Deep House

The sixth installment in Thomas King's DreadfulWater mystery series opens with Frank Dodge, a former driver for Shield Industries, stealing a company van from the Sacramento plant and driving east toward the small town of Chinook. Dodge nearly died from COVID and lost his job during the pandemic. The virus left him with a damaged heart requiring daily medication. He has disconnected the van's GPS and plans to disappear within a week with enough money to start over. He makes a cryptic phone call confirming everything is on schedule.

In Chinook, Thumps DreadfulWater, a Cherokee photographer and former acting sheriff, wakes alone in his bungalow. His on-again, off-again partner, Claire Merchant, a former tribal chief, has adopted a toddler named Ivory and suggested Thumps spend time at his own place, calling his presence "disconcerting." His cat, Freeway, disappeared months ago, and he assumes she is dead. At Al's café, run by Alvera Couteau, regulars debate philosophy while Thumps eats breakfast and tries to ignore a creeping depression.

Sheriff Duke Hockney, recovering from prostate surgery, invites Thumps on a ride to a paint-testing facility near Deep House, a canyon on restricted tribal land. The facility, once owned by a family paint company called Main Street Paints, is now a subsidiary of Shield Industries. Hundreds of plywood panels stand in the weather to test paint durability. Bargain Hall, a paint-store owner in the nearby town of Glory, reports that her gate alarm registered one activation on Friday evening and four more early Sunday morning, though the facility closed eight months ago. Beside the trailer sits the burned-out shell of a Mercedes van with no driver in sight. Duke calls Shield's Sacramento office, where security chief Carl Mobley claims no van or driver is missing, yet the company requests the site be locked down and announces it is sending a liaison.

Days later, Cooley Small Elk, grandson of the elder Moses Blood, takes Thumps into Deep House at dawn to gather medicinal tea plants. In the canyon's deepest shelter, they find scattered paint panels among the rocks. Thumps photographs the scene, and a digital enlargement back at Langfield's camera store reveals what appears to be a human arm in one image. Duke organizes a recovery expedition and retrieves the body.

Three Shield executives arrive in Chinook in a stretch Porsche Cayenne: Martha Burke, the plant manager; Graham Chandler, the General Dynamics liaison; and Mobley, the head of security. Under Duke's pressure, they reluctantly acknowledge that former employee Frank Dodge took a van. Duke receives a photo of Dodge, which matches the recovered body. Beth Mooney, the county coroner, determines that Dodge died of a heart attack caused by his COVID-damaged heart and was likely dead before entering the canyon. A pill bottle in his pocket leads to a Sacramento pharmacist who reports that Dodge recently came into money and was planning to move to Mexico.

Meanwhile, Cisco Cruz, a dangerous but loyal figure who saved Thumps's and Claire's lives in a previous case, appears uninvited in Thumps's house. Cruz explains that his cousin, Rajan Garza, is Shield's head of research, a physicist specializing in bioengineering. Garza called Cruz in a panic about trouble at Shield, and they agreed to meet in Chinook, but she never arrived. Research at the bookstore of Archie Kousoulas, Thumps's persistent friend, confirms that Shield is a wholly owned subsidiary of the defense conglomerate General Dynamics, has received massive government funding, and recently had an unexplained fire at its Sacramento plant.

Garza surfaces at Thumps's house. She explains her work: a protocol called Helios that combines pigments, silicon crystals, and ceramics to turn any painted surface into a solar panel, converting nearly 40% of sunlight to energy. Shield began testing Helios on military drones for indefinite flight capability, then Burke and Chandler ordered Garza to surrender all her research. Shortly after, someone tried to run her down with a car. She fled Sacramento for Chinook. Thumps and Cruz conclude the hit-and-run was designed not to kill Garza but to scare her into running, making her look guilty.

Amid these events, Thumps's personal life shifts. Freeway returns through the cat door with four tiny kittens, one of which did not survive. Thumps buries the dead kitten with Freeway watching. Claire confronts Thumps about Harold Shipman, a serial killer from a previous case who died on the reservation from a broken leg and exposure. Claire believes Thumps went back and shot Shipman to ensure he could not escape. Beth Mooney separately reveals that the state medical examiner found a possible lead fragment at the break in Shipman's leg bone, though she considers the evidence inconclusive.

The case escalates when Chandler is found shot dead in his hotel suite, hit once in the chest and once in the head at close range, his own gun still holstered. Garza has vanished from the hotel where Cruz secretly stashed her, taking his car. Cruz turns himself in to Duke.

Thumps enlists Cooley and Stas Black Weasel, a local mechanic, to retrieve a silver panel from the canyon floor. Bargain examines it and determines it is not standard paint but five or six laminated layers of ceramic and glass, with the layers separating.

With Burke, Mobley, Cruz, and Duke assembled in the sheriff's office, Thumps delivers his reconstruction. Garza arranged for Dodge to steal the Helios test panels from a high-security vault at the plant and drive them to the test facility. To protect her work from Burke and Chandler, who had demanded she hand it over, Garza copied her research files and set fire to the computer complex. When Dodge died before she could meet him, Garza improvised: She drove the body and panels to Deep House, then returned and burned the van, accounting for the four Sunday gate notifications. Thumps then reveals the deeper truth: Helios does not work because the laminated layers delaminate over time. Burke and Chandler knew this but falsified test results, signing Garza's name to fraudulent reports to keep government funding flowing.

That night, Duke and Thumps respond to another gate alarm and find Garza in the facility trailer holding a gun Mobley gave her, the same weapon used to kill Chandler, already bearing her fingerprints. Mobley arrives with Burke and opens fire with a rifle, pinning everyone inside. Mobley is the true mastermind: He staged the hit-and-run to panic Garza, arranged for Dodge to steal the panels, and planned to take Helios for himself. When the protocol proved flawed, he shifted to eliminating witnesses, killing Chandler and planning to frame Garza with the murder weapon. Cruz, who claimed to be at a restaurant having dessert, intervenes with a long-range rifle shot that shatters Mobley's rear window and forces his surrender.

In the aftermath, Mobley is jailed and Burke is hospitalized. Garza is released for lack of charges. Cruz says goodbye at Al's, calling Thumps his only real friend, and heads to New Mexico. Thumps distributes the kittens among friends and keeps one alongside Freeway.

Thumps spends the following week photographing Deep House, finding unexpected beauty at the canyon rim. On Sunday, he takes Claire and Ivory on a picnic to a bluff overlooking the site where Shipman died. Claire presses him once more, asking whether he shot Shipman. That night, they make love for the first time in months. Thumps rises before dawn to feed Ivory her bottle, rocks her back to sleep, and starts the coffee, settling into a quiet scene of domestic possibility.