CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ben had dreaded many things in his years as a police officer, but nothing quite like this. He sat in the passenger seat of Captain Yazzie's truck, watching the Naalnish house grow larger through the windshield, and felt his stomach tighten with each passing second.
Dorothy Naalnish was waiting on the porch, as if she'd known they were coming.
Maybe she had. Word traveled fast on the reservation, and the FBI's departure hadn't gone unnoticed.
She stood with her hands clasped in front of her, her face composed but her eyes already betraying the fear of what she was about to hear.
Yazzie parked and turned to Ben. "Let me do most of the talking. But if she has questions for you specifically, answer them honestly. She deserves that much."
"Yes, sir."
They walked up the path together, gravel crunching under their boots.
The wind chimes on the porch made their soft, hollow music, and somewhere in the distance, a dog was barking.
Normal sounds, everyday sounds, as if the world didn't know that it was about to break an old woman's heart all over again.
"Captain Yazzie. Detective Tsosie." Dorothy took a slow, steadying breath. "Come inside. I'll make coffee."
"Mrs. Naalnish, you don't have to—"
"I'll make coffee." She turned and walked into the house, leaving them to follow.
The interior was the same as Ben remembered from previous visits, the walls covered with photographs of Evan at various ages, the furniture worn but clean, the air carrying the faint scent of sage and cedar.
Dorothy moved to the kitchen and began preparing coffee with the automatic motions of someone who needed to keep her hands busy.
They sat at the kitchen table and waited.
Ben studied the photographs on the nearest wall, a timeline of a life cut short.
Evan as a toddler, grinning at the camera.
Evan as a teenager, holding a rock he'd found somewhere, his face alight with discovery.
Evan as a young man, standing at the edge of a canyon with the wind in his hair.
He wondered what that young man would have become if he'd been allowed to live. A geologist, maybe. A teacher. A father. All the possibilities erased by someone who'd decided his life was worth less than whatever secret he'd stumbled onto.
Dorothy set cups of coffee in front of them and lowered herself into a chair. Her eyes moved from Yazzie to Ben and back again, reading their faces.
"The FBI isn't going to find out who killed my son," she said. "That's what you've come to tell me."
Yazzie took a breath. "Mrs. Naalnish, the FBI has concluded their investigation. Their official finding is that Evan's death was inconclusive. They weren't able to determine whether it was murder or an accident."
Dorothy's hands tightened around her coffee cup, but her expression didn't change. "Inconclusive."
"They cited the condition of the remains and the lack of witnesses. They said they couldn't justify the resources for a full investigation without more evidence."
"More evidence." Dorothy shook her head scornfully.
Ben couldn't stay silent. "Mrs. Naalnish, I'm sorry. I know this isn't what you wanted to hear. It isn't what any of us wanted."
"What I wanted was justice for my son. What I wanted was for someone to tell me who killed him and why.
" For a moment, Dorothy's face became a battleground between grief and fury.
Then she pulled herself back together. "Fifteen years I've waited for answers.
Fifteen years of hoping, praying, refusing to give up even when everyone told me I should accept that he was gone.
And now the federal government tells me they can't be bothered to find out what happened. "
"The good news," Yazzie said gently, "is that they're releasing Evan's remains. You can finally lay him to rest properly."
"Lay him to rest." Dorothy laughed, a sound without any humor in it. "I suppose I'd better make extra room in that grave for the truth of what happened to him."
They sat in silence for a moment. Ben looked at Yazzie, who gave a small nod. It was the permission Ben had been waiting for.
"Mrs. Naalnish," Ben said carefully, "the FBI may be done investigating. But I'm not."
Dorothy's eyes sharpened. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that I don't believe the official story any more than you do.
I saw what was done to Evan. That wasn't a rock fall or a cave collapse.
Someone killed him, and someone went to a lot of trouble to hide what happened.
" Ben held her gaze steadily. "I can't investigate officially.
The land where he was found isn't in our jurisdiction.
But on my own time, in my own way, I'm going to keep looking.
I'm going to find out who bought that land and why.
And if there's any way to connect them to your son's death, I'll find that too. "
Yazzie shifted in his chair but didn't contradict him. They'd discussed this on the drive over, the limits of what Ben could and couldn't promise. The captain hadn't forbidden him from continuing to investigate, as long as he was careful about it.
Dorothy studied Ben's face for a long moment. Whatever she saw there seemed to satisfy her, because some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
"Anna Chee believed my son was murdered," she said. "She came to me, asked questions, said she was going to find out what happened. And then she died, and nothing ever came of it."
"I've been going through Anna's files," Ben said. "She was building a case. Not just about Evan, but about a pattern of deaths stretching back decades. People who found out things they weren't supposed to know, who died under suspicious circumstances."
"And now her daughter is continuing her work."
"Kari is part of this, yes. She and I are working together." Ben paused. "Mrs. Naalnish, I can't promise you that we'll find the answers. The people behind this have money, power, and connections that we don't. But I can promise you that we won't stop looking. Evan deserves that. And so do you."
Dorothy was quiet for a long moment. Then she stood and walked to one of the walls covered with photographs. She removed a picture of Evan as a young man, maybe twenty or twenty-one, holding a notebook and smiling at the camera.
"This was taken a few months before he disappeared," she said.
"He'd just found something in one of the caves he was exploring.
Something that excited him. He wouldn't tell me what it was, said he needed to do more research before he could explain it.
" She handed the photograph to Ben. "He never got the chance. "
Ben took the photograph carefully. Evan's face was full of the enthusiasm of someone who'd discovered something important, something that mattered. A young man on the verge of understanding something significant.
And someone had killed him for it.
"I'll find out what he discovered," Ben said. "Whatever it takes."
They left soon after, Dorothy standing on the porch again, watching them drive away. Ben turned to look back and saw her still there, a small figure against the vast landscape, holding vigil for a son who'd been denied justice for fifteen years.
That night, Ben spread Anna Chee's files across his kitchen table and began again from the beginning.
Seventeen deaths, spanning five decades.
Each one ruled an accident or natural causes.
Each one involving someone who'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time, who'd seen or heard or discovered something that made them a target.
He wasn't looking for the details of the deaths this time. He was looking for something else. The aftermath. What happened to the land where each victim had died, or had been investigating, or had stumbled onto something they shouldn't have.
Three hours later, his eyes burning from reading Anna's cramped handwriting, he found it.
Evan Naalnish wasn't the only one. There were two other cases in Anna's files, where the victim had died on or near land that was purchased shortly afterward by a shell company.
Different names, different states of incorporation, but the same pattern: a death, a quick sale at an inflated price, and then the land locked away behind fences and "no trespassing" signs.
Anna had started mapping the connections. She'd drawn lines between the cases, noted similarities in the corporate structures, begun building a timeline. But the work was incomplete. She'd died before she could finish it.
Ben stared at the documents spread across his table. Three deaths, three land purchases, three pieces of property that someone had paid a fortune to control. What was on that land? What had Evan Naalnish and the others found that was worth killing for?
He thought about what Ruth had said about sacred sites and nuclear tests, about geological anomalies. Something was being hidden. Something big enough that people had killed to protect it for decades.
The answers were here. He could feel it. He just had to keep looking until he found them.