McKean S02 Blood Tide (2 page)

“Get some saxitoxin and crosslink it chemically to diphtheria toxoid and inject it into some mice and we’ll make a therapeutic monoclonal antitoxin. What say?” I couldn’t hear Janet’s reply but knowing the two of them as I do, I had no doubt she was bravely shouldering her new burden of lab work. And I had little doubt that an invention of McKean’s brilliant scientific mind, even one conceived on a drizzly day while riding in my Mustang, would lead to a medicine of great potential. That’s just the way things tend to work out with Dr. Peyton McKean.

“I should have started this project long ago,” he explained after getting off the phone. “But shellfish poisoning is so rare, and so rarely fatal, that no big pharmaceutical company has an interest in developing the antitoxin. I’ll bet Kay Erwin would gladly test my antibodies someday on a desperate patient.”

“Anti what?” I asked, my mind more on a road-raging tailgater than McKean’s conceptualizing.

“Antibodies,” McKean replied. “The body’s own natural antitoxin molecules. I’ve just asked Janet to begin preparing some by immunizing mice against saxitoxin. It’s all pretty straightforward.”

As I drove downtown he did his best to explain how antibody proteins could bind saxitoxin molecules and remove them from a victim’s circulation, thereby preventing them from reaching nerve cells and doing their damage. Eventually, I dropped him off at Immune Corporation’s waterfront headquarters, where he intended to work through the evening with Janet. Then I headed home to my apartment in Belltown and sipped a happy-hour glass of red wine with blood orange soda in it, my head full of wonder at how quickly McKean could get involved in a new science project, and full of doubts as to how all this could solve the case at hand.

* * * * *

Nothing happened for a week or two and as time went by I began to think the case had been forgotten. But I was underestimating McKean’s keen, dogged persistence on any question that piques his prodigious curiosity. On a morning that dawned gray and cold Peyton McKean called before I left my apartment and summoned me to pick him up at his labs to continue the investigation. I drove us back to West Seattle and onto West Marginal Way again, from which McKean pointed me onto Puget Way, which branched off and snaked up Puget Creek Canyon, a damp, fern-bottomed, tree-choked gorge. Near the top of the canyon, McKean directed me onto a small moss-lined alleyway that led to a tree-shrouded home site.

The small cottage of perhaps nineteen-thirties vintage was overhung by the adjacent alder and Douglas fir woods; its old-fashioned asbestos shingles were coated in faded and chipping turquoise blue paint streaked with dark mildew. Despite its decrepitude, the home seemed neatly kept with blooming rhododendron bushes at the front behind an unpainted, lichen-crusted but orderly picket fence. Under a leaf littered, corrugated-fiberglass roofed carport beside the house, sat the blue pickup truck Frank Squalco had been driving when we last saw him.

The windows of the house were dark, but McKean went to the door and rang the bell several times. There was no response, so we got back in my Mustang.

“I visited Franky here several times when I was young,” murmured McKean. “I remember that his aunt used to live a block or two away. Let’s try there.”

Moments later I pulled the Mustang up in front of another old, small house set into the woods on the rim of the canyon. This one struck me as much less appealing than Frank’s rather spare accommodations. The house had dark red stained cedar shingles on its sides, a few of which had dropped loose, and a mossy roof with a blue plastic tarp covering a patch where rain had breached the decaying shakes. A central chimney spewed a lazy stream of wood smoke. The hillside yard was home to a jumble of trash, including a cracked and useless children’s plastic wading pool mired with a decade’s worth of black leaf litter, and a large number of black plastic garbage bags tossed years ago into the underbrush and overgrown with salmonberry brambles. There was a car on wooden blocks on a drive behind the house with its wheels missing. On one side of the house lay a tall and chaotic pile of alder cordwood.

We got out of my Mustang and climbed the mossy concrete steps of the front porch. McKean held up a hand and paused to listen. From inside came a slow Native American drumbeat accompanying a male voice singing in a high pitch - a tremulous wail of indecipherable syllables punctuated now and then by unfamiliar consonants: a
“thloo”
here, a
“t’say”
there. McKean nodded in thoughtful recognition.

“Lushootseed,” he whispered.

“Lu-what?”

“The local branch of the Salish language family. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I listened a moment, thinking McKean’s definition of beautiful and mine might vary by a bit, but enjoying the song until it ended with three strong drumbeats.

McKean rapped three times on the cracked green paint of the weather-beaten door and soon we were greeted by an old, gray, short, and almost toothless lady in a flowered dress and wool sweater, whose round wrinkled face broke into a broad gummy grin at the sight of McKean.

“Ah!” she cried in a tiny but vibrant voice. “You! After so much time. Welcome!”

Hobbling and leaning on a short cane carved in Northwest Native American totem figures, she ushered us into a dim, crowded front room with knick knack laden shelves, carved Northwest Native artwork on the walls, antique-looking furniture, sheer-curtained windows and a mangy smelling old Persian carpet. A dilapidated couch was occupied by two old mongrel dogs that seemed too tired to lift their heads, let alone bark. And there, leaning forward in an overstuffed chair whose arms were losing their stuffing, sat Frank Squalco, holding a round tambourine-like drum in one hand and a leather-headed mallet in the other.

“
Wi’aats!”
he said, smiling up at my tall companion who nodded a hello.

“Peyton McKean!” the old woman remarked. “I was teaching Franky a song to call more salmon home and instead we called Franky’s old friend.”

She introduced herself to me as Clara Seaweed and offered McKean a creaking but comfortable rocking chair near the fireplace, relegating me to the only other seat available, a corner of the couch next to one of the almost hairless, spotted mongrels. As I sank self-consciously into the rank-smelling cushions, a set of rusty springs croaked.

Clara, despite her heavy limp, bustled into the kitchen and fetched a tray with three plastic glasses containing Cokes on ice, which she set between us on a small glass coffee table.

“I brought Auntie Clara some fresh-caught salmon this morning,” Frank began. “What brings you here?”

“I came to discuss red tide poison,” McKean replied firmly.

“I know you did,” Frank conceded, his congeniality fading. He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees, looking nervously from McKean to Clara, who stood in the kitchen doorway, eyeing him as expectantly as McKean did. He seemed to realize the only words possible in this room were truthful ones, and started without further prompting. “Shamans used to make a kind of potion from red tide.”

“How was that done?” McKean perked up like a dog on a scent.

“Don’t know.”

“But you know something. I could see it on your face the other day.”

Frank looked at the floor. “Yeah. I know something.” He looked up at McKean and said, “Henry George knows how to make the poison.”

“Perhaps he’s our murderer,” I remarked, to a resounding silence.

“Naw,” replied Frank. “He’s a harmless old geezer, part Muckleshoot and part Suquamish.”

“And all crazy,” Clara interjected. “Stays with folks on charity. Been under this roof a few times.”

“But he’s a real shaman,” Frank insisted. “Knows the old ways. Told me once when I was a kid about making red tide poison. I don’t remember much except you skim the pink foam off the water, then you make it into poison.”

“Where can we find this Henry George?” asked McKean.

“He sometimes stays down along the river in our village.”

“Village?” I questioned. “I didn’t see any Indian village down there.”

“Our village is gone,” Squalco muttered. “White folks burned us out in the 1890s - nothin’ left standing. Old longhouses used to be across the street from where they’re building the new longhouse.”

“Or,” Clara added, “try upriver at Terminal 107. Our village was all along there. Went on for a mile or so on the Duwamish riverbanks. You look for Henry anywhere in there. A lot of bushes and trees and places to camp.”

Further conversation brought little further insight, so after a pleasant morning we left to search for Henry George. When I remarked that it was nearing noon and I’d gotten hungry, McKean suggested we pick up a quick lunch at The Spud on Alki Beach, not far away on the west side of the West Seattle peninsula. We got two orders of fish and chips from the friendly counter staff, sprinkled with garlic vinegar and wrapped in blue and white paper, and two Cokes to go. I drove us to the parking lot at Herring’s House Park where we ate lunch in the car to avoid a drizzle and then got out to search for Henry George. After some poking around along the gravel trials that crisscrossed the wet undergrowth paralleling a meandering loop of the main river channel, McKean sniffed the air, then began following his nose until he’d pushed through some wet brush to come upon a large culvert through which Puget Creek emptied into the Duwamish River. Inside, we found the old man camped beside the trickling stream on the concrete floor of a dry side culvert in a lean-to he’d fashioned from sticks, clothesline cords, and some tattered blue tarps. He was scraggly-bearded, dressed in soiled blue jeans and a heavy cotton shirt and wrapped in a cape that appeared to have been woven from cedar bark fibers, and barefoot, despite the chill of a wet day. He sat near a small, smoldering little fire made of deadfall twigs.

“Poison?” he said with a bitter grimace that bared a gap where a front tooth had gone missing, when McKean explained our interest. “I got white man’s poison in me right now. Alcohol. Tide’s running against Duwamish people these days. We had it running our way a few years ago when Clinton signed a piece of paper saying Duwamish was a recognized tribe. Then Bush came along and crossed out every order Clinton made. Just like that. Swept us out like trash. A’yahos knows why.”

“A’yahos?” I asked, getting out a pen and notepad. “Who’s that?”

“The two-headed serpent spirit, like the river slithering first this way, then that way, with the tide. He brings strong medicine from the sea, but he can take away stuff too, like people’s lives. He’s part of the balance of nature. In, out, back, forth, everything moves in time to the tides. Someday the white man’s tide will go out.”

McKean scowled, impatient to learn what we’d come to find out. “Can you tell us,” he said, stooping to look George in the eye, “how to make red tide poison?”

The old man stared at McKean for a moment, then picked up a stick and poked at his little smoldering fire. “You take two canoes out on a calm day, towing one behind the other. You find some big eddy lines of the pinkest foam on the water. Then you take your paddle and skim the foam and put it in the second canoe until it’s full to the gunnels. Then you paddle somewhere people can’t see, like over on Muddy Island, and you mix the foam with sea water and some pieces of whale blubber.”

“Who can get whale blubber?” I asked.

“Indian people can get lots of stuff.” He flashed a gap-toothed grin. “After you soak up enough poison to make the blubber blood red all the way to the middle, then you put the blubber in a pot and add firewood ashes and heat it till it melts. Then you skim off the grease, and the water’s all dark red now. Then you dry it. It’s a blackish red powder. Don’t taste like nothing. Don’t smell like nothing. Just poisons folks real good. Lotta work, though. Takes all the foam you can get into a boat to make a few doses. Takes a lotta time.”

“Assuming you’re working alone,” McKean remarked.

“Shamans always work alone. You don’t ask your mother to help you gather poison. She’d tell everyone.”

McKean questioned George further but there was little else to be gleaned, especially as the old man sipped cheap wine from a pint flask until his face went beet red and his eyelids drooped. Finally he lay down and fell asleep next to his cold fire.

We left Henry George sleeping and headed back along the footpath toward the parking lot. Suddenly, in the densest part of the thicket, we found our way blocked by a young Indian man who stared at us angrily. He was dressed in a long black leather coat. His long black hair was braided on each side and he wore a deep scowl on his otherwise handsome dark face. Most ominously, he carried a woodsman’s hatchet in one hand.

“What you white folks want with Henry George?”

McKean responded without showing fear, though plenty was working inside me. “We’re here about a poisoning,” he said evenly. “You know anything?”

“Wouldn’t tell you if I did. You leave the old man alone.”

McKean sized up the young man. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Won’t tell you that either. Now you’d best move along.” He stepped aside to let us pass, pointing the way with his hatchet. We went on and he tailed us back to the parking lot, keeping his distance.

Nervous about his intentions, I hurried into my car and quickly fired the engine while McKean got in. As I drove away, the young man stopped beside a shiny black Dodge Ram pickup that hadn’t been there before, conversing sullenly with its occupant, a tall man silhouetted through a tinted windshield. I turned onto West Marginal Way and headed for downtown, slugging down some Coke to sooth a fear-parched throat. “Now what?” I asked.

McKean tapped his own Coke against mine in a mock toast and took a long pull. “Leave nothing but footprints,” he quipped, “and take nothing but pictures.” He held his cell phone so I could see the image on its screen. He’d snapped a photo of the man beside the pickup. “We’ll ask Frank to tell us who that is. Oh, and a bonus,” he said. “I got their license plate in the shot.”

Peyton McKean is, among other things, the inventor of a couple dozen widely used DNA forensic tests, so he’s pretty well connected for a man who doesn’t carry a detective’s badge. As I drove, he called an acquaintance who owed him a favor, Vince Nagumo of the Seattle FBI Office. Within minutes, Nagumo had identified the owner of the pickup as Craig Showalter, age thirty, of White Center. McKean asked him to look into the man’s background and Nagumo promised to get on it right away.