“Do you mean the back room?” asked Two Moons. “The one with all those vertical racks?”

Summer nodded.

The detectives had walked right in. The door had been left open. Katz realized he hadn’t even noticed the lock. “Where would we find an inventory list?”

“On Larry’s home computer,” said Summer. “Also, I keep a written log for backup. I’m real good at organizing. That’s why Larry likes me.”

The state of her room said otherwise, but who knew.

Then Katz thought: She hadn’t even bothered to clean up before bringing Kyle Morales back. Maybe her plans had been different from Morales’s.

He asked her about the dancer. Her story matched Morales’s.

Katz said, “So you and Kyle were headed back here.”

Summer said, “He was taking me home.” She tossed her hair and blushed. “That was it. I wasn’t going to see him again.”

“Bad date?”

“Boring. He’s not bright.”

Metallic edge to her voice. This one could be tough.

“The artist who made the hammer-Miles D’Angelo,” said Katz. “What can you tell us about him?”

“Miles? He’s eighty-three and lives in Tuscany.”

“Mr. Olafson have any conflict with him?”

“With Miles?” Summer smirked. “He’s the gentlest man alive. He loved Larry.”

Two Moons said, “We’ll need a look at your log.”

“Sure,” said Summer. “It’s back in the gallery. In Larry’s desk.”

The detectives hadn’t seen anything like that.

They returned to Olafson Southwest, where the girl pointed to the drawer. Darrel gloved up and slid it open.

Papers but no log.

“It’s not there,” said Summer Riley. “It’s supposed to be there.”

3

By 3:10, Katz was at the wheel of the Crown Victoria with Two Moons silent in the passenger seat. They were headed north up Bishop’s Lodge Road toward Tesuque, a flat and tree-shrouded village, an odd mix of horse estates and mobile homes, some nice-view houses of all sizes studding the hills that rimmed the town. The population was movie stars and financial types playing absentee rancher, artists and sculptors and horse people, the blue-collar Hispanics and Indians who’d been Tesuque’s original residents. And then there were a few truly weird loners who skulked into the Tesuque Market to buy organic veggies and beer, only to disappear for weeks.

The kind of mix Katz would’ve thought volatile, but like the rest of Santa Fe, Tesuque stayed pretty calm.

The sky was jammed with stars-awash in diamond light-and the air smelled of juniper and piñon and horse manure. Lawrence Olafson’s place was on a narrow dirt road well beyond the town limits, at the far, high end of the Los Caminitos tract, a posh neighborhood of big, pretty adobe dream houses on five-to-fifteen-acre lots.

No streetlights since they’d left the Plaza, and out here the darkness was a thick, tangible fudge. Even with high beams, the address was easy to miss: discreet copper numerals on a single stone post. Katz overshot, backed up, continued up the sloping drive, slick with patches of frozen water. Five hundred feet of dirt road swooped through a snow-topped piñon corridor. There was no sign of the house until the third turn, but when you saw it, you saw it.

Three stories of rounded angles, free-form walls, and what looked to be a half dozen open patios along with an equal number of covered portales. Pale and monumental against a mountain backdrop, lit subtly by the moon and the stars and low-wattage lighting, it was ringed by a sea of native grass and globules of cactus, dwarf spruce, and leafless aspen branches that shivered in the wind.

For all its size, the place was a harmonious fit with the environment, rising out of sand and rock and scrub like a natural formation.

Officer Debbie Santana’s cruiser sat in front of the quadruple garage that formed the house’s lowest level. It was parked perpendicular, blocking two and a half garage doors. Katz left the unmarked several yards away, and he and Two Moons got out and stepped onto crunchy gravel.

A climb up twenty stone steps took them past a river of shrubs to massive double doors hewn from wood that looked ancient. Nailhead borders, hardware of hand-hammered iron. Above the door a carved plank: HAVEN.

Darrel pushed at the door, and they stepped into an entry hall bigger than Katz’s entire apartment. Flagstone floors, twenty-foot ceilings, some kind of free-form glass chandelier that he figured might be a Chihuly, peach-blush walls of diamond plaster, gorgeous art, gorgeous furniture.

Beyond the entry was a step-down great room with an even higher ceiling and walls that were mostly glass. Officer Santana sat on a tapestry sofa next to Sammy Reed. Reed had gone from weepy to numb.

Darrel said, “Nice place. Let’s tear it apart.”

They spent the next three hours going over six thousand square feet. Learning plenty about Olafson, but nothing that told them a thing about the murder.

A Jaguar sedan, green and sleek, resided in the garage, along with an old white Austin Healey and a red Alfa Romeo GTV. Olafson’s Land Rover had been ID’d in the driveway of the gallery.

They pawed through closets full of expensive clothes, mostly with New York labels. Bankbooks and brokerage accounts said Olafson was more than solvent. Gay and straight porno was stacked neatly in a locked drawer of the media room. Plenty of bookshelves in the leather-walled study, but very few books-mostly coffee-table numbers on art and decorating, and biographies of royals. The borzoi, huge and fleecy white, slept through it all.

Art was everywhere, too much to take in during a single visit, but one painting in the great room caught Katz’s eye: two naked children dancing around a maypole. The pastel tints were of a mellow summer. The kids were around three and five, with fluffy yellow hair, dimpled buttocks, and cherub faces. Given the sappy theme, it could’ve been poster art, but the painter was skillful enough to elevate the image. Katz decided he liked it and checked the signature. Some guy named Michael Weems.

Two Moons said, “Think we should look for kiddie porn?”

That took Katz by surprise, shook him a bit. He checked his partner’s face for irony.

“Eye of the beholder,” said Two Moons, and he headed for Olafson’s desktop computer.

The PC switched on, but the opening screen demanded a password and the detectives didn’t even try.

Bobby Boatwright, a sex-crimes guy on the two to eight-thirty shift, was as good with machines as any techno-head. Let him have a go at it before they bundled it off to the state police forensic lab on Highway 14.

They unplugged the computer and took it along with the printer and battery pack into the entry hall. Then back to the private world of Lawrence Olafson.

Under the four-poster in the regal bedroom, they found a tooled-leather scrapbook. Inside were clipped articles about Olafson.

“What?” said Darrel. “He lulled himself to sleep with ego trips?”

They paged through the album. Most were puff pieces from art magazines, describing the dealer’s latest auction, acquisition, or price-setting sale. But also there were negative pieces: whiffs of deals gone sour, questions about authenticity. Why Olafson kept those was anyone’s guess.

Under the scrapbook was another volume, smaller, bound in cheap green grass cloth. That one held clippings about ForestHaven, including the News-Press story about the small-time ranchers sued by the group.

Bart Skaggs, sixty-eight, and his wife, Emma, sixty-four, had been targeted specifically because they struggled financially to raise five hundred head of beef cattle to market weight, using their federal grazing rights in Carson Forest as collateral against bank loans for feed and stock and equipment. Each year, the interest ate up $31,000 of their $78,000 gross income, but until ForestHaven brought the Skaggses to court using the Endangered Species Act, they’d managed to scrape by.