“Is there anything else you can tell us?” Kari asked. “Anything at all that might help us understand who is doing this?”

  Crowfeather shook his head, a look of profound helplessness on his face. “I wish I could,” he said, his voice cracking. “This person… they are using our ways as a weapon. They are making people afraid of the one place where they should feel safe. I don’t know who could do such a thing.”

  It was clear they had reached the end. He was a victim in this, not a perpetrator. His only crime was a naivete that a cynical reporter had exploited. For their investigation, he was a dead end, a distraction manufactured for ratings.

  As they stood to leave, a profound sense of frustration settled over Kari. They had spent the entire night chasing a false lead, losing precious time while their real suspect, Dr. Alarcon, sat in her lab in Tucson, possibly destroying evidence. The media leak had done exactly what the killer would have wanted: It had sent the police scrambling in the wrong direction, muddying the waters and creating chaos.

  It made her wonder, with a sudden chill, just how the reporter had been pointed in Crowfeather’s direction in the first place

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The next morning, the squad room felt like the scene of a lost battle. The damaging news report had done its work, and the phones were ringing incessantly with calls from concerned citizens, angry elders, and at least one Phoenix news station trying to get an official comment on the "Crowfeather scandal." Captain Yazzie was in damage control mode, leaving Kari and Ben to navigate the fractured landscape of their own investigation.

  The Crowfeather debacle had been a costly distraction, but it had also clarified something for Kari. Their straightforward, evidence-based approach was failing. The killer was insulated by layers of culture, academic privilege, and now, media-fueled chaos.

  “We need to split up,” Kari said, pouring two cups of coffee at the break room counter. It was Thursday morning, two days since the discovery of Robert Benally's body. “Divide and conquer.”

  Ben took the mug she offered. “What’s the plan?”

  “You’re better at interviewing our people than I am,” she admitted. “People trust you. They see you as one of them. I want you to go back and try to talk to the ceremony participants again. Not about Haske, not about Alarcon. Just about the ceremonies themselves. Ask them about the medicine, about how it felt. Tell them you’re trying to understand the nature of the accidents. See if anyone mentions anything unusual, anything out of the ordinary.”

  “And you?” Ben asked.

  “I’m going to see my grandmother,” Kari said. The words felt strange on her tongue. It wasn’t an investigative step she could log in a report. “I need… perspective. I need to understand what I’m looking at.” She needed to learn the language of the world she was investigating before she could ever hope to understand its crimes.

  Ben just nodded, his expression one of quiet understanding. He seemed to know this was more than just a case for her.

  Ruth Chee was in her small, sun-drenched garden, not tending to the dormant vegetable beds, but sitting on a low stool before a single, withered corn stalk left over from the fall harvest. She wasn’t praying or meditating. She was sketching it in a small, leather-bound notebook with a piece of charcoal, her gnarled fingers moving with a surprising, fluid grace.

  Kari had never seen her grandmother draw before. She had always associated her with weaving, with herbs, with the solid, tangible work of a medicine woman.

  Kari stood for a moment, watching, feeling like an intruder. Ruth didn’t look up.

  “The coffee you drink smells like impatience,” Ruth said, her eyes still on the stalk. “You came here for answers you think I have.”

  “I came here because I don’t know what I’m doing,” Kari confessed, walking over and sitting on the ground near her grandmother’s stool. The admission felt freeing.

  Ruth finished a line, then finally looked at Kari. Her gaze was soft, without the usual sharp, assessing quality. “Good,” she said. “That is the first step to wisdom. The Anglo world teaches you that not knowing is a weakness. Our way teaches that it is an invitation for knowledge to enter.”

  “My investigation is stalled,” Kari said. “The people I need to talk to are closing ranks. They see my badge, and they see a threat.”

  “Your badge is not the threat,” Ruth said, turning a page in her sketchbook. “Your hurry is. You move through this world like a fast-moving storm. You want to shake the truth from the trees. But some truths are roots. You cannot shake them out. You must dig for them, carefully, with respect for the earth you are disturbing.”

  She held up the sketchbook. The drawing of the corn stalk was beautiful, capturing not just its shape, but its essence—the brittleness of the husk, the memory of its summer strength. On the next page were other sketches: the intricate pattern of a frost-covered spiderweb, the way the light hit a particular stone, the face of a sleeping dog.

  “You’ve never shown me these before,” Kari said, surprised and intrigued.

  "They are not for showing," Ruth replied. "They are for seeing. When I was a girl, long before I was taught the Blessing Way, my own grandmother taught me to do this. She said, 'Before you can learn to heal the people, you must first learn to see them. See the stalk of corn. See how it stands, how it breaks. Understand its story. Do that, and you will be ready to understand the stories of the people."

  It was a side of her grandmother Kari had never known, a hint of the young, observant girl who existed long before the respected and sometimes feared medicine woman. She wasn’t all-knowing. She was a lifelong student, her wisdom earned not through visions alone, but through decades of quiet, patient observation.

  “I don’t know how to see this case,” Kari said, her voice low. “I feel like I’m blind.”

  “Tell me what you see with the eyes you have,” Ruth said.

  Kari found herself talking, laying out the whole tangled mess. The three victims, the different roadmen, the elusive Dr. Alarcon and her research, the suspicious traditionalist Manuelito, the chaos of the news report. She spoke for a long time, the words tumbling out, stripping the case down to its confusing, contradictory bones.

  Ruth listened, her hands resting on her sketchbook, her gaze fixed on the distant mountains. When Kari was finished, the silence stretched.

  “Your mother asked questions like these,” Ruth said finally. “Near the end. She was reading her old books, her anthropology notes. She was looking for patterns, too. Not patterns of crime, but patterns of vulnerability.”

  “Vulnerability?”

  “She believed that the peyote medicine, when used correctly, opens a person’s spirit to healing,” Ruth said. “It makes them vulnerable, but it is a sacred vulnerability, protected by the songs, the fire, the roadman’s intent. It is like a surgeon opening a person up to remove a sickness. It is a necessary and holy wound.”

  She paused, turning to look directly at Kari, her eyes clear and focused. “But she asked me, what would happen if someone who did not have healing in their heart entered that sacred space? What if their intent was not to remove a sickness, but to introduce one? She believed that the medicine, in the hands of someone with a bad heart, could be used to make a person vulnerable not to healing, but to suggestion. To manipulation.”

  The words surprised Kari. She had been thinking about poison, about a tangible substance that could be isolated in a lab. But what Ruth was describing was far more insidious. A psychological weapon. A way to guide someone to their death, not with a push, but with a whisper.

  It reframed the entire investigation. She wasn’t just looking for a killer who was poisoning people. She was looking for a killer who was corrupting their spirits, turning a journey of healing into a path to self-destruction.

  “How?” Kari asked. “How would someone do that?”

  Ruth closed her sketchbook and placed it beside her on the stool. “I do not know the ‘how’ of this new kind of evil. That is for you, with your modern tools, to discover. I only know the shape of the wound.”

  She looked at her own hands, at the gnarled knuckles and the skin like fine, crinkled paper. “Your mother saw this same shape. It troubled her deeply. It is a part of why she returned to the old ways, to the ceremonies. She was not just looking for answers in books. She was looking for a shield. For protection.”

  Ruth stood up and walked over to Kari. She placed a cool, dry hand on Kari’s shoulder.

  “You have her sight, Asdzą´ą´ K'os. And you have your grandfather’s fire. Do not be afraid to use them both. But do not let the fire blind you to what you see.”

  Kari looked up at her grandmother. The woman she had always seen as an unshakable pillar of ancient wisdom now seemed different. She saw the artist, the observer, the woman who had spent a lifetime learning to see before she ever tried to heal. Kari felt a profound sense of connection to her, not just as her granddaughter, but as a fellow seeker of difficult truths.

  “Thank you, Grandmother,” Kari said, and the words were not just a formality. They came from a place of deep, sudden clarity.

  She left Ruth’s house with the low afternoon sun warming her back. The world looked the same, but her perception of the case had fundamentally shifted. She was no longer just a detective hunting a killer. She was the inheritor of her mother’s last, unfinished investigation into a new kind of sickness. The thought was daunting, but for the first time in days, it was not paralyzing.

  It was a purpose.

  ***

  Kari met Ben late that afternoon at a small diner off the highway. The smell of coffee and fried onions was a grounding, welcome reality after the profound, unsettling conversation with her grandmother. Ben looked tired, but focused.

  “Any luck?” Kari asked as she slid into the booth.

  “Maybe,” he said, pushing a small notebook across the table. “I talked to six more participants. Four from Haske’s ceremonies, two from the one Benally was at."

  "And?"

  "At first, it was the same story—everyone was reluctant to talk. But I didn’t ask about suspects. I just asked about their own experiences."

  He tapped the notebook. “Four of the six said the ceremonies felt… different. Stronger. One woman said she felt a burning in her stomach she’d never felt before. Another man said he had trouble maintaining his balance when he stood up, that the ground felt like it was shifting. A third said the visions were more intense, more terrifying than enlightening."

  "What did they make of these experiences?" Kari asked.

  "They all dismissed it as just a particularly potent batch of medicine. But they all noticed it.”

  Intense physical reactions. Difficulty with balance. Visions that felt more terrifying than enlightening.

  “I don't think the killer is just adding a poison, Ben,” Kari said, her grandmother’s words fresh in her mind. “They’re augmenting the effects of the peyote. Making the hallucinations more intense, the physical disorientation more severe. They’re not just killing them; they’re hijacking their spiritual journey.”

  The method was becoming clearer, more terrifyingly elegant. The killer didn’t have to be there when the victim fell from a cliff or succumbed to the elements. They just had to dose them with the enhanced medicine and let the powerful, manipulated experience do the work for them. It created the perfect, deniable accident.

  “If they’re altering the medicine,” Ben said, his mind moving to the practical, procedural next step, “then we need to find the source. We need to know where it’s being grown, who has access to it, and how it’s being prepared.”

  “Exactly,” Kari said. The path forward was suddenly clear. They had been looking at the people. Now, it was time to look at the poison itself. “Our next stop isn’t a suspect’s house. It’s a greenhouse.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The idea of a single, central greenhouse seemed like a long shot. Kari knew that the peyote used in ceremonies came from a variety of sources. Some was wild-harvested, some was mail-ordered from licensed distributors in Texas, and some was grown in small, private collections.

  But Dr. Alarcon’s research—the kind of controlled, scientific study she was conducting—would demand a consistent, reliable, and high-quality source. She wouldn’t be using random, wild-harvested plants with variable potency. She would need a cultivated supply.

  The next morning, back at the station, Ben found the lead. He had spent two hours on the phone with the Bureau of Indian Affairs agricultural liaison, a man whose job was a dizzying mix of crop management and federal bureaucracy.

  “It’s not technically a secret, but it’s not advertised, either,” Ben said, hanging up the phone and turning to Kari. “About five years ago, the Tribal Council, in partnership with a few of the larger NAC chapters and with funding from a private foundation, established a cooperative cultivation facility. The goal was to provide a stable, local, and legal source of medicine for certified roadmen, to cut down on the risks of poaching and the expense of ordering from Texas.”

  “A central greenhouse,” Kari said.

  “Exactly. It’s a secure facility. Not just anyone can walk in. You need to be a certified roadman with the NAC, or have a research permit approved by both the cooperative’s board and the Tribal Council.”

  “A research permit,” Kari said, nodding. “Like the one Dr. Alarcon has.”

  “Exactly,” Ben said. “I’ve got the address. It’s a good ninety-minute drive from here.”

  Kari grabbed her keys from the desk. “Let’s go.”

  ***

  The facility was located in a remote, nondescript valley, intentionally far from main roads. The drive itself felt like a journey into a secret world. They left the main highway for a secondary paved road, which eventually turned into a well-maintained but unmarked dirt track that wound its way between low, scrub-covered mesas.

  There were no signs, no mailboxes. The only reason they knew they were on the right path was the GPS pin Ben had been given.

  From a distance, the facility looked like any other large agricultural operation: a long, low building and three massive greenhouses, their translucent panels glinting in the morning sun. But as they got closer, the security became apparent. The entire compound was surrounded by a high, chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. A single, heavy-duty gate blocked the entrance, a small security hut sitting beside it. This wasn’t a place you just waltzed into.

  They pulled up to the gate and Kari buzzed the intercom. After a moment, a crisp, female voice answered.

  “This is a private facility. State your business.”

  “Navajo Nation Police,” Kari said. “Detectives Blackhorse and Tsosie here to speak with the facility manager.”

  There was a pause, then the sound of a heavy lock disengaging. The gate slowly slid open. They drove through and parked in a small, designated visitor area. They were met at the door of the main building by the facility manager, a woman named Brenda Begay.

  She was a formidable figure in her late forties, with a no-nonsense demeanor, her hair pulled back in a severe bun, and eyes that seemed to take in everything at once. She looked them over, her expression a mixture of professional caution and overt skepticism.

  “Detectives,” she said, her voice crisp. “I can’t imagine what kind of police business you’d have at a greenhouse.”

  “We’re investigating the recent deaths of three individuals,” Kari explained as Brenda led them through the gate and toward the main building. “We have reason to believe the peyote used in the ceremonies they attended may have been tampered with. We need to understand your sourcing and distribution protocols.”

  Brenda’s stern expression tightened. “Tampered with? Here? That’s impossible. Our security is absolute. Every plant is accounted for, from seedling to harvest.”

  She led them into a small, sterile office. One wall was covered with security monitors displaying feeds from dozens of cameras positioned inside and outside the greenhouses. “This place is more secure than a bank,” she said, a note of pride in her voice.

  “We’re not suggesting a breach of your security, Ms. Begay,” Ben said. “We’re trying to understand who has had legitimate access. We need to see your visitor and access logs for the past six months.”

  Brenda’s expression, already stern, hardened into a flat wall of refusal. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Absolutely not,” she said, her voice leaving no room for argument. “That information is confidential. The privacy and safety of our roadmen and our permitted researchers are my highest priority. I can’t just turn over our internal records to anyone who asks, not even the police.”

  “This isn’t just ‘asking,’” Kari countered. “This is a homicide investigation. We have three dead people, and the only thing connecting them is the medicine they took. Medicine that very likely originated right here. We have every reason to believe your facility is a part of our crime scene, whether you know it or not.”

  “My facility is clean,” Brenda insisted, her chin jutting out. “My protocols are perfect. What happens after the medicine leaves my gate is not my responsibility.”

  “It becomes your responsibility when people start dying,” Kari said, stepping closer to the desk. She leaned forward, lowering her voice. “Look, Brenda. I’m not trying to cause problems for you or for the Church. I am one of you. But there is a killer out there using our traditions as a weapon."

  Kari paused, but Brenda made no reply. She simply gazed back, unmoved.

  "Right now," Kari continued, "you are obstructing an investigation into the murder of three of our own people. You can either help us find who is doing this, or you can explain to Captain Yazzie and the Tribal Council why you refused. Either way, we will see those logs. The easy way just helps us catch this person faster.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17