Close To Midnight (Kari Blackhorse #7)

PROLOGUE

The blue glow of the computer monitor was the only light in Patricia Lomahongva's home office, casting her face in an ethereal pallor that made her look older than her sixty-two years.

Outside, the Arizona desert night pressed against the window, vast and silent except for the occasional whisper of wind through the sage.

She should have been in bed hours ago. Her husband Jonas would be asleep by now in their bedroom down the hall, probably snoring softly the way he did when he lay on his back.

But sleep felt impossible when she was this close.

Patricia adjusted her reading glasses and leaned closer to the screen, her arthritic fingers moving carefully across the keyboard.

The spreadsheet before her contained eighteen months of meticulous work—DNA analysis results, genealogical research, family trees that branched and interwove in patterns that had surprised even her.

She'd been doing genealogical research for thirty years, had helped dozens of families trace their lineages, had untangled countless puzzles of ancestry and connection.

But this project was different. This project was revealing truths that made people uncomfortable.

Truths that some people might not want revealed at all.

She scrolled through the data, her trained eye picking out the patterns that would be invisible to most people.

Genetic markers that told stories of movement across the Southwest, of connections between communities that official tribal enrollment records—the legal documentation each tribe maintained to determine membership and citizenship—had obscured or denied.

It was beautiful, really, when you looked at it objectively—a testament to centuries of human interaction, of families crossing boundaries, of love and marriage and children born into complex heritages.

But she knew how it would be received. She'd seen it already in the faces of the study participants when she shared their results privately.

Some had been curious, even delighted, eager to understand the full complexity of their ancestry.

Others had been confused, processing information that challenged their understanding of who they were.

And a few—a very few—had reacted with something that looked like anger, or fear, or both.

Patricia pulled up one of those files now, studying it with the same careful attention she'd given to all the others.

The subject's maternal line showed clear genetic markers from multiple tribal groups, not just Hopi.

The paternal line was even more complex.

Together, they painted a picture of heritage that was roughly thirty percent Hopi and seventy percent from neighboring peoples, primarily Navajo but with traces of other Pueblo ancestry as well.

On paper, it was just data. Numbers, percentages, and genetic markers with technical names.

But to the person who carried those genes, to someone who had built an entire identity around being purely Hopi, who had dedicated their life to preserving Hopi culture and traditions—Patricia could only imagine how shattering such a revelation might be.

She'd tried to be compassionate when she'd shared the results in their private consultation.

She'd explained that genetic ancestry was just one aspect of identity, that culture was learned and lived, that a lifetime of connection to Hopi traditions was not diminished by the presence of other ancestral lines.

She'd offered resources, suggested counseling, recommended books and articles about navigating complex heritage.

The subject had listened politely, had even thanked her for her thoroughness. But Patricia had seen something in those eyes that troubled her—a kind of rigidity, an inability to process the information as anything other than a betrayal.

She'd made a note in the file: May need additional follow-up. Recommend a delay in including results in the public presentation.

That had been three weeks ago. She hadn't heard from the subject since, despite two follow-up emails and a phone message. The silence worried her more than anger would have.

Patricia closed that file and opened another, then another.

So many families. So many stories. She thought about the presentation she was planning for next month—a community gathering where she would share the broad findings of the study without identifying specific individuals.

She would talk about the beautiful complexity of Hopi ancestry, about the porousness of boundaries that modern politics tried to make rigid, about how understanding these connections could help heal old wounds between neighboring communities.

She knew it was naive to think everyone would receive the information with the same academic detachment she felt. But she believed in transparency. She believed in truth. And she believed that people deserved to know their own histories, even when those histories were complicated.

A soft sound from outside made her pause, her fingers hovering over the keyboard. She tilted her head, listening. Footsteps on the gravel driveway?

She glanced at the clock in the corner of her screen: 11:47 PM. Sometimes people came to her house directly when they had questions about the study, too shy or too urgent to wait for her office hours at the Cultural Center. But it was almost midnight.

She saved her work and pushed back from the desk, her chair creaking.

Her office was cluttered with the accumulation of decades of research—filing cabinets stuffed with genealogical records, bookshelves sagging under the weight of reference materials, cork boards covered with family tree diagrams and sticky notes.

On the wall behind her desk hung her master's degree in anthropology from Northern Arizona University, earned thirty-five years ago when she was a young woman with more energy than wisdom.

The footsteps were clearer now, approaching the front porch.

Patricia made her way through the darkened house, not bothering to turn on lights—she knew every step of this path, had walked it thousands of times.

The living room was neat and spare, furnished with pieces she and Jonas had accumulated over four decades of marriage.

Wedding photos. Grandchildren's drawings. A Hopi basket her mother had woven, its coiled geometry a testament to patience and skill.

Through the front window, she could see a figure standing on the porch, backlit by the pale moonlight.

The person was waiting, not knocking yet.

Something about the stillness of the figure gave her a moment's hesitation.

But this was her home, on the Hopi reservation, in the community where she'd lived her entire life. Fear was not her first instinct.

She unlocked the door and opened it, expecting to see a familiar face. But she couldn't tell whether she knew this person or not.

Because the person on her porch wore a mask.

Patricia's mind struggled to process what she was seeing.

It was a ceremonial mask, traditional in style but wrong somehow—the left side showed Hopi design elements, katsinam features she recognized from a lifetime of dances and ceremonies.

But the right side was different, showing patterns that didn't belong, symbols from another tradition entirely.

"Can I help you?" she asked, her voice uncertain. Her hand remained on the doorknob.

The figure didn't speak. The mask's eye holes were dark, revealing nothing of the person beneath.

"I'm sorry, but it's very late," she tried again, her tone firmer now. "If you need to discuss the study, you can make an appointment at the Cultural Center. I have office hours on—"

The figure moved.

It happened so quickly that Patricia's mind couldn't track the sequence of actions.

One moment, the figure was standing on the threshold.

The next, there was movement, a blur of motion that brought them close, too close.

She tried to step back, tried to close the door, but a hand—strong, gloved—caught the edge of the door and pushed.

Patricia stumbled backward into her living room. Fear, real fear, flooded her system for the first time. This wasn't a confused study participant. This wasn't someone seeking answers about their heritage. This was something else entirely.

"Who are you?" she demanded, her voice sharp with the authority of a woman who had spent decades teaching, researching, commanding respect in academic and community settings. "What do you want?"

The masked figure said nothing. The silence was more terrifying than any threat would have been. Behind the mask, she could hear breathing—steady, controlled, purposeful.

Patricia's mind raced. Jonas was asleep in the bedroom, too far away to hear unless she screamed, and even then, she wasn't sure she'd wake him from a deep sleep.

Her phone was back in the office. The nearest neighbor was a quarter mile down the road.

She was sixty-two years old with arthritis in her knees and hands. She could not run. She could not fight.

But she could try to reason with this stranger.

"You don't need to do this," she said, her voice steadier than she felt. "Whatever's wrong, whatever the problem is, I can help you."

The figure moved again, and this time Patricia saw the knife.

It was traditional too—a blade that might have been used in ceremonies, or for craft work, or for preparing food.

Patricia tried to scream, but the sound caught in her throat. She stumbled backward, knocking over a side table. A lamp crashed to the floor, its bulb shattering. The sound was loud in the quiet house, but not loud enough to wake Jonas, whose snoring continued unabated down the hall.

The figure advanced with terrible patience. There was no rage in the movements, no frenzy. This was methodical. Ritualistic, almost. As if the person behind the mask was performing a ceremony they had rehearsed, following steps laid out in some twisted internal script.

Patricia's back hit the wall. There was nowhere left to go.

"Please," she whispered. It was not a word she used often, this woman of facts and research and academic rigor. But in the face of this masked violence, it was all she had left. "Please."

"The password." The voice was muffled by the mask, urgent. "Give me the password to the encrypted files."

Patricia's mind raced. That's what this was about?

She could give up the password. She could save herself. But then what? Everything she'd worked for, all those families' histories, would be destroyed or manipulated. The truth would die with her silence.

And she had no guarantee it would even save her own life.

"I don't—I can't—" she stammered.

"Yes, you can."

Patricia swallowed hard. To her own surprise, a sense of defiance rose up in her. She wasn't going to betray those people, not even to save her own skin.

"No," she said firmly. "I won't do it. I'm not giving it to you."

There was a long silence as the stranger studied her. Then: "Wrong answer."

The knife caught the moonlight filtering through the window, a bright slash of silver in the darkness.

Patricia Lomahongva's last thought was not of fear, or pain, or even of the person killing her. It was of all the families whose stories remained untold, all the complex truths about ancestry and identity that would die with her if her research was suppressed or destroyed.

She hoped someone would continue the work.

She hoped the truth would not die here, on the floor of her living room, beneath a mask that represented a fractured soul and a community too afraid to face its own complicated history.

The knife descended.

And the desert night pressed closer against the windows, vast and silent and keeping its secrets.