He met her headlights with a calm expression, his dark eyes taking in everything without hurry. There was no sign of surprise or agitation, just the placid competence of a man who had answered these pre-dawn calls for fourteen years. He gave a short, single nod as she stopped, a complete conversation in one small gesture that said, I’m ready. Let’s go.

  Neither spoke as Ben climbed into the vehicle. The miles rolled on.

  The pin Captain Yazzie had sent was in a remote section of the canyonlands east of the Lukachukai Mountains. The paved road gave way to a washboard dirt track that rattled the teeth. Kari gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles tight, as she navigated the ruts. Ben scanned the landscape, his eyes missing nothing.

  "My uncles used to bring me hunting out here," he said, his voice quiet. "The land is beautiful, but it doesn't forgive mistakes. Easy to get turned around, especially at night."

  "Especially if you're disoriented," Kari said, finishing the thought. It was the most logical explanation. The simplest one. It was almost always the simplest one.

  They found the site easily enough. Two patrol cars were already there, their light bars off, their presence a quiet intrusion on the sacred space. Officer Begay, a veteran with nearly fifteen years on the force, met them as they got out of the SUV. The air was thin and cold.

  "Detective," Begay said with a nod. "Deceased's name is Jerome Natanii. His wife confirmed he was attending the ceremony last night. The roadman and the other participants are over by the fire pit. They’re pretty shaken up."

  "What’s the story?" Kari asked, pulling on a pair of latex gloves.

  "The roadman says Jerome slipped out sometime after midnight," Begay explained. "He seemed a little agitated, but nothing they considered alarming. They figured he’d just walked off a little way to clear his head. It happens. No one realized he was missing until the sun started coming up. The hiker found him before they did."

  "Where's the body?" Ben asked.

  Begay gestured with his chin toward the canyon’s edge. "Down there. It's a straight drop. About fifty, sixty feet."

  Kari and Ben walked toward the precipice. The ground was a mix of red dirt and sharp, loose scree. A few yards from the edge, the patrol officers had marked off a preliminary area with yellow tape.

  Kari scanned the ground, taking in the details. She saw scuff marks, disturbed earth, the kinds of signs you’d expect from someone losing their footing in the dark. It all pointed to a tragic, straightforward accident. A man, his senses altered by peyote, walks too close to a cliff he can’t see. It was a story that wrote itself.

  "Looks like he stumbled here," Ben said, pointing to a deep gouge in the dirt, the kind a heel would make trying to find purchase. "Then a few more unsteady steps, and… over he went."

  Kari nodded, but something felt off. A subtle dissonance. She couldn't put her finger on it. It was a feeling, not a fact.

  She moved closer to the edge, peering down. Jerome Natanii’s body lay broken on the rocks below, a small, still form in the vastness of the canyon. The department's forensic tech, Lisa Becenti, was already down there with her kit, working alongside the medical examiner, Dr. Nakai.

  "Anything else?" Kari asked Begay, standing back up.

  "Just this," Begay said, pointing to a spot a few feet away from the initial scuff marks. "Found this when we first got here. Looks like he might have dropped it."

  He indicated a small, beaded medicine pouch lying in the dirt. It was simple, made of worn buckskin with a single line of blue and white beads.

  Kari reached into her own pocket, her fingers finding the familiar shape of her mother’s pouch. It was a reflex, an unconscious search for reassurance.

  "Don't touch it," she said. "Let Lisa bag it."

  She turned her attention back to the ground near the cliff's edge. The story of a man stumbling alone in the dark was clean. It was simple.

  But the earth held other stories if you knew how to look.

  Her eyes traced the patterns of disturbance. There were Jerome’s tracks, the deep, frantic scuffs of a man fighting for his balance. But there was something else. Fainter. Overlapped.

  She pointed. "Ben, look here."

  Ben knelt beside her. "What am I looking at?"

  "The ceremony ended this morning," Kari said, thinking aloud. "The ground is cold, there was frost. The tracks from last night should be sharp, clear. Jerome’s are. But look at these." She indicated a series of shallower impressions, slightly to the side of the main disturbance. "These look… fresher. Like someone was standing here this morning. After the frost melted."

  Ben studied the ground, his eyes narrowed. "Could be the hiker who found him."

  "The hiker came from the east trail," Begay interjected. "His prints are over there. He never came this close to the edge. He said he saw the body from about twenty yards back."

  So someone else had been here. Standing here. Watching. It could have been one of the other participants, coming to look for Jerome after they realized he was gone. That was the logical explanation.

  But if so, why hadn't they reported the body?

  "The roadman accounted for everyone else throughout the night?" Kari asked Begay.

  "He says so," Begay answered with a nod. "After Jerome left, nobody else went out until the ceremony was over."

  Kari stood up and walked over to the fire pit where the ceremony participants were huddled together, wrapped in blankets, their faces etched with shock and grief. The roadman, a man in his late sixties with a kind, weary face, stood to meet her.

  "This is a terrible thing," he said, his voice raspy. "A terrible, terrible thing. Jerome was a good man. He carried a heavy heart."

  "Did he seem distressed to you?" Kari asked gently. "Before he left the tipi?"

  The roadman considered this. "He was emotional. But the medicine can do that. It opens the heart. Sometimes joy comes out, sometimes pain. He was working through something. I thought he was having a breakthrough."

  "And no one else left the circle?"

  "No one," the roadman said firmly. "We were all here. We were praying for him."

  Kari thanked him and walked back toward the cliff edge. Ben was waiting for her.

  "The ME just radioed up," he said. "Dr. Nakai. She said initial examination shows injuries consistent with the fall. Nothing that screams foul play from her end. She'll know more after the autopsy."

  "Of course," Kari said, her eyes still scanning the ground. Consistent with the fall. Just like her mother’s death had been consistent with exposure. The official story.

  She thought about the fresher tracks. She thought about the medicine pouch lying in the dirt, a sacred object discarded in a place of violence. And she thought about what her grandmother had said just yesterday. The kind that can make a death in the desert look like an accident.

  "It's too clean, Ben," she said.

  "What is?"

  "The scene. The story. A man gets disoriented, he falls." She shook her head. "Maybe. But someone else was here. Someone who stood right there and watched. Someone who was here after the sun came up and who wasn't the hiker and wasn't one of us."

  Ben looked from the tracks to the canyon and back to Kari’s face. He could see the intensity in her eyes, the familiar hum of her intuition kicking into gear. He had learned to trust it.

  "So what are you thinking?" he asked.

  Kari stared down into the canyon where Lisa Becenti was now carefully placing the small, beaded medicine pouch into an evidence bag. She thought of the anniversary. She thought of her mother. And she thought of this new death, another supposed accident at a sacred site.

  A cold certainty began to form in her gut, an unwelcome and familiar feeling.

  "I'm thinking this wasn't an accident," she said. "I'm thinking Jerome Natanii had help getting to the edge.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The drive back from Red Point was silent. The sun was fully up now, casting long shadows from the mesas and throwing the stark beauty of the land into sharp relief. Kari kept her eyes on the road, but her mind was back at the canyon’s edge, replaying the scene.

  The faint, fresh tracks. The discarded medicine pouch. The clean, simple story of an accident that felt too neat. She sensed a dissonant hum beneath the surface of the facts, a vibration she couldn’t ignore. Ben sat beside her, respecting her silence, his own thoughts a quiet presence in the cab of the SUV.

  Back at the station, the air was stale with the smell of old coffee and paperwork. The Saturday skeleton crew was in place, the usual weekend quiet punctuated by the crackle of the dispatch radio. Kari walked straight to her desk, shrugging out of her jacket. She felt a familiar restlessness, the thrumming energy that always came when a case didn’t sit right with her.

  “I’m going to run a search,” she said, more to herself than to Ben, who had followed her in. She logged into her computer, the screen flickering to life.

  “What are you looking for?” Ben asked, leaning against the edge of her desk.

  “Accidents,” Kari said. “Unattended deaths. Anything in the last few weeks. Specifically, anything involving a ceremony.”

  “You really think Natanii’s death wasn’t an accident?”

  “I think someone else was at that cliff, Ben. Someone who wasn’t supposed to be there, who didn’t come forward.” She started typing, navigating the departmental database. “That’s not nothing.”

  The search parameters were broad at first: unattended deaths, Navajo Nation, last thirty days. A handful of results populated the screen. A car crash near Shiprock. An elderly man who passed away in his sleep in Tuba City. A suspected overdose in Kayenta. None of them fit.

  She narrowed the search. She added keywords: "exposure," "fall," "drowning," "ceremony," "peyote." She expanded the jurisdiction to include the bordering counties, just in case.

  The system chugged for a moment. Then a single result appeared.

  Her breath hitched. It was a report from the Apache County Sheriff’s Office, filed just three days ago.

  “Ben,” she said, her voice tight. “Come look at this.”

  He moved behind her, leaning in to read the screen over her shoulder.

  INCIDENT REPORT: ACSO-24-087

  DECEASED: Sandoval, Maria, F, 54

  LOCATION: Approx. 4 miles south of Sanders, AZ

  DATE OF DISCOVERY: January 24

  REPORTING DEPUTY: A. Garcia

  INITIAL FINDING: Unattended Death

  Kari clicked to open the full report. The details scrolled up the screen. Maria Sandoval had been found by a rancher checking his fence line. She'd been miles from the nearest road, her body showing signs of severe dehydration and hypothermia. The cause of death was listed as "exposure to the elements."

  The report was brief, clinical. But one paragraph made the hair on Kari’s arms stand up.

  “Subject was reported missing by family members on January 23. According to the reporting party, the deceased had been attending a private Native American Church ceremony on the evening of January 22. It is believed the subject became disoriented due to the hallucinogenic effects of peyote, wandered away from the ceremonial site, and became lost in the desert. No signs of foul play were observed at the scene. M.E. prelim is exposure. No further investigation is planned at this time."

  In other words, the case was effectively closed.

  “Three days ago,” Ben said, his voice low. “Another ceremonial death.”

  “Another accident,” Kari countered, a hard edge to her words. "Just like my mother." The words were out before she could stop them. She rarely spoke of her mother's case at work, keeping that investigation walled off, private. But the parallel was too stark, too chilling to ignore.

  Exposure. Wandering away from a sacred place in the dark. It was the same story, the same official explanation that had never felt true.

  “Kari…” Ben started, his voice gentle.

  “No, look,” she said, pointing at the screen, pushing her personal feelings aside. “Two ceremonies. Two deaths attributed to disorientation. One a fall, one exposure. Different counties, different jurisdictions, so nobody connected them. But it’s the same pattern.”

  A grim excitement began to build in her chest, a feeling she wasn’t proud of. It was the thrill of the hunt, the cold satisfaction of her instincts being proven right. But tangled up with it was the dark, personal hope that this, finally, was a thread that might lead back to the truth of what had happened to Anna a year ago.

  She forced that thought down. A good detective couldn’t afford to see ghosts. She had to focus on the facts in front of her. Jerome and Maria.

  But that didn't mean there couldn't be a connection between the deaths.

  “Pull up the file on my mother’s case,” she said to Ben.

  He hesitated for a fraction of a second, understanding the line she was crossing. Then he nodded and moved to his own computer. Kari opened a new window on her screen and began a fresh search, this time for any information she could find on Maria Sandoval. She found a short obituary from a Gallup paper.

  Maria had been a weaver, a well-known local artist whose rugs were prized for their intricate designs and traditional techniques. She was survived by a husband and two grown children. A respected member of her community. Not someone prone to careless wandering.

  Ben came back over to her desk. “I have Anna’s file open. What are you looking for?”

  “The M.E. report. Specifically, the summary of findings from the scene.”

  He read from his screen. “Victim: Anna Chee. Found deceased near Canyon de Chelly. Evidence suggests death by exposure. Subject was known to hike and conduct research in the area alone. No evidence of foul play. Ruled accidental.”

  Kari stared at her own screen, at the words describing Maria Sandoval’s death. No evidence of foul play. Ruled accidental.

  Two accidents were a coincidence. But what about three?

  “We need to talk to Maria Sandoval’s family,” Kari said, her decision made. “And we need to find out who was at that ceremony with her.”

  “Her case is in Apache County,” Ben reminded her. “It’s their jurisdiction. And it’s closed.”

  “I know.” Kari’s jaw was set. “But Jerome Natanii’s case is ours. If these two are connected, it’s a cross-jurisdictional issue. That gives us a reason to ask questions. I’ll call the Sheriff’s office, give them a professional courtesy heads-up. But we’re going.”

  She stood up and began to pace the small space between their desks. Her mind was clicking through the possibilities. A bad batch of peyote? Possible, but unlikely to cause such different outcomes in two different ceremonies days apart.

  Her grandmother’s words echoed in her thoughts. A disrespect that was leaving a stain on things. This felt deliberate. This felt targeted.

  “Okay, let’s assume for a minute these aren’t accidents,” Ben said, playing devil’s advocate, testing her theory. “Someone is killing people during peyote ceremonies and making it look like they got lost. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Kari admitted. “The motive is a black hole right now. But the method… it’s smart. It uses our traditions, our legal protections, against us. Who’s going to question a death during a ceremony? The participants are in an altered state, their memories are unreliable. Federal law protects the religious freedom of the NAC, which makes a formal investigation difficult and politically sensitive. It’s the perfect cover for murder.”

  She stopped pacing and looked at Ben. The weight of it settled on her. This wasn’t just a killer. This was someone who understood their world, who knew its seams and its vulnerabilities. Someone who knew how to exploit the trust inherent in a sacred circle.

  “We need to drive to Sanders,” she said. “Find Maria’s husband. Learn everything we can about that night. Who was there. Who ran the ceremony.”

  The grim excitement she’d felt earlier had faded, replaced by a cold resolve. This was bigger than she had thought. It wasn’t just about Jerome Natanii anymore. It was about Maria Sandoval.

  And, whether she was ready to admit it to anyone else or not, it was about her mother. The cases were now inextricably linked in her mind. One was a year old, cold and dormant. The other two were fresh. They were her way in. This was a chance not just to find justice for the new victims, but to finally unravel the mystery that had shrouded her own family in grief for the past year.

  She looked at the picture of her mother she kept pinned to the corkboard above her desk—Anna smiling, her eyes bright with intelligence, standing in the sunlight near Spider Rock. Kari had put it there to remind herself of what she was fighting for.

  Now, it felt like a mandate.

  “This is it, Ben,” she said, her voice low and certain. “This is the one.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The decision was made in the space of a single, shared look across their desks. The quiet hum of the station, the half-finished reports, the very idea of waiting—it all felt irrelevant.

  “I’m calling Apache County dispatch,” Kari said, already reaching for her phone. “Letting them know we’re on our way. Professional courtesy.”

  “They’re not going to like us digging into a case they’ve already put to bed,” Ben said, though he was already grabbing his jacket, his skepticism secondary to his loyalty.

  “It’s not their case anymore,” Kari said, dialing the number. “It’s a potential victim in our serial investigation.” She kept her voice formal and clipped on the phone, explaining to a disinterested-sounding deputy that a new death in their jurisdiction showed a similar M.O. to an unattended death in theirs. She didn’t ask for permission; she stated her intention to follow a lead. It was a fine line, but one she was comfortable walking.

  The drive south toward Sanders was a two-hour straight shot through a landscape of sparse grassland and distant, flat-topped mesas. The high winter sun was bright but gave off no warmth, bleaching the colors from the sky. Kari drove, her hands tight on the wheel, the coffee and adrenaline from the morning giving way to a grim, focused energy.

 

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