He didn’t saunter in my office with a pout on his lips. He lives in New Mexico. I wasn’t nursing my second breakfast whiskey of the day. Counter to the apocryphal advice credited to Hemingway, I tend to not “write drunk, edit sober,” but instead prefer bombarding my nervous system with a steady cannonade of caffeine. Yet despite these minor details, the proposal former filmmaker, restaurant owner, and Texas correspondent for The Economist David E. Wynne emailed me last November offered a tantalizingly noirish mystery: help find neo-surrealist artist Mark W. Spencer’s missing painting, Border Storm.

Of course I relished the opportunity to play Sam Spade in yoga pants. Wynne put me in touch with Spencer to collect the facts, and I began drawing up a mental map resembling the Charlie Day meme, albeit less organized.

Spencer first created Border Storm as a lithograph in 1978. This version recently appeared in the Off-Center: New Mexico Art, 1970-2000 survey at New Mexico Museum of Art’s Vladem Contemporary annex, which closed on May 18. The lithograph features a migrant family fleeing from an eagle-faced tornado. Along the way, the titular weather phenom has picked up cattle, a nude woman, Jesus with his crown of thorns, other families, a pig, some snakes, and plenty more passengers. He conceived of the piece while visiting a girlfriend’s family home in Clint.

“I’ve always been very involved with what’s going on in the world, politically, spiritually, emotionally,” Spencer says. “It was the first time I was on the border. And it was pretty amazing to me, all these people walking across the river and leaving their homes behind. It was just amazing to me that people would do that to escape the poverty and try to improve their lives.”

Some years later, he decided to make a painted version of Border Storm. Where the original lithograph was only about 14 inches, the painting came in at a staggering seven feet tall. Spencer moved to New York in 1986, while still in the process of completing it. He finished a year later and eventually sold the Border Storm painting to Dallas art collector Frank Ribelin.

An alumnus of Jesuit College Preparatory School in Dallas, Ribelin donated artwork to help establish the on-campus museum. Border Storm was among these gifts, and Spencer dropped by in 1993 while on a visit to Texas. That was the last time he saw it, hanging in the teacher’s lounge because the nudity was deemed a little too risqué for mainstream display.

And this is where our mystery begins.

When planning Off-Center: New Mexico Art, 1970-2000, New Mexico Museum of Art assistant curator Katie Doyle wanted to include the Border Storm painting in the survey. The institution already has one of the lithographs—which ended up in the final show—but thought it would be even more impressive to hang the seven-foot canvas on the walls.

“We chose Border Storm because we are a border state, and the border impacts our own regional politics, and it also impacts the people who live here. Thinking about what Border Storm depicted, the family fleeing this chaos at the border, perhaps seeking refuge…we have so many immigrant families here in the state of New Mexico,” she says. “We have people who cross the border every day to go to and from work. It’s a very real and tangible part of the identity of many, many New Mexicans.”

Trouble is, nobody has any idea where the Border Storm painting is these days. And the ones who might are beholden to professional silence. Doyle has experience tracking down hard-to-find artworks, but Spencer’s massive masterpiece left her with a trail so cold you’d think it was directed by Roland Emmerich. She now keeps a pink sticky note on her desk as a reminder to keep searching for Border Storm as any new leads emerge.

“It would be incredible to find this painting. Personally, I would like to bring it home…back to New Mexico,” Doyle says.

Wynne and Spencer have breakfast every Friday at Pantry Rio in Santa Fe, along with some other “old timers,” as the former affectionately calls them. One morning, the story of Border Storm’s disappearance came up. Ever the newsman—not to mention a fan of his friend’s oeuvre—Wynne took an interest in helping Spencer ferret out the painting’s current home.

“We’ve tried a number of different avenues to run down clues… No one knew what happened to this painting,” Wynne says. “So I said, ‘Mark, I’m going to see what I can find out.’”

He ended up burrowing a rabbit hole that led him to the Lewis & Maese Auction Co. house in Houston, where he claims he spoke with a woman—identified on Spencer’s website as “Donna”—who promised to do some digging into the sale. A name popped up in the records of sale, but when she contacted the alleged buyer, they denied any knowledge of Border Storm. Wynne asked if there were any shipping logs or other documents pointing in the direction of a possible purchaser. She said no, that Lewis & Maese doesn’t keep that information, which he found “astonishing.”

This is the part where I enter the story, fated to wind up either Bogart or bogarted. Was there anything new I could contribute to the tale?

I called Lewis & Maese first, informing them of Spencer and Wynne’s experience and inquiring about their records. The man on the other end firmly told me that the auction house does not disclose its client list. Since the attempt at a phone conversation didn’t pan out, I decided to email the woman of the hour using the address listed on Spencer’s site instead. Donna eventually wrote back confirming her conversation with Wynne and Spencer and the subsequent confusion with the alleged buyer, though she was unable to provide any details beyond that due to company policy. As Lewis & Maese is a private entity, I couldn’t exactly request relevant papers through the Freedom of Information Act. But maybe I could at least get an idea of how the painting landed at Lewis & Maese in the first place.

I decided to go back to the beginning with Ribelin and Jesuit Dallas. The prolific collector passed in 2010. One of his daughters, Sally Warren, is the only child whose contact information could be tracked down. Herself an artist, she spoke through a representative that she has never heard of either Spencer or Border Storm.

According to Jesuit Dallas museum director Elizabeth Hunt Blanc, while the painting was on campus in 1993 per Spencer’s account, there are no records of where it ventured off to. After his passing, much of Ribelin’s collection ended up donated or sold to the Dallas prep school as well as Strake Jesuit College Preparatory in Houston. Border Storm never shows up in the paperwork.

Though Strake Jesuit does indeed own Border Storm…as a lithograph. Leslie Rahuba, director of museum collections at the school, confirmed that it entered their holdings from the Ribelin estate in 2011, part of a bulk purchase of dozens of art pieces. Other former Ribelin-owned works in the Strake Jesuit collection were donated. Fine art dealer Geolat in Dallas handled this sale, though like Lewis & Maese, their records proved off limits to nosy reporters. I was unable to check if they also facilitated the sale or donation of the Border Storm painting, and if that was perhaps its entry ticket down to Houston.

Wynne noted that he did speak to a gallery at one point in his research. The staff pointed him toward Lewis & Maese, though he forgot the name. It was most likely McClain Gallery, according to Rahuba. The space’s codirectors, Hélène Schlumberger and Sharon Graham, confirmed that Border Storm never passed through its walls. Graham also noted that Christie’s, the other auction house that handled pieces from Ribelin’s collection (and one more forthcoming than Lewis & Maese), didn’t have a record on hand for the painting, either.

And this is where the trail’s mercury starts dropping. Schlumberger, Graham, Rahuba, Blanc, Doyle, Wynne, Spencer, and I have all exchanged and confirmed information with one another both as part of this article and individually for our own curiosity. We’ve all tracked one another down and created an excited feedback loop of wanting to see this mystery solved.

“It’s a fascinating story. It’s created by the auction house,” Wynne says. “All they had to do was just say, ‘OK, let us run this down.’ But no.”

Beyond the question of who now owns Border Storm, there are some other major inquiries regarding the painting’s quite busy and quite well-hidden life: How did it get to Houston in the first place? Was it via the Ribelin estate or another collector? How did it ultimately end up at Lewis & Maese? Did it even end up at Lewis & Maese at all, or was Donna taking Wynne and Spencer for a ride as a goof for requesting she break their privacy policy?

The answer to all of these is the same. We simply don’t know.

Like grizzled detectives Doyle and Wynne before me, I couldn’t jackhammer down the auction house wall or trace Border Storm’s movement through Houston. The passage down I-45 was likely related to the distribution of the Ribelin estate somewhere along the line, even if Strake Jesuit didn’t receive the giant painting.

Border Storm’s disappearance comes at an inconvenient point in American history. Many people interviewed for this story expressed regrets that audiences weren’t able to experience the painting at a time when empathy and justice for migrants is needed most. “It’s so pertinent now. It’s more pertinent now than it was back then [in 1978],” Wynne says.

They all hope the current owner will emerge with a desire to show and share such a strikingly necessary piece.