that her fingertips had gone white. She made herself relax them.
“What am I supposed to do? Just leave him there?”
“You stay on this case. You stay inside the FBI, surrounded by agents who have no connection to whoever’s been protecting Devco. You do your job, and you let me work on this from the outside.” A pause. “Ben would tell you the same thing.”
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.