CHAPTER NINE
The impulse to own art was something Kari had grown up without.
She appreciated it—she’d grown up surrounded by it, in a culture where making things was as fundamental as breathing.
Her grandmother wove rugs that could hang in any museum in the world, but Ruth would have been baffled by the suggestion that they should.
The rugs were for use. They kept people warm.
The fact that they were beautiful was a consequence of care, not an intention toward display.
But the people Kari was about to interview inhabited a different world. A world where beauty was currency and possession was the point.
Soto had compiled a list of collectors who’d purchased work from all three victims—a smaller overlap than Kari had expected.
Redhouse, Tafoya, and Honanie worked in different media, different traditions, different price ranges.
The collectors who moved between all three were a specific type: people who collected Indigenous art as a category, not people who’d fallen in love with a particular painter or jeweler.
There were eleven names on the list. Kari started with the three who lived in Santa Fe and could be interviewed in person.
The first was a retired cardiologist named Arthur Halpern who lived in a sprawling adobe compound in the foothills east of town.
He met Kari and Attcity at the door in paint-stained jeans and a flannel shirt, and led them through a house where Indigenous artwork hung on every wall and filled every shelf and occupied every horizontal surface.
He was earnest, voluble, and so eager to discuss the victims’ work that Kari had to interrupt him twice to redirect the conversation toward her actual questions.
No, he hadn’t noticed anyone unusual at galleries or Indian Market.
No, he hadn’t been contacted by anyone asking about the artists’ creative processes.
Yes, he’d purchased pieces from all three—he showed them, proudly, with detailed provenance for each.
His alibi for the relevant dates was solid: he’d been in Boston for a medical conference during Redhouse’s disappearance, and his credit card records confirmed it.
Kari crossed him off mentally before they'd left his driveway.
Wrong profile entirely. Halpern collected the way some people collected stamps—comprehensively, organizationally, with a focus on cataloging and displaying.
He loved having a collection. He showed polite enthusiasm for each piece and had even less interest in the artists behind them.
The second collector was less forthcoming.
Miranda Solis, a real estate developer, spoke to them through the screen door of her Canyon Road townhouse and made it clear that she considered the interview an imposition.
She’d purchased one piece from each artist—modest acquisitions by the standards of the market—and described them as “investments” without apparent irony.
She’d heard about the murders from a gallery owner and expressed perfunctory sympathy.
She had nothing useful to offer and Kari didn’t press.
The third interview changed everything.
Elliott Sheffield’s gallery occupied a two-story building on a side street off the Plaza—not the tourist stretch of Canyon Road but the quieter, more expensive block where the major dealers operated.
A location that communicated seriousness to people who knew Santa Fe.
The sign above the door said simply SHEFFIELD in dark bronze lettering.
No first name. No description of what was inside.
Yazzi held the door and they entered a space that was deliberately spare—white walls, polished concrete floor, halogen lighting that turned each piece of art into the focal point of its own small world.
The current exhibition was Pueblo pottery, a dozen pieces arranged on white pedestals with enough space between them that each one demanded individual attention.
The room smelled like beeswax and good coffee.
A man emerged from a back office. Tall, mid-fifties, silver hair swept back from a tanned face, wearing a charcoal blazer over a white shirt with no tie. His handshake was warm and his eye contact was direct.
“Detective Blackhorse. Agent Attcity. I’ve been expecting you.” Sheffield gestured toward a pair of leather chairs near the back of the gallery. “I’m surprised it took this long, frankly. I was close to all three of them.”
“Close how?” Kari asked, sitting.
“Professional and personal. I represented Leonard for fifteen years. Sold more of his work than any other gallery in the Southwest. Linda and I had a consignment arrangement—she showed here twice a year, always sold out. Raymond’s relationship was newer, maybe five years, but his overlay work was the best I’d ever handled.
Forty-two-thousand-dollar sale at auction last year.
” Sheffield’s face tightened. “I loved their work. And I liked them as people. All three of them.”
“You used the past tense for Honanie.”
Sheffield looked at her steadily. “I’m a realist, Detective. Raymond’s been missing for two weeks. Given what happened to Leonard and Linda, I don’t think he’s on vacation.”
He was sharp. Kari adjusted her approach—less open-ended, more direct.
“In the months before the disappearances, did you notice anyone in the collecting community behaving unusually? New buyers, aggressive offers, anyone paying more attention than normal to the artists themselves rather than the work?”
Sheffield leaned back in his chair. His hands rested on his knees, and Kari noticed that he didn’t fidget—a man who’d spent decades sitting across from wealthy people and reading them.
“The Indigenous art market is small at the top,” he said.
“Maybe forty or fifty serious collectors nationally. People who buy six-figure pieces, who show up at every Indian Market, who fly to Scottsdale for the auctions. I know most of them personally. And yes, in the past year or so, there’s been a new presence.
Someone buying aggressively who wasn’t on anyone’s radar before. ”
“Do you have a name?”
“I have a name that was given to me by two different auction houses, but I’ve never met the man personally. Gregory Ashford."
"How did the auction houses give you his name? I'd have thought buyer information was confidential."
"It is, formally. But the Indigenous art world is small enough that information moves sideways.
Auction houses rely on gallerists like me to consign work and bring in buyers.
In return, when someone new starts bidding aggressively, they'll drop a name—not on the record, but over drinks, at previews.
A courtesy call. 'Someone's moving into your territory, thought you'd want to know.
' That's how I heard the name. Twice, from two different houses. "
"What can you tell us about him?" Kari asked.
"He's a retired pharmaceutical executive, lives outside Santa Fe somewhere. He started buying Indigenous art about two years ago and he’s been escalating—both the volume and the price points. He bought a Redhouse painting at Sotheby’s last spring for a hundred and ten thousand.
That’s thirty percent above what I’d have valued it.
And at the Scottsdale auction, he bought three Honanie pieces in a single lot. ”
Kari kept her face neutral. “Three pieces.”
“At prices that made no commercial sense. He was overbidding by significant margins, which tells me he wasn’t buying for investment. He wanted the objects themselves, and he was willing to pay whatever it took to get them.”
“Have any of the artists mentioned him?”
Sheffield looked at the gallery wall, then back at Kari.
“Linda did. About six months before she disappeared. She called me and said someone had approached her directly—not through a gallery, not through her studio, but at a coffee shop in Espanola where she went most mornings. He wanted to buy her entire body of work. Everything. Not just what was available on the market—he wanted the pieces in her personal collection, the ones she’d never intended to sell. Works she considered sacred.”
“What did she say to him?”
“She said no. She was angry about it, actually. She told me the man seemed desperate, that he kept raising his offer and getting more agitated when she wouldn’t agree. She described it as...” Sheffield paused, searching for the word. “Unsettling.”
“Did she describe the man physically?”
“Older. White. Well-dressed. She said his hands shook.”
The same description. The same tremor. Kari exchanged a glance with Attcity, who was writing in his notebook with the focused concentration of someone who understood what he was recording.
“I should have paid more attention,” Sheffield said.
His voice had dropped. The composure was still there—the posture, the steady gaze—but behind it, the grief he’d been managing had moved closer to the surface.
“When Leonard disappeared, I thought of Ashford. I even mentioned it to the FBI agents who interviewed me. But they seemed more interested in Leonard’s personal life, his finances, whether he had enemies. I don’t think they followed up.”
Kari checked the interview transcripts later and confirmed it. Sheffield had mentioned Ashford by name in his first FBI interview. The lead had been noted but not pursued—a single line in a field report, categorized under “collector activity” and never assigned for follow-up.
Marshall’s team hadn’t missed the name. They’d deprioritized it.
A wealthy collector overbidding at auctions wasn’t suspicious behavior in a world where wealthy collectors overbid at auctions all the time.
Without the context Kari had gathered—the gallery visits, the personal questions, the tears, the tremor, the desperation that escalated over months—Ashford was just another rich man buying art.
With that context, he was something else entirely.
“I need everything you have on Ashford,” Kari told Sheffield. “Auction records, gallery purchases, any correspondence, any secondhand information from other dealers. And I need the names of anyone else who’s had direct contact with him.”
“I’ll have it for you by tomorrow.” Sheffield stood, and for a moment the gallery owner’s polish fell away and Kari saw the man underneath—tired, grieving, angry at himself for not connecting the dots sooner. “Find him, Detective. Before he does this to someone else.”
Outside, the afternoon sun was low enough to cast long shadows down the side street. Attcity walked beside her in silence until they reached the car.
“Ashford’s name was in the file the whole time,” he said.
“Buried in a paragraph that nobody read twice.”
“Marshall’s going to be upset.”
"Marshall's going to run his name through every database we have access to.
And then we're going to find out where Gregory Ashford lives and what's inside his house.
" Kari got in the car and pulled the door shut.
"Call Soto. Tell him I need a full background on Gregory Ashford—real estate, financials, and medical records, if he can get them. Everything."
Attcity was on the phone before she’d started the engine.