CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Kari had interviewed killers who knew exactly what they’d done and felt nothing. She’d interviewed killers who didn’t remember and were horrified when told. She’d never interviewed one who remembered and yet didn’t understand.
Marshall arranged the interview for a Tuesday afternoon at the Ashford estate, where the court-appointed caregiver reported that Ashford had been having a run of lucid days.
His attorney—a criminal defense specialist from Albuquerque named Weiss—was present, along with a forensic psychiatrist Marshall had brought to evaluate Ashford’s competency in real time.
The psychiatrist, Dr. Lena Flores, would observe from a side room through a video feed and could halt the interview if Ashford’s mental state deteriorated below a threshold she’d defined in advance.
Kari sat across from Ashford in his own living room, in one of the leather chairs she’d sat in during the search.
The Steinway still had dust on its lid. Ashford was dressed in pressed khakis and a blue oxford shirt, his silver hair combed, his hands folded in his lap.
He looked like a man receiving a visitor for afternoon tea.
The tremor was visible in his fingers when he unfolded them, a fine oscillation that he seemed unaware of.
“Mr. Ashford, do you know why I’m here?”
“You’re the detective.” He said it with mild interest, the way someone might identify a species of bird. “You were here before. With the other woman. The one with the badge.”
“That’s right. I’d like to ask you some questions about your art collection.”
“Of course.” He brightened. “Would you like to see the gallery? I’ve made some recent acquisitions that I’m very proud of.”
"The gallery is being processed by our forensic team right now. But I'd like to talk about some of the artists whose work you've collected. Specifically, Leonard Redhouse, Linda Tafoya, and Raymond Honanie."
At the mention of the names, Ashford’s expression underwent a change that Kari watched with close attention. No alarm, no guilt—instead a flickering between recognition and confusion, as if the names opened doors in his mind that led to rooms he could no longer navigate.
“Leonard,” he said slowly. “Yes. The dancer. I have his dancer. The one with the red—the ceremonial...” He trailed off, his eyes losing focus for a moment before sharpening again.
“Leonard understood something about movement that most painters miss entirely. The dancer isn’t frozen.
He’s between moments. That’s what makes it extraordinary. ”
“When was the last time you saw Leonard Redhouse?”
“I see him every day.” Ashford smiled. “In the painting. He’s there, in the brushstrokes. If you look long enough, you can feel him moving through the paint.”
“I mean Leonard Redhouse the person. The man who created the paintings.”
Ashford's brow furrowed. The tremor in his hands increased slightly. "Leonard is... I spoke with him at his studio. He showed me how he mixes the pigments. The red comes from—it's a mineral, I can't remember the name. He grinds it himself." He paused. "That was recently. Wasn't it?"
“Mr. Ashford, Leonard Redhouse is dead.”
“No.” He said it simply, without distress. “No, that’s not right. I was just with him. We talked about the dancer.”
Weiss, the attorney, shifted in his chair but didn’t intervene. Dr. Flores, watching from the side room, sent a text to Marshall’s phone: Competent to continue. Confabulation present but he’s tracking the conversation.
Kari changed approach. Direct confrontation wasn’t going to produce clarity—Ashford’s disease had woven his memories into a fabric where past and present bled together, where conversations from months ago felt like yesterday and yesterday was unreachable.
She needed to work within his frame, not against it.
“Tell me about the last time you were with Leonard. What did you talk about?”
Ashford relaxed. This was comfortable territory—discussing art, discussing artists.
“He was explaining the dancer’s hands. The positioning.
In the ceremony, the hands have specific meanings—each gesture carries intention.
Leonard spent years studying the movements before he painted them.
He said the painting wasn’t a representation. It was a translation.”
“And you wanted to understand that translation.”
“I needed to. The painting is a window, but I needed it to be a door. Do you understand? A window lets you see. A door lets you enter. I needed to enter the painting, to feel what Leonard felt when he created it. Because if I could carry that feeling—that specific creative memory—then it would become mine. And the things that are mine, truly mine, the disease can’t take. ”
He spoke with absolute conviction. Not the fervor of a zealot, but the calm certainty of a man explaining how gravity works.
The delusional system that Sandoval had described wasn’t a set of beliefs Ashford held.
It was the architecture of his reality, as fundamental to him as the floor beneath his feet.
“Did Leonard help you enter the painting?”
“He tried. He was generous. But in the end, the painting wasn’t enough.
A painting is still a window. Even when you stand in front of it for hours, even when you feel the painter’s presence in the brushstrokes, you’re still on the outside.
” Ashford’s voice dropped. “I needed something more. Something... closer.”
“What did you do?”
“I brought him to the place where the painting lives. The real place—the clearing, the light through the pines. I dressed him the way the dancer is dressed. I put his hands in the right positions, the ones he’d shown me.
And then he was the painting. Not a translation anymore.
The original. Leonard and the dancer and the painting, all one thing, all permanent.
” Ashford’s eyes were bright and clear and utterly without comprehension of what he was describing.
“He’s there now. In the clearing. Anyone who finds him will see what I see—the dancer, alive, forever. ”
Kari’s pen had stopped moving on her notepad. Weiss was rigid in his chair. Marshall, standing by the doorway, had her phone pressed to her ear but wasn’t speaking into it.
“And Linda?” Kari said, keeping her voice level. “Did you do the same for Linda?”
“Linda’s transformation. Yes. The woman becoming the bird. She sculpted it in clay, but clay breaks. What I did was permanent. She’s in the stone now, part of the mountain. She’ll be there when the clay is dust.”
“And Raymond?”
“Raymond’s prayers.” Ashford’s face softened. “Each cut in the silver is a prayer. He told me that. I put the prayers back on him—all of them, every piece I could find. He’s wearing his own devotion. When I forget everything else, I’ll remember that.”
He stopped. The brightness in his eyes dimmed. He looked down at his tremoring hands, then at Kari, then at Weiss, the certainty draining from his face and leaving bewilderment in its place.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “What were we discussing?”
Weiss stood. “I think that’s enough for today.”
Dr. Flores concurred—a text to Marshall that read: Deteriorating. Recommend stopping. Kari agreed. She had what she needed, and continuing would produce nothing that the recording hadn’t already captured.
She stepped outside while Weiss spoke with his client. The afternoon sun was low, the Sangre de Cristos casting long purple shadows across the foothills. Marshall followed her out.
“That’s a confession,” Marshall said.
“From a man who may not be competent to stand trial.”
“That’s for a judge to decide. What we have now is sufficient to charge.
Forensics came back this morning—fibers from the gallery’s back room match fibers found on Redhouse’s clothing.
Soil samples from Ashford’s vehicle match the Bandelier site.
And Soto found a workshop in an outbuilding behind the main house—a converted stable with a commercial refrigeration unit, a work table, and trace amounts of midazolam in a storage cabinet. ”
“The preservation facility.”
“Everything. The refrigeration explains the delayed decomposition. The midazolam explains the sedation. And the workshop has DNA from all three victims.” Marshall paused.
“There’s also a vehicle—an SUV with a modified cargo area, parked in a garage behind the stable.
Soto found soil samples in the cargo bed matching both the Bandelier and Jemez sites.
And Ashford’s financial records show payments to a personal assistant who left his employment about two months ago—before Sandoval was hired.
We’re tracking him down. The physical logistics of transporting preserved bodies to remote locations would have required help, and this assistant appears to have provided it. ”
“Does Ashford know the assistant helped?”
“Hard to say. On his bad days, he doesn’t remember the murders.
On his good days, he describes them as if he acted alone.
The assistant may have been a willing participant or someone Ashford manipulated during lucid periods.
Either way, we need to find him.” Marshall paused.
“It’s done, Kari. The art murders case is closed. ”
Kari looked at the house—the adobe walls warm in the low light, the windows dark, the estate quiet.
Somewhere inside, Gregory Ashford was sitting in his leather chair, his hands trembling, his mind dissolving, trying to remember a conversation that had already slipped away from him.
A man who had killed three people in the sincere belief that he was saving them, transforming them from mortal artists into permanent embodiments of their own best work.
He would be arrested. He would be evaluated. A forensic psychiatrist would determine whether he understood the charges and could participate in his own defense. If yes, a trial. If no, a secure psychiatric facility for however many years the Alzheimer’s left him, which wouldn’t be many.
Justice, of a kind. Kari had learned to accept the kinds that were available rather than mourning the kinds that weren’t.
She stood by the SUV for a moment before making the call.
Ashford had killed three people because he was losing his mind and believed—with the absolute certainty of a man whose reality was dissolving—that he could preserve himself by becoming one with the art he loved.
Monstrous. Tragic. And in a way that Kari could feel but not yet articulate, connected to what she was about to do next.
Because the people who’d killed her mother had done it for the opposite reason.
Not to preserve something beautiful, but to protect something profitable.
Not out of desperate love, but out of calculated interest. Ashford’s crime was a kind of madness.
Devco’s was a kind of sanity—the cold, rational decision that a human life was worth less than what lay beneath the ground she’d walked on.
Both kinds of killing ended the same way. A person gone. A family broken. A silence where a voice had been.
“I need to make a call,” she said.
She walked to her car and dialed Daniels. He answered on the first ring.
“It’s done,” she said. “Ashford confessed. Forensics confirm. Marshall’s closing the case.”
“How fast can you get here?”
“Where’s here?”
“The reservation. Helen’s house. We’re planning the next move and we need Marshall on board.” A pause. “We need you, too. All of you. This is the endgame, Kari.”
She looked at the mountains, dark against a sky that was fading from blue to violet.
The art murders were over. Three families would get answers, imperfect and terrible as those answers were.
Three artists would be remembered for their work, not for how they died—if the world was fair, which it usually wasn’t, but sometimes could be pushed in that direction.
Now the other case. The older one. The one that had been running beneath everything since before Kari had become a detective, since before she’d understood what her mother had been doing all those years, piecing together a conspiracy in the margins of her own life.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” she said. “And I’ll bring Marshall.”