"He was characteristically tight-lipped."
"Do I have your authorization to help?"
"You do.Ben can partner with you if needed, but I'm leaving that to your discretion.The chief was clear that this needs to be handled delicately.Too many investigators could make the community defensive."Yazzie paused."Kari, this is an opportunity and a minefield.You help solve this, you build bridges between our departments and our people.You screw it up, you confirm every prejudice they have about Navajo law enforcement."
"No pressure, then."
"You can handle it.Just remember—you're a guest in their territory.Show respect, follow their lead, and don't push where you're not wanted."
"Understood."
After ending the call, Kari sat in her Jeep for a moment, engine idling, trying to reconcile the morning's events.She'd started the day pursuing her mother's investigation, following a vision that had led her to filing cabinets full of unsolved cases.And now she was being pulled into an active investigation she knew nothing about.
The present and the past aren't separate.They're threads in the same weaving.
She could almost hear her mother's voice, patient and knowing, as if Anna had anticipated this exact moment.
Kari pulled out of the parking lot and headed south, toward the station first to brief Ben and gather what equipment she might need, then on to Hopi territory and whatever Chief Lomayesva was waiting to show her.
The seventeen case files would have to wait.Her father would go through them, looking for the pattern Anna had seen.And Kari would pursue this new case, whatever it turned out to be.
CHAPTER THREE
The drive to the Hopi reservation took Kari and Ben through landscape that shifted subtly as they traveled—high desert giving way to mesas and buttes that rose from the earth like ancient sentinels.
Kari kept her eyes on the road while Ben navigated from the passenger seat, though they both knew the route well enough.The Hopi reservation was an island entirely surrounded by Navajo Nation land, a geographic reality that had shaped centuries of complex relations between their peoples.
"I appreciate you bringing me into this," Ben said, breaking the silence that had stretched for the first twenty minutes of the drive."It's been pretty quiet around the precinct, and I can only rearrange the items on my desk so many times."
"I just wish we had some idea what to expect," Kari said.
"I don't think a Hopi chief requests help from Navajo Nation PD unless the situation is desperate.And if he specifically wants you, there must be a reason.Community politics, maybe.My guess is he's concerned about perception."
"Yeah, but whose?"
"His own people's, maybe.The tribal council.Elders who remember the land disputes."
"That's pretty old history."
"Not for everyone."Ben was quiet for a moment, then said, "My grandfather used to tell me about the partition.Not the legal details—I learned those in school.But what it felt like.Having federal bureaucrats draw lines on a map and tell families they were on the wrong side, that they had to move.Some Hopi families living on what got designated Navajo land.Navajo families living on what got designated Hopi land.The government solution was to force relocations."
Kari had heard similar stories from her own family, though from the other perspective.The Navajo-Hopi land dispute had been a wound that never fully healed, a source of resentment and pain on both sides.Federal law had attempted to resolve competing claims to the same territory, but the solution—dividing the land and requiring thousands of people to relocate—had satisfied no one and created new grievances.
"Ruth told me about families she knew who had to leave land they'd lived on for generations," Kari said."She said it broke something in people.Not just losing their homes, but being told their connection to the land wasn't valid anymore.That someone else's claim was more legitimate."
"Same thing happened to Hopi families," Ben said."It wasn't one-sided.Both peoples lost something."
The road curved around a mesa, and in the distance, Kari could see the edge of the Hopi reservation proper—the mesas where villages had stood for nearly a thousand years, some of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America.It was a landscape of deep time and deeper memory, where every rock formation had a story and every spring had a name in a language that predated European contact by centuries.
"I studied some of this at ASU," Kari said."The anthropological perspective.My mother used to say that academics loved to analyze the conflict, write papers about competing land use patterns and cultural differences, but they rarely acknowledged the human cost.The actual people caught in the middle."
"Your mother was Navajo, though.Did she ever work with Hopi communities?"
"Sometimes.She tried to approach her research with respect for all the tribes in the region.But yeah, she was conscious of her own position, her own biases."Kari thought about the files in the archives, about Anna's investigation that had crossed tribal boundaries."She believed that the artificial divisions between tribes—the hard borders, the enrollment rules—those were colonial constructs.That historically, there was more fluidity, more connection."
"There was also conflict," Ben said."Long before any Europeans showed up.Different peoples, different territories, competition for resources.It wasn't all peaceful coexistence."
"No, but it was different.More like..."Kari searched for the right words."Like family feuds, maybe.Arguments between people who knew each other, who sometimes intermarried, and who shared trading relationships.Not the formalized, legalistic hostility that the federal government created with its partition lines."
