"Check the boarding schools," she said, her voice suddenly clear. "Your mother was very interested in the boarding schools. The places where they tried to kill the Indian to save the man. Some killings were more literal than others."

  Then she was gone, leaving Kari alone with more questions than answers. Again.

  Kari sat for a moment, processing. Three visits, and this was the most Hampton had said about Anna. The boarding schools—was that real information or just another delusion? Anna had been researching historical violence and patterns of trauma. Boarding schools would fit that interest.

  She stood, gathering her things. Outside the visiting room, she signed out at the security desk, noting the time: 2:47 PM. If she left now, she could make it to Flagstaff by four, have dinner with her father, and be back on the reservation by evening.

  The drive from the psychiatric facility to Flagstaff took her through familiar territory. Interstate 40 stretched ahead, cutting through high desert that shifted from red to gray as clouds gathered for what looked like an incoming storm. Kari kept the Jeep at a steady seventy-five, her mind churning over Hampton's words.

  The Flagstaff city limits appeared ahead, the San Francisco Peaks looming above the town with fresh snow on their summits. Early November meant ski season was starting, bringing tourists and their money to the local economy. Kari navigated through downtown, past the university where her mother had taught, past the museum where her father's new wife worked.

  James Cooper lived in the same house in the Forest Highlands neighborhood where Kari had spent her teenage years. A two-story craftsman that managed to look both rustic and expensive, surrounded by ponderosa pines that provided privacy from the neighbors. His truck was in the driveway—the same Ford F-150 he'd driven for a decade, a small rebellion against his wife Linda's suggestion that he get something more "age-appropriate."

  Kari parked behind the truck and sat for a moment, preparing herself. These visits had gotten easier over the months, but they still required emotional energy she didn't always have. Her father had tried to bridge the gap between them, and she'd met him halfway, but some distances were measured in more than miles.

  The front door opened before she could knock. James stood there in jeans and a NAU sweatshirt, his silver hair disheveled.

  "Kari." He smiled cautiously. "Come in. I've got coffee on."

  The house smelled like pine and leather, and the scent of something baking—Linda's influence, probably. The living room looked the same as always: comfortable furniture, walls lined with books, a few pieces of Native American art that Anna had chosen during their marriage and that Linda had wisely left in place.

  "Linda's at the museum," James said, answering the unasked question. "Special event tonight. Preview of the spring exhibit."

  "How's that going? The exhibit?" Kari had finally attended one of these visits a month ago, and it had gone surprisingly well. She didn't have much in common with her father’s new wife, but to her relief, Linda had preoccupied herself with other friends and guests most of the time. It had been easier for Kari to make a brief appearance, then slip away unnoticed.

  "Good," James said. "They're focusing on contemporary Native artists. Moving beyond the historical pieces to show living traditions." He poured coffee from the expensive machine Linda had bought him last Christmas. "How are you? How's the shoulder?"

  Kari rotated her left shoulder, feeling the slight pull of scar tissue from Hampton's blade. "Fine. Hardly notice it anymore."

  "And the case load?"

  "Quiet since the pipeline murders." She accepted the coffee gratefully. "Some property crimes, a few domestics. Nothing that requires... special insight."

  James studied her with the analytical gaze that had made him a successful FBI profiler. "But you're not here about current cases."

  "No." Kari set down her mug. "You mentioned you'd found some of Mom's things? Notebooks and research materials?"

  "Ah." He stood, gesturing for her to follow. "They're in my office. I've been meaning to go through them properly, but..." He trailed off.

  The office was pure James Cooper: organized, functional, slightly intimidating. File cabinets lined one wall, a massive desk dominated the center, and a whiteboard covered in notes about his current research project took up another wall. But it was the banker's boxes stacked in the corner that drew Kari's attention.

  "Three boxes," James said. "Mostly notebooks, some printed articles, a few recordings on old cassette tapes. The museum returned them after..." He cleared his throat. "I glanced through them, but honestly, a lot of it was beyond my understanding. Cultural references I didn't have context for."

  Kari approached the boxes, running her hand over the top one. These were her mother's thoughts, her research, possibly her secrets. The weight of them felt heavier than cardboard and paper should.

  "She was researching violence," James said quietly. "Historical trauma, she called it. How past violence echoes through generations. The last few months before she died, she became almost obsessed with patterns. Missing people, unexplained deaths, incidents that were covered up or dismissed."

  "Boarding schools," Kari said.

  James looked surprised. "Yes, actually. How did you—"

  Kari's phone rang, interrupting. She glanced at the screen: Captain Yazzie.

  "I'm sorry, I need to take this," she said. Her captain rarely called unless it was important.

  "Blackhorse," she answered.

  "Kari, where are you?" Yazzie's voice carried an undertone of urgency.

  "Flagstaff. Visiting family. What's wrong?"

  "We have a body. Found about an hour ago at the old Riverside Indian Boarding School. It's... unusual."

  Kari's blood chilled. Hampton's words echoed: Check the boarding schools.

  "How unusual?"

  "The victim was tied to a chair in what witnesses say was the old punishment room. This isn't a standard homicide."

  She was already moving toward the door, her father following with questions in his eyes.

  "I'll be there in ninety minutes," she said.

  "Ben's already en route. Kari... be prepared. This one's going to bring up a lot of old pain for the community."

  The call ended. Kari stood in her father's foyer, torn between duty and the boxes of her mother's research waiting in the office.

  "Go," James said, reading her conflict. "The boxes will be here. I'll keep them safe until you can come back."

  "Dad—"

  "Go," he repeated. "But be careful, okay?"

  She smiled to reassure him. "I will." She thought of saying she loved him, but the idea of speaking those words felt strange, given their complicated history. Instead, she settled for, "It was good seeing you."

  "You, too."

  She hurried out to her Jeep and left.

  As she drove out of Flagstaff, racing against the dying light, Kari couldn't shake the feeling that the past and present were colliding in ways she didn't yet understand. Her mother's research, Hampton's cryptic warnings, and now a murder at a boarding school—threads in a pattern she couldn't quite see.

  But she would. Even if it led her down the same path her mother had walked

  CHAPTER TWO

  The old Riverside Indian Boarding School materialized out of the desert like a wound that wouldn't heal. Kari's headlights swept across the crumbling adobe walls as she pulled into what had once been a parking lot, now just a flat area distinguished from the surrounding desert by scattered chunks of asphalt. Emergency vehicles crowded the space—tribal police cruisers, the medical examiner's van, Ben's departmental SUV.

  She parked and sat for a moment, mentally preparing herself. Boarding schools occupied a particular place in Native American trauma—institutions designed to erase culture, to "kill the Indian to save the man," as their founders had proudly proclaimed. Every Native family had stories. Ruth had been lucky, hidden by her parents until the authorities stopped looking.

  But James's casual mention that Anna had been researching these places added another layer of dread to an already grim scene.

  The November wind bit through her jacket as she exited the Jeep. Crime scene tape fluttered like prayer flags, marking a perimeter around the main building. Portable lights had been set up, throwing harsh shadows that made the ruins look even more haunted.

  "Detective Blackhorse." Officer Sam Begay—no relation to the victim, despite the shared surname—met her at the tape. Shared surnames were common among the Diné, a byproduct of government schools and translated names imposed generations ago. It didn’t mean they were kin.

  "They're in the basement," Begay said. "It's... it's bad, ma'am."

  "Define bad."

  Sam, a twenty-year veteran who'd seen plenty, actually looked shaken. "The staging. The room itself. Knowing what happened there to kids... and now this."

  Kari signed the scene log and ducked under the tape. The main entrance gaped before her, darkness beyond the threshold despite the portable lights. She pulled out her flashlight, adding its beam to the surreal illumination.

  The interior was worse than the outside suggested. Decades of abandonment had left debris everywhere—broken furniture, scattered papers water-damaged beyond reading, graffiti ranging from teenage declarations of love to angry denunciations of the school's history.

  But underneath the decay, the institutional bones remained. Long hallways designed for control. Small rooms designed for containment. Architecture as oppression.

  She followed the lights and voices down a staircase to the basement level. The temperature dropped noticeably, and the musty smell grew stronger. At the end of a narrow corridor, she found the cluster of investigators.

  Ben Tsosie looked up as she approached, relief flickering across his usually stoic features. At thirty-six, her partner had the kind of quiet competence that made him easy to underestimate—a mistake criminals rarely made twice. He'd been on modified duty until recently due to a shoulder injury, but he moved with his usual economical grace.

  "Kari. Thanks for coming quickly." He led her aside, lowering his voice. "The victim is Tommy Begay, thirty-two. Cultural preservation activist. He runs—ran—a YouTube channel documenting Native history. According to his roommate, he's been talking about filming here for a while."

  "Who found him?"

  "Roommate got worried when Tommy didn't come home last night. Drove out to see if he was here." Ben's expression darkened. "Poor kid's in shock. First time finding a body is hard enough, but this..."

  "Show me."

  Ben led her to a doorway where Dr. Susan Nakai crouched beside the body. The medical examiner looked up, her face grim behind safety glasses.

  "Detective. I was just about to begin my preliminary examination."

  Kari stepped into the room and immediately understood everyone's reaction.

  Tommy Begay sat in a wooden chair in the center of the small space. His hands were bound behind the chair with rough rope, his feet tied to the chair legs. His head lolled forward, but someone had placed a ruler under his chin to prop it up—a grotesque parody of the "proper posture" boarding schools had demanded.

  But it was the other details that made Kari's stomach turn. A slate board had been placed in his lap, the kind students once used. Written on it in chalk, in careful cursive: "I will not speak unless spoken to." The walls around him bore similar phrases, also in chalk: "Tradition is savagery." "English only." "Obedience is survival."

  On the floor around the chair were artifacts of institutional control: a leather strap, a wooden paddle, a bar of yellow soap that victims of the schools would recognize as the kind forced into children's mouths for speaking their native languages.

  It took Kari a moment to force down the potent cocktail of disbelief, sorrow, and rage she felt at the sight of all this. Then she cleared her throat and asked, "Time of death?"

  "Based on liver temperature and rigor, between 8 PM and midnight last night," Dr. Nakai said. "Cause appears to be ligature strangulation, but I'll know more after the full autopsy."

  Kari circled the scene, photographing from every angle. The killer had spent time here. This wasn't a quick murder—this was a recreation, a performance. But for what audience?

  "His camera's broken," Ben said, pointing to a piece of expensive equipment smashed on the floor. "But his phone's missing. Roommate says he always had it for backup recording."

  "So our killer might be on video." Kari studied the scene again. "This took planning. The chair was already here?"

  "Bolted to the floor," Ben said with a nod. "Original to the room. This was..." He paused, choosing words carefully. "This was where they put kids for punishment. Isolation, restraint, sometimes for days."

  Kari had known, intellectually. But standing in the room, seeing the small space, the lack of windows, the chair designed to hold small bodies immobile—knowing became feeling, and feeling threatened to overwhelm professional distance.

  "Any witnesses? Security cameras?"

  "Nothing. The building's been abandoned since 1982. Kids party here sometimes, urban explorers document it, but Tommy seems to have been alone."

  "Except for his killer." Kari moved to examine the walls more closely. The phrases were written in different hands—some in the careful script of a teacher, others in the shaky writing of someone under duress. "These aren't all the same person."

  Ben joined her. "You think Tommy wrote some of them? Under coercion?"

  "Look at this one." She pointed to "I am nothing" written at a height that suggested the writer was either very short or seated. "The angle's wrong for someone standing. And the chalk pressure varies—starts firm, gets shakier."

  "Torture," Ben said flatly. "The killer tortured him. Made him participate in his own degradation."

  They were silent for a moment, absorbing the cruelty of it. Not just murder, but a forcing of the victim to enact his own cultural humiliation.

  "Tell me about Tommy Begay," Kari said finally.

  Ben pulled out his notebook. "Local boy, graduated from NAU with a degree in Native American Studies. Started his YouTube channel two years ago. According to his roommate, he was passionate about documenting sites before they were lost to development or decay."

  "Activist?"

  "More educator than activist, from what I can tell. His videos are about teaching history, not political action. Though given the history he was teaching..." Ben shrugged. Truth itself could be a form of activism.

  Dr. Nakai stood, knees creaking. "I'll need to take him soon. Want to preserve any trace evidence before decomposition advances."

  "Give us a few more minutes," Kari said. She turned to Ben. "Who else have we notified?"

  "Captain's on his way. I held off on calling the FBI—technically this is our jurisdiction unless we find evidence of federal crimes."

  Kari nodded. The boarding schools had been federal institutions, but they were closed. A murder in an abandoned building fell under tribal authority. For now.

  She moved back to study Tommy's body, trying to see past the horror to the evidence. His clothes were dusty but not torn—no signs of a significant struggle. The rope work was competent, even elaborate. The staging afterward suggested the killer was comfortable with what they'd done and unafraid of discovery.

  "This is someone who knew the history," she said. "Not just general knowledge, but specific details. The soap, the exact phrases, the rule..."

  "Former student?" Ben suggested. "Someone acting out their own trauma?"

  "Or a teacher," Kari said quietly. "Someone who participated in the system."

  They both considered the implications. Former students would mostly be in their sixties or seventies now. Old enough to kill, certainly, but the physical control needed to subdue and position Tommy suggested someone still relatively strong. Former teachers would be even older, pushing the boundaries of physical capability.

  Unless…

  "What if it's not someone from the original era?" Kari said. "What if it's someone who studied it? Researched it?"

  Like her mother had been doing.

  "I'm going to make some calls," Ben said. "We need units at Tommy's residence immediately. Secure any computers, documents, anything related to his research."

  As Ben made the calls, Kari took one last look around the punishment room. The chalk phrases on the walls seemed to mock her: "Obedience is survival." But Tommy Begay hadn't been obedient. He'd asked questions, sought truth, refused to let the past stay buried.

  And it had killed him.

  But that didn't mean the investigation had to die with him.

  "Units are rolling," Ben reported. "Captain's ETA is five minutes."

  "Good." Kari stepped out of the room, needing distance from the concentrated horror. "Ben, what do you know about boarding school records? Where would documentation about students be kept?"

  "Bureau of Indian Affairs, mostly. Though a lot was destroyed over the years. Convenient fires, flood damage, routine purges." His tone carried generations of bitter experience. "Why?"

  She looked back at the punishment room. "This isn't just about the past, Ben. There's something in those old records that's worth killing to keep secret."

  The wind had picked up outside, sending dust devils dancing across the abandoned grounds. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howled—or maybe it was just the wind through broken windows. At Riverside Indian Boarding School, it was hard to distinguish between natural sounds and the echoes of old pain.

  But one thing was certain: Tommy Begay's murder was only the beginning. Whatever secrets he'd uncovered, it was Kari's job now to bring it to light.

  Even if it meant following the same dangerous path that had led Tommy to that chair in the punishment room.

  Even if it meant asking the same questions her mother had been asking in the months before her death.

  The past, Kari was learning, was never really past. And at Riverside Indian Boarding School, it was still claiming victims

  CHAPTER THREE

 

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