CHAPTER TWELVE
James’s colleague at Canyon State worked fast.
Paul had expected days. Dr. Alan Peshlakai was a computer science professor who ran a forensic data recovery business out of a converted garage behind his house in Flagstaff.
James had called him on the drive back from Farmington, and by the time they’d delivered the laptop at nine that evening, Peshlakai had already cleared his morning schedule.
Paul picked up the laptop at two the following afternoon.
The password had been a twelve-character alphanumeric string that Peshlakai cracked with a dictionary attack modified by Whitmore’s personal data—birthday, college mascot, girlfriend’s name.
Took him four hours. He’d imaged the drive first, working from the copy, leaving the original untouched for chain-of-custody purposes. The man was thorough.
Paul drove to the house where Ruth was staying and sat down at the kitchen table with James.
Ruth was out—Ben's release on bail had come through that morning, and she'd gone to meet him at the courthouse in Window Rock with a bag of clean clothes and, James suspected, enough food to feed a family of six.
The house was quiet for the first time in days.
The laptop’s contents were organized with the care of a man who knew he might need someone else to make sense of them. Whitmore had created a folder structure that read like an evidence file: dated entries, labeled photographs, spreadsheets, and a series of documents he’d titled simply “Record.”
Paul opened the first Record file. It was dated seven months ago.
Whitmore wrote the way he probably spoke—direct, technical, without embellishment.
He described being assigned to a new survey area in the Four Corners region by his supervisor at Ridgeline Resources.
The area was on land owned by a holding company his supervisor identified only as “the client.” The survey parameters were unusual: Whitmore was instructed to focus on subsurface lithium indicators—brine concentrations, clay mineral signatures, pegmatite formations—rather than the broader geological assessment that was standard for the firm’s contracts.
He hadn’t thought much of it. Lithium exploration was booming. Half the geology firms in the Southwest had pivoted to it as demand for battery materials drove prices up. But as the weeks went on, Whitmore noticed irregularities.
The second Record file, dated five months ago, described his growing concerns.
Core samples were being collected on a schedule that didn’t match Ridgeline’s reported project timeline.
Equipment was being moved onto the survey site at night.
And the land itself—when Whitmore checked the property records—was adjacent to the Navajo reservation, in an area where mineral rights were contested.
Paul read that paragraph twice. Adjacent to the reservation.
Contested mineral rights. This was the same land Devco Holdings had been acquiring through shell companies for two decades—the land Anna had mapped, the land Ben had trespassed onto, the land beneath which sat a lithium deposit worth twenty billion dollars.
The third Record was longer. Whitmore had started photographing the operation covertly—equipment, vehicles, license plates, faces.
He’d taken soil and rock samples independently and sent them to a lab in Denver under his own name, paying out of pocket.
The results confirmed what he’d suspected: the subsurface lithium concentrations were extraordinary.
Not just commercially viable but among the richest deposits ever identified in North America.
He’d also found something else. Test holes that predated Ridgeline’s involvement by years—older bore sites, partially concealed, that showed someone had been exploring this deposit long before the current survey.
The geological data from these older sites had been removed from public records.
Whitmore had found traces of it only because one of the original survey reports had been improperly archived in a state database that nobody at Ridgeline knew existed.
“They’ve known about this deposit for at least fifteen years,” James said, reading over Paul’s shoulder. “Probably longer. The old test holes match the timeline Anna documented.”
Paul opened the folder of photographs. Dozens of images, geotagged and timestamped, showing heavy equipment operating on the survey site: drilling rigs, earth movers, storage containers.
Several showed men in hard hats and high-visibility vests—workers, not security—going about their business with the routine efficiency of people who’d been at this for a while.
One photograph showed a row of core sample boxes stacked beside a trailer, each box labeled with depth and grid coordinates.
“These are active extraction preparations,” Paul said. “Not exploration. They’ve moved past the survey phase into pre-production work. They’re getting ready to mine.”
“Which is exactly what Ben saw when they caught him on the property.” James pulled up a spreadsheet Whitmore had compiled—grid coordinates cross-referenced with sample results, each cell color-coded by lithium concentration.
The highest concentrations formed a dense cluster that, when Paul overlaid the coordinates on a map, sat squarely beneath reservation land.
“The richest part of the deposit is still on tribal land. They can mine the edges from their own property, but the core—the part that makes this worth billions instead of millions—requires access they don’t have. ”
The final Record file was dated three weeks before Whitmore’s death. His tone had changed. The technical clarity was still there, but beneath it Paul could hear fear pressing against the words.
Whitmore described a meeting with his supervisor in which he’d raised concerns about the project’s legality—specifically, whether the survey work was being conducted with proper permits and whether the land ownership was legitimate.
The supervisor had told him to focus on his job and stop asking questions.
Two days later, Whitmore arrived at the survey site to find that his access badge no longer worked.
A security guard he’d never seen before told him the site was temporarily closed for “environmental review.”
He’d been frozen out. But he still had his samples, his photographs, and his records. And he’d started looking for someone outside the company to tell.
The last entry was a single paragraph:
Contacted a journalist today. Won’t say who or where, not in writing.
She seemed interested but careful. I told her I have physical evidence—samples, photos, documents—showing illegal mineral extraction on contested land near the Navajo reservation.
She said she’d need to verify independently before her paper would touch it.
I gave her enough to start. If something happens to me, the rest is here.
This laptop is the only copy. Amy doesn’t know about any of this and I want to keep it that way. She’s safe as long as she doesn’t know.
Paul closed the laptop and sat back. The kitchen was silent except for the refrigerator’s hum and the faint creak of the house settling in the afternoon heat.
“He was protecting her,” James said quietly. “The way Anna tried to protect us.”
It was the first time James had drawn the parallel aloud, and Paul let it sit.
Anna Chee had spent years building a case against the same conspiracy, documenting the same pattern of death and deception, and she'd kept her family at a distance because she believed ignorance was a form of safety.
It hadn't saved her. It wouldn't have saved Whitmore's girlfriend either if Devco had known about the laptop.
“The journalist,” Paul said. “He contacted someone. A woman, based on the pronoun. And his timeline—three weeks before he died—matches when I was trying to place the story. If it’s the same journalist...”
“Sandra Reyes.”
“If Whitmore contacted Reyes independently, and Devco found out about it the same way they found out about our approach—through surveillance or a source at the paper—then Whitmore’s death and Ben’s frame-up aren’t just retaliation against us.
They’re part of a broader cleanup. Devco is eliminating everyone who’s getting close, from every direction, simultaneously. ”
James took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt, a habit he defaulted to when his hands needed something to do.
“So what do we have now, total? Anna’s research.
The financial documentation. Ben’s testimony.
And Whitmore’s independent geological confirmation with photographs, samples, and a contemporaneous written record. ”
“We have a case,” Paul said. “Not a perfect one. The chain of custody on this laptop is messy—Trujillo gave it to us voluntarily, but we’re not law enforcement in any capacity that a court would recognize for this particular matter.
The core samples Whitmore sent to the Denver lab are stronger—independent analysis, professional chain of custody, verifiable results. ”
“But.”
“But none of it changes the fundamental problem. We still don’t have proof that Devco killed anyone.
We have proof they’re mining illegally. We have proof the deposit exists.
We have a financial network that connects to Ben’s frame-up.
What we don’t have is a body on a table with Devco’s fingerprints on it.
” Paul looked at the closed laptop. “We need the physical site. We need to get onto that land, document the active operation, collect samples that we control from start to finish, and if possible, find evidence that connects Devco’s security apparatus to the murders. ”
“Including Anna’s.”
“Including Anna’s.”
They sat with that for a while. Outside, the sun was dropping toward the western horizon, the light going gold and long through the kitchen window. A truck passed on the road, its engine fading into the distance.
“Ben’s out,” James said. “Nadine Begaye got him bail this morning. Ankle monitor, travel restrictions, the usual conditions. He’ll be here by tonight.”
“Good. We’re going to need him.”
“For what?”
Paul looked at James across the table, covered in printouts and legal pads, and the closed laptop that held a dead man's last testament. "For what comes next."