Canyon State University's Anthropological Research Division looked almost abandoned on a Saturday morning. Kari recognized her father's sedan in its usual spot near the east entrance. He'd probably been here for hours already, preparing for this conversation the way he prepared for everything—methodically, thoroughly, leaving nothing to chance.
Twenty years with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit had trained James Cooper to approach every problem systematically, to build cases from evidence rather than intuition. It was what had made him an excellent profiler and, Kari suspected, a difficult husband to Anna Chee, whose anthropological work had been guided as much by cultural intuition as by empirical data.
Eventually, those differences became too much. Anna had returned to the reservation, to her mother Ruth and thetraditional knowledge she'd been raised with. James had stayed in Flagstaff, remarrying and building a second life in academia.
And Kari had spent her teenage years shuttling between two worlds, never quite belonging fully to either.
She'd thought she'd made peace with that fractured heritage. Then Anna had died, and suddenly all those carefully compartmentalized pieces of Kari's identity had come crashing together, not least of all because of the strange circumstances surrounding her death.
James was waiting at his desk, surrounded by manila folders and yellow legal pads covered in his precise handwriting. He looked up as she entered, and despite the week that had passed since they'd last spoken, Kari could see the weight of what he'd discovered still pressing on him.
"You look better," he observed, gesturing to the chair across from his desk. "More rested."
"I needed the week." Kari accepted the coffee he poured from a thermos. "The Hopi case had more loose ends than I expected."
"I read the preliminary reports. Seems like David Lomatuway'ma was quite determined to protect his daughter's adoption secret." James shook his head. "Good intentions can lead down dangerous paths."
Kari didn't want to dwell on it. "But that's not why I'm here."
"No." James pulled the nearest folder toward him. "I went through all seventeen case files that Anna had flagged in her research. Cross-referenced them with federal databases, tribal police records, everything I could access through my university credentials and old FBI contacts."
"And?"
"Most of them show exactly the pattern you suspected. Deaths officially ruled as accidents or natural causes, but with enough inconsistencies in the investigations to raise questions." He opened the folder, revealing crime scene photos, autopsyreports, witness statements. "A Navajo man found dead near Canyon de Chelly, ruled as exposure despite being an experienced outdoorsman who knew the area intimately. A Hopi woman who died in a fall at a ceremonial site she'd climbed dozens of times. A Zuni elder who supposedly drowned in a creek that was barely knee-deep."
Kari leaned forward, scanning the documents. She'd heard about some of these cases before—Ruth had mentioned a few over the years, always with that particular tone suggesting she didn't believe the official explanations. But seeing them laid out together, seeing the pattern emerge, was different.
"Seventeen cases over how many years?" she asked.
"Twenty-three." James pulled out a timeline he'd created, deaths marked along a horizontal axis. "But Anna wasn't just documenting deaths. She was documenting what the victims had in common."
"Which was?"
"They were all people who'd discovered something or were about to expose something. Environmental violations, illegal construction on sacred land, corporate dumping, archaeological looting—things that would have been expensive or embarrassing or criminal if they'd come to light."
James pulled out another sheet covered in Anna's handwriting. "Your mother was building a case that these weren't random accidents. She believed someone—or multiple someones—were systematically silencing indigenous people who threatened corporate or development interests."
Kari felt a chill despite the warm coffee in her hands. "That's a hell of a conspiracy theory."
"I thought so too, at first. But the more I looked at the individual cases, the more connections I found." James spread out several files. "This man was documenting illegal dumping near Shiprock. This woman was preparing to testify aboutconstruction fraud at a casino development. This elder had evidence of archaeological sites being deliberately destroyed to avoid preservation requirements. And in every case, their deaths were ruled accidental quickly—sometimes within days—with investigations that were perfunctory at best."
"Dad." Kari chose her words carefully. "I have to say I'm about surprised you're so… open to this. Not more…"
"Skeptical?" He raised an eyebrow. "I know I like to play devil's advocate. But I've spent the past week going through these files. I've applied every analytical tool I learned at the Bureau, every method for distinguishing real patterns from coincidental clustering. And I keep coming back to the same conclusion: Anna was right. These deaths are connected."
The certainty in his voice made Kari's chest tighten. Her father didn't make statements like that lightly. Twenty years as a behavioral analyst had taught him to be cautious, to qualify his conclusions, to acknowledge alternative explanations. If he was saying this definitively, he'd found something solid.
"So what killed her?" Kari asked quietly. "If she was investigating a pattern of murders disguised as accidents, and then she died in what looked like an accident..."
"It's fishy, no doubt about it. But as far as what actually happened to her, I don't know. That's the honest answer." James's expression grew troubled. "Anna's death fits the pattern in some ways—experienced person dies in terrain she knew well, investigation closes quickly with minimal follow-up. But I can't prove anything beyond that. No smoking gun, no clear suspect, no evidence that would hold up in court."
They sat in heavy silence. When Kari first returned to the reservation, she'd struggled with the question of whether her mother's death had been accidental or not. Now, convinced it hadn't been an accident, she was struggling to figure out who had killed Anna and why.
"Does any one particular case stand out from the seventeen?" she asked.
"Yes." James pulled out a thicker folder from the stack. "Evan Naalnish. Twenty-three years old when he disappeared, fifteen years ago. Unlike the others, there was no body, no crime scene, no official ruling of accidental death. Just a missing person report that went cold after a few months."
Kari opened the folder, finding a photograph of a young Navajo man with an easy smile and intelligent eyes. He wore hiking gear in the photo, standing in front of a distinctive rock formation she didn't immediately recognize.
