“If we go, and Devco has people watching her—”
“Then we’d better get there first.”
Paul pocketed his phone and gathered the printouts.James stood and stretched, his back popping the way it always did, and went to tell Ruth they were leaving.
Paul could hear them in the back room—James’s low voice, Ruth’s quieter one.He couldn’t make out the words.He didn’t need to.It was the sound of a man telling his mother-in-law he’d be back soon, and a woman deciding whether she believed him.
The front door was open, the late afternoon sun cutting a bright rectangle across the kitchen floor.Paul stepped through it and walked toward his car, running through the drive to Farmington in his head—highways, timing, what to say to a grieving woman who might be holding the evidence that could unravel everything.
Behind him, the loom started up again.
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?”
