CHAPTER SIX
Kari had worked missing person’s cases before, and she'd learned that the people closest to a victim rarely knew what they knew. Details filed away as ordinary—a conversation, a stranger's face, a change in routine—only became significant after someone disappeared.
The trick was asking the right people the right questions before those details faded.
She drove to Santa Fe with Attcity, who handled the car while Kari reviewed the interview logs from Marshall's team.
The agents had been methodical—they'd talked to gallery owners, fellow artists, family members, event organizers.
What they hadn't done, as far as Kari could tell, was talk to the people on the margins.
The assistants, the framers, the art handlers who moved pieces between studios, galleries, and auction houses.
The people who saw the art world's machinery from the inside but weren't considered important enough to interview.
“Where do artists in Santa Fe go when they’re not showing?” she asked Attcity as they passed the exit for Bernalillo.
“Depends on the artist. Galleries on Canyon Road, coffee shops on the Plaza, studios in the Railyard district. Redhouse had a studio on Agua Fria that he shared with two other painters. Tafoya worked out of her home in San Ildefonso. Honanie rented space near the Railyard—small place, more of a workshop than a studio.”
“Let’s start at Redhouse’s studio.”
The building on Agua Fria was a converted warehouse that had been repurposed once a decade as the neighborhood shifted—feed store, auto shop, artist collective.
The current iteration had three units, each with a rolling metal door and a smaller entrance to the side.
Redhouse’s was the one on the end. Yellow crime scene tape still crossed the door, curling at the edges where the adhesive had dried in the sun.
“FBI cleared the scene two weeks ago,” Attcity said. “Forensics pulled what they could. The other two artists still use their spaces.”
Kari wasn’t interested in Redhouse’s studio—Marshall’s team had processed it thoroughly, and any trace evidence was already in a lab. She wanted to talk to the neighbors.
The adjacent unit belonged to a painter named Dolores Vigil, a compact woman in her sixties with turquoise rings on seven of her ten fingers and white paint dried in the creases of her hands.
She was working when they knocked—a large canvas propped on an easel, abstract forms in earthy reds and ochres that suggested landscape without depicting it.
“I already talked to the FBI,” Vigil said, not stopping her work. “Twice.”
“I know. I’ve read the transcripts.” Kari leaned against the doorframe, keeping her posture open, non-threatening. “I’m not here to go over the same ground. I want to ask you about something they didn’t cover.”
Vigil glanced at her. “Which is?”
“In the months before he disappeared, did Leonard mention anyone new paying attention to his work? Not buyers—the FBI covered that. I mean someone who was interested in the work itself. Asking about his process, his inspirations, the stories behind specific pieces.”
Vigil’s brush paused, hovering over the canvas. “Why do you ask that?”
“Because whoever killed Leonard didn’t just study his art. They understood it. The staging wasn’t a copy—it was an interpretation. That requires a relationship with the work that goes deeper than owning a print.”
Vigil set down her brush and wiped her hands on a rag that had once been a t-shirt. She turned to face Kari, and her expression had shifted from guarded impatience to something more focused.
"There was a man. Maybe three, four months before Leonard went missing.
He came to the studio twice. The first time, Leonard was showing a collector through the space, and this man was just there, standing near the Ceremonial Dancer study, the smaller version Leonard kept here.
I didn't think much of it. People wander in off the street sometimes.
But the second time, he came specifically to talk to Leonard.
I could hear them through the wall." She tapped the partition between the units. "These aren't soundproof."
“What did you hear?”
“Questions. Not the usual ones—not ‘how much is this’ or ‘do you ship to New York.’ He was asking about the dance itself. The specific ceremony the painting depicted. What it meant, what Leonard had been trying to capture, why he’d chosen that particular moment.
Leonard loved talking about that—he could go for hours on the spiritual dimensions of his work.
But afterward, he came over here and said something I remember because it struck me as odd. ”
Kari waited.
“Leonard said, ‘That guy didn’t want to understand the painting. He wanted to understand the painter.’” Vigil picked up her brush again, turning it between her fingers. “At the time I thought Leonard was flattering himself. He had an ego—most great artists do. But now...”
“Can you describe the man?”
“Older. White. Well-dressed, but not flashy—good fabric, simple cut. The clothes of someone who doesn’t need to impress anyone.” She frowned, reaching for the memory. “His hands were shaking. Not a lot—a tremor, like he was cold, except it was August.”
Kari made a note. Tremor. Could be age. Could be medication. Could be a neurological condition.
“Did he give a name?”
“Not that I heard.”
From Vigil’s studio they drove to Canyon Road, the half-mile stretch of galleries that formed the commercial heart of Santa Fe’s art market.
Kari and Attcity worked their way down the street, stopping at galleries that had shown any of the three victims’ work.
The conversations followed a pattern: shock and grief over the murders, effusive praise for the artists’ work, careful reluctance to speculate about who might have done it.
But at the third gallery—a high-ceilinged space called Tierra Sagrada specializing in contemporary Indigenous work—the owner, a white-haired woman named Elaine Kerr, told Kari something that changed the shape of the day.
“I had an unusual interaction about five months ago,” Kerr said.
They were in her office behind the gallery floor, a cluttered room lined with catalogs and price lists.
“A man came in asking about Raymond Honanie’s overlay work.
That wasn’t unusual in itself—Raymond’s pieces move fast, and collectors are always looking.
But this man wasn’t asking about availability or price.
He wanted to know how Raymond described his own creative process.
Whether Raymond had ever talked about what the patterns meant to him personally.
Whether there were interviews or artist statements I could share. ”
“Did you give him anything?”
“I gave him a copy of a catalog essay Raymond had written for a show we did two years ago. It was a beautiful piece of writing—Raymond describing how Hopi overlay technique connects to prayer and intention, how each cut in the silver is a meditation.” Kerr paused.
“The man read it right there in the gallery. Standing in the middle of the room, reading every word. When he finished, he had tears on his face.”
“Was it this man?” Kari repeated Vigil’s account—older, white, well-dressed, trembling hands.
“That sounds right. Older, yes. Expensive clothes. I don’t remember the tremor specifically, but he was... agitated isn’t the right word. Moved. Like someone hearing a piece of music they’d been looking for their whole life.”
“Did he buy anything?”
“He tried. He wanted to buy everything of Raymond’s that we had—four pieces, total value around sixty thousand dollars.
He wanted to take them that day. I explained that two were on hold for another collector and the other two were consigned, meaning I’d need the artist’s approval to release them.
He became very insistent. Not rude, exactly, but persistent in a way that made me uncomfortable.
He said he needed them. Not wanted—needed.
And when I told him it would take a few days to arrange, he left without giving me a name or contact information. ”
"He never came back?"
"No. I expected him to—that kind of urgency, I assumed he'd call within a day or two. But nothing. I still have all four pieces."
Kari looked at Attcity, who had been taking notes in the small leather notebook he carried.
“Same pattern,” Attcity said quietly.
It was. Someone moving through the Santa Fe art world, seeking not just the artwork but the artists’ relationship to their own work.
The creative process, the spiritual dimensions, the personal meaning behind the craft.
Someone collecting not objects but understanding—building an intimate knowledge of how each artist thought, what they intended, what they poured of themselves into the work.
They visited four more galleries. At two of them, dealers remembered a similar figure—older, white, well-dressed, intensely interested in the artists’ creative philosophy rather than the commercial value of their work.
At one, a dealer recalled the man asking specifically whether Linda Tafoya had ever described the physical sensation of sculpting—what it felt like in her hands when the clay took the shape she’d envisioned.
By late afternoon, Kari had six independent accounts of a man who matched the same general description, visiting galleries and studios across Santa Fe over a period of roughly four to six months before the first disappearance.
No one had a name. No one had taken a photo.
No one had thought it strange enough at the time to mention it to anyone else—collectors were eccentric, and the art world tolerated eccentricity as long as the money was good.
Kari and Attcity drove back to Albuquerque with the windows down and the sun dropping toward the Jemez Mountains on their left. Attcity was quiet, processing what they’d gathered. Kari was doing the same, but her mind kept pulling at the edges of something she couldn’t yet name.
The tremor. The tears. The insistence on buying everything immediately, the agitation when told he’d have to wait. The distinction between wanting and needing. And the questions—always about the artist’s inner life, never about the market value or the investment potential.
This wasn’t a collector in any conventional sense. A collector wanted to own the work. This man wanted to own the experience of creating it. He wanted to get inside the artist’s mind, to understand the act of making art from the inside out.
“Attcity,” she said. “The man Kerr described—the tears, the desperation, buying everything at once. Does that sound like a collector to you?”
He thought about it. "No. It sounds like someone who's desperate."
Kari looked at the road ahead, the asphalt shimmering in the heat, and turned that over in her mind. Desperate. A man who needed rather than wanted. Who trembled and wept and couldn't wait for paperwork.
Whatever was driving this killer, it wasn't patience.
It was need. The careful staging of the bodies, the weeks of preservation, the painstaking recreation of the artwork—all of that suggested control.
But the behavior in the galleries suggested the opposite: a man coming apart, unable to wait, unable to walk away empty-handed.
Two contradictory profiles. Unless they weren't contradictory at all. Unless the careful staging was the compensation, the desperate attempt to create permanence by someone who could feel permanence slipping away.
She didn’t have the answer yet. But the shape was getting clearer.