CHAPTER SEVEN
Photographs lied. Kari knew this from years of working crime scenes.
Not deliberately—a good crime scene photographer captured everything the lens could see, every angle and surface and spatial relationship.
But a photograph couldn’t capture how a place felt.
The silence of a clearing where something terrible had happened.
The way the air sat differently on the skin, as if violence left a residue that settled and stayed.
Marshall drove. Kari rode shotgun, Attcity and Soto in the back.
The drive from Albuquerque took ninety minutes, most of it on a two-lane road that climbed through pinon and juniper into the higher elevations where ponderosa gave way to mixed conifer.
Nobody talked much. Marshall checked her phone at stoplights.
Attcity stared out the window. Soto read something on a tablet, his reading glasses balanced on the tip of his nose.
The trailhead was already crowded when they arrived—a Forest Service truck, two county sheriff’s vehicles, an ambulance that wasn’t going to be needed. A ranger in a flat-brimmed hat met them at the gate and walked them in.
“Hiker named Gary Pollard found him around six this morning,” the ranger said as they climbed.
He was fifties, sun-weathered, with the careful pace of someone used to matching the speed of people less fit than himself.
“Pollard’s a regular up here—runs the side canyons for exercise, knows every trail.
He came around the bend into the amphitheater and saw the body and he knew right away it wasn’t natural.
He said the man looked like he was praying. ”
“Did Pollard touch anything?”
“He says no. Called 911, sat on a rock about fifty yards back, and waited. My team secured the perimeter when we arrived. We haven’t approached the body.
” The ranger glanced at Marshall. “We see a lot of things out here—lost hikers, dehydration cases, the occasional fall. We don’t see this.
I’ve been working these mountains for twenty-two years and I’ve never seen anything like this. ”
“What made you call the FBI specifically?” Kari asked.
“We’d been briefed. After the Tafoya discovery in the Valles Caldera, the regional supervisor sent around a bulletin—staged bodies in wilderness areas, contact the Albuquerque field office immediately. When Pollard described what he’d found, I knew.”
The trail was narrow and rocky, switchbacking up a slope thick with ponderosa pine before dropping into a side canyon that opened into a small natural amphitheater—a curved bowl of red rock and scrub oak, sheltered on three sides, open to the sky above.
A place that would have been sacred to someone, once. Maybe still was.
Raymond Honanie was in the center of the amphitheater.
Kari stopped at the perimeter the rangers had marked with tape and made herself look before moving closer. First the whole scene, then the details. Wide to narrow. The way she’d been trained, the way she always worked.
He was seated on a flat stone, cross-legged, his hands resting palm-up on his knees.
His head was bowed slightly forward, chin toward chest, in a posture that suggested meditation or prayer.
He was dressed in a white cotton shirt and dark trousers.
Around his neck, layered across his chest, and draped over his shoulders was the jewelry.
Kari counted seven pieces. Necklaces, mostly, each one a masterwork of Hopi overlay technique—oxidized silver with precise geometric cutouts revealing a polished layer beneath, turquoise stones set into bezels that followed the contours of the metalwork.
The pieces were arranged in a cascading pattern, largest at the top, smallest at the bottom, creating a visual progression that drew the eye from the throat downward.
She recognized the arrangement. She’d seen it in a catalog photograph at Elaine Kerr’s gallery—a famous image of Honanie wearing his own work for a magazine profile. Eight pieces in the photograph. Seven on the body.
“Attcity,” she said quietly. “How many major pieces did Honanie have in circulation?”
Attcity consulted his notebook. “According to gallery records, approximately forty works over twenty years. But his signature necklaces—the ones he considered his best—numbered around a dozen. He kept track of them. Knew where each one had ended up.”
“These are originals. Not reproductions.”
Attcity stepped closer, careful to stay on the marked path.
He looked at the jewelry for a long time.
“Yes. I can tell from the overlay work—Honanie’s cuts were distinctive.
Each piece had a slightly different depth ratio that was essentially a signature.
” He pointed to the largest necklace, a sweeping collar of silver and turquoise that covered Honanie’s upper chest. “That one sold at auction in Scottsdale two years ago for forty-two thousand dollars.”
The killer had acquired original Honanie pieces and placed them on the artist’s body.
Not reproductions, not imitations—the actual work, purchased at auction or from galleries, probably at significant cost. It was consistent with the Redhouse staging, where the killer had assembled regalia that matched the painting’s details.
But this went further. The killer wasn’t just recreating the artwork.
He was returning the artwork to the artist.
Kari stepped back from the body and looked at the amphitheater itself.
Each previous staging had been placed in a location that complemented the artist's work—Redhouse in a sun-dappled clearing that evoked his warm palette, Tafoya on volcanic rock that matched the elemental quality of her sculpture.
The pattern held here. The side-canyon was a natural gallery—curved walls of red stone, a flat stone floor, the open sky above serving as a ceiling that changed with the light.
Honanie's overlay technique used negative space the way architecture used windows: the cutouts in the silver revealed the layer beneath, and the interplay between surface and depth created the piece's visual power.
This rock gallery worked the same way. The curved walls framed the seated figure, the sky above provided the contrasting depth, and the result was a composition that felt curated rather than accidental.
The killer had scouted this location. He’d walked these mountains looking for a specific combination of features—the enclosed space, the flat stone, the sight lines—the way a gallery owner walks a building looking for the right wall.
That meant he’d spent time up here, possibly days, possibly on multiple trips.
It meant he’d carried or transported a body and seven pieces of museum-quality jewelry up a trail that had taken Kari twenty minutes to climb unencumbered. The logistics were staggering.
“Attcity,” she said. “Is there vehicle access to this canyon from another direction?”
Attcity checked the topographic map on his phone. “There’s a fire road that runs along the ridge to the north. It dead-ends about a quarter mile from here. A four-wheel-drive vehicle could get that close, and then it’s a steep downhill carry through the scrub oak.”
“That’s how he got the body in. Not from the trailhead—from above.”
“Which means tire tracks on the fire road. Or at least compression marks.”
“Get the ranger. Tell him we need that road preserved before anyone drives on it.”
Marshall was on her phone, coordinating with the ME’s office and the forensics team that was en route from Albuquerque. Soto was photographing the perimeter, working in careful concentric circles. Kari moved closer to the body, staying on the path the rangers had cleared.
The smell hit her at ten feet. Not decomposition—not yet, or not much. It was the same chemical preservation the ME had noted in the Tafoya case, a faint antiseptic sharpness beneath the pine and dust.
She crouched and looked at the body’s hands without touching them.
The skin was waxy, the color wrong—too even, lacking the mottling that came with lividity.
The killer’s preservation technique was working.
Honanie looked less like a corpse and more like a figure in a museum display, which was almost certainly the point.
But the hands told a different story than the previous victims. The positioning was precise—palms up, fingers relaxed, each hand placed symmetrically on the corresponding knee.
Yet the right hand was rotated slightly outward compared to the left.
A few degrees, barely noticeable, but enough that it disrupted the symmetry of the pose.
Kari looked at the jewelry arrangement again.
Seven pieces, cascading. But in the catalog photograph, the arrangement started with the widest necklace at the top and progressed to the narrowest at the bottom.
Here, the third and fourth necklaces were reversed—the narrower one above the wider.
Again, a small deviation. Invisible unless you knew what the original looked like.
Two errors. Small ones, the kind that a meticulous person would not make unless something was interfering with their attention to detail.
She stood and stepped back, letting the scene settle in her mind. Redhouse’s staging had been flawless—every detail of the painting reproduced with obsessive accuracy. Tafoya’s had been ambitious but precise. Honanie’s was close, very close, but imperfect.
A decline. Over four months, across three victims, it seemed like the quality of the killer’s work was degrading. Not dramatically—someone lacking a deep familiarity with the artists’ work would never notice. But Kari noticed, and the implication troubled her.
She found Marshall standing by the trailhead, phone against her ear, gesturing at a map one of the rangers was holding.
“I need to see the acquisition records for these specific pieces,” Kari said when Marshall finished her call. “Every necklace on that body was purchased somewhere. Auction house, gallery, private sale—there’s a paper trail. If we can find who bought them, we find our killer.”
“Soto’s already on it. He’s pulling auction records and gallery sales for Honanie’s major works going back five years.” Marshall looked at her. “You saw something else.”
“The staging is slipping. Redhouse was perfect. Tafoya was precise. Honanie has errors—small ones, but they’re there. The hand positioning is off by a few degrees. Two of the necklaces are in the wrong order.”
“Fatigue? Overconfidence?”
“Maybe. Or maybe something is happening to the killer that’s affecting his ability to execute.
The gallery owners described a man with tremoring hands who was increasingly agitated over time.
That’s consistent with what I’m seeing in the staging—someone whose precision is deteriorating.
” Kari paused, choosing her next words. “This man isn’t going to stop.
Whatever’s driving him, it’s getting worse.
And as his control degrades, his behavior is going to become more erratic and more dangerous. ”
Marshall absorbed this. “You think he’ll take another victim.”
“I think if we don’t find him soon, he’ll have no choice.
He’s trying to preserve something, and it’s slipping away from him.
Every staging is an attempt to hold onto whatever he’s losing.
When this one doesn’t work—when the memory or the feeling or whatever he’s chasing fades again—he’ll need another one. ”
The forensics team arrived, a white van pulling onto the shoulder behind the line of vehicles. Technicians in coveralls began unloading equipment—evidence cases, portable lighting, a body bag they wouldn’t need for hours yet.
Kari watched them work. Somewhere in a gallery archive or an auction house database was a name—the person who had spent tens of thousands of dollars acquiring Raymond Honanie’s jewelry, only to place it on the dead artist’s body in a mountain clearing.
A name attached to a tremor, to tears, to a need that was eating through whatever control had kept the killings precise.
She was close. And so was the killer—close to his next victim, close to the moment when deterioration overtook discipline and the careful staging gave way to something messier and harder to predict.
Every minute she spent here was a minute the killer was using. And somewhere—in a workshop, a studio, a room she hadn't found yet—the clock on another person's life was ticking away.