When Silence Screams

Arthur Nakai, now armed with his newly minted Private Investigator license, has visitors at his doorstep on White Mesa. Melanie Manygoats and her young son arrive on a cold winter’s day asking him to locate her missing daughter, whom she fears has become one of the stolen. Arthur accepts and soon finds himself wading through the world of teenage prostitution where he discovers April has already been sold into the darker, more horrifying world of human trafficking and sexual slavery. Arthur’s quest quickly leads him to a man known to everyone in the trade as The Cuban. Running underage girls is his business; to him they are nothing more than property to be microchipped and tattooed to ensure they never leave his employment. For The Cuban, the door of the flesh trade is always revolving—and his clients are always looking for fresher faces and younger girls to please their insatiable appetites. Meanwhile, Navajo Nation Police Captain Jake Bilagody has his own problems: a fifteen-year-old girl is missing, and all that was left behind was a bicycle hidden among scrub trees under a bridge over an empty desert wash. Are the cases related or are they simply part of a bigger, more disturbing picture plaguing Arthur’s beloved Dinétah?