McKean S03 The Ghost Trees (2 page)

“An impressive undertaking,” McKean mused, choosing not to acknowledge George’s remark. “Given the size of these trees, the value of the wood must have been tremendous even in those days.”

The old man’s scowl deepened. “Killed for money. I see these marks and I know the tree’s spirit is not at rest. Not like the trees my ancestors took. We honored them. Took their lives with ceremonies, with respect, and with a good reason, not for money. We cut trees with stone axes, and we prayed to the tree while we worked. Asked its forgiveness and asked it to bless the dugout canoe or longhouse or totem we made from it. Those’s the only good reasons to take down a big cedar.

“After the trees was cut, our fishermen came “round and prayed to the stumps every once in a while and thanked them for becoming a good canoe, and for the good hunting and fishing. I don’t think any pioneers ever came back and prayed to the stumps they left behind. Just took the money they got and disappeared. That makes a tree’s spirit mad, givin” up their life for nothing but money. Makes “em into ghost trees. Mad ghosts. Native people’s stumps, they’re happy they gave their wood to us. They feel like they’s still a part of it all if they got made into a totem or part of a longhouse. They’s proud when you catch a lot of fish in a canoe made from one of “em.”

Peyton McKean paused in silent thought at those remarks. George gestured forward with his staff. “Come on, you haven’t met Grandmother yet.”

He led on into a high-vaulted, cathedral-like open space where cedars spread their branches a hundred feet above a cavernous gap in the otherwise dense forest. In the center stood a truly immense stump, twenty feet across at the root level and topped off, fifteen feet above us, by a horizontal saw cut grown ragged with time and rot, overgrown by a wreath-like fringe of huckleberry bushes.

“The stump of a fine old tree,” McKean murmured. “It might have grown for two thousand years before it fell.”

“She,” the old man corrected. “Peyton McKean and Fin Morton, meet Grandmother Tree. She’s the biggest stump around. The tree that seeded all the younger ones around here before she got killed by loggers. Some of her children seeded even younger trees. That’s why I call her Grandmother.”

The huge stump seemed simultaneously immense, majestic, and tragic. “Look at Grandmother’s face,” George said. Beneath the stump’s severed top were three springboard slots, two above and one below in an arrangement reminiscent of the eyes and mouth of a human face.

“Don’t her face look a little mean?”

“Answer: yes,” McKean agreed. “Those narrow slits for eyeholes look angry, and the slit-like mouth seems bitter.”

“Think maybe she wants revenge?”

McKean remarked, “I’ll allow that her narrow eyes and mouth make her appear somewhat stern, but - ”

“Nobody ever said thanks to her for her wood,” the old man muttered. “Nobody ever came back and shared the happiness of a good fishing trip or a new house built from her. Just sent the wood off to a sawmill for money. She’s got a right to be mad. Gave up her life for money. Stumps all over this land is mad like that.”

He grasped his walking stick in both hands and held it up in a salute to the stump. Then, in a sing-song voice, he began an incantation. My knowledge of the Duwamish tribe’s Lushootseed language was inadequate to follow him, but Franky translated softly. “Grandmother Tree, I pay my respects to you and your family. Yesterday a tree poacher died here. That is good. May they all die, those tree poachers.”

McKean frowned. “I don’t see how all this talk of bygone days helps us determine the true killer.”

The old man grumbled, “Chief Seattle said, ‘Even the dead are not without power,’ so maybe Grandmother Tree’s getting her revenge. Maybe she put thoughts in the head of whoever killed that man.”

“Tell them what you saw yesterday,” Franky urged him.

“I already told the cops.”

“Tell my friend, Peyton McKean.”

George shrugged. “I seen two white men here about dusk yesterday. I’d just finished harvesting a little cedar bark fiber from the trunk of one of Grandmother’s kids for a new sleeping blanket I’m weaving. I heard two pickups come up the canyon road. I hid up here and watched these two guys get out their chain saws and get ready to cut that tree when night fell. They was arguing. The taller one says, ‘You still owe me some money, so all the payoff from this tree is mine.’ ‘No,’ says shorter one, ‘I need some cash now.’ ‘For cocaine, right?’ says the tall guy. ‘I’ll pay you back later,’ says the short guy, ‘when I get some more money.’ ‘

“They sound like dangerous men,” McKean said.

“You got that right,” George agreed. “I slipped away on a deer path and went back to my camp and tried to decide what to do. If I went to call the cops, they’d bust me for vagrancy like before. So I lit my little fire and had me a drink of wine. Pretty soon, night fell and the chain saws started up. I didn’t like to hear it, so I had another drink of pahstud poison. I drank some more, until it got to where I couldn’t hear the chain saws. Pretty soon I passed out. Next morning I came up here ‘cause I wanted to see the body.’

McKean cocked his head. “But if you left before anyone died, how did you know there had been a murder?”

“Crows told me.”

“Crows told you there was a murder?”

“Crows tell a man a lot, if he listens. Next morning when I woke up, they told me somebody died up here. Listen, they’re talking right now.”

We paused. Far up among the branches overhead, three crows engaged in an odd, low-pitched conversation of chortles and cackles as if they were discussing us, or perhaps the case we were investigating. A tingle ran along my spine.
Were they really discussing a murder?

“I see.” McKean broke the spell cast by the conversation of the crows. “You’re saying they gathered to investigate the carrion of a dead man and you heard them.”

“Guess so.” George parted his wiry-mustached lips and sucked at the gap in his teeth.

McKean’s cell phone rang. After a brief conversation he said to me, “That was Officer Stanwood of the Seattle Police Department. She’s got a tip on a fresh pile of cedar wood at a warehouse in South Park.” Within minutes we had left George and Squalco and were headed southbound on West Marginal Way.

South Park is a couple miles upstream along the banks of the Duwamish River. On the way I said, “I still think Henry George did it. After the first pickup left, he came out of hiding and clubbed Olafsen. He’s got a motive in his hatred of tree poachers, he admits he was at the scene, and that walking stick looks like it could be deadly.”

McKean shook his head. “Answer: no. The killer’s traces were right there: the tire tracks indicate two pickups parked side by side. From the density of footprints around each, it appeared to me that the wood from the tree was loaded into both initially. However, I noticed that the tracks of the missing vehicle were doubled up. That is, it came and went a second time. That observation, coupled with my impression that there is a greater density of the larger footprints between the two vehicles, suggest that the wood initially loaded into the victim’s pickup was transferred out of it after he was killed. Hence, the missing tree poacher is our prime suspect.”

“Find the pickup, then, and we find our man.”

“Yes, Fin. And since I don’t believe old Henry George has access to a pickup or shoes with which to leave those prints, he’s cleared. Furthermore, I think we can safely assume the motive was money for poached wood, not fibers for a blanket or vengeance for a tree spirit.”

We arrived a few minutes later at a large concrete-box warehouse in a truck farm built on landfill in what had once been a wetland beside the Duwamish River. Two police cars hemmed in a huge black Dodge Ram pickup truck parked at one of the building’s loading docks.

McKean inspected the truck, which stood much taller than him on jacked up springs and huge knobby tires, like something out of a monster truck rally. “Spotless,” he said. “No mud on the tires, no mess in the back.”

“Not our suspect vehicle then.”

“Unless it’s been through a car wash. We’d be lucky to find any clues on it in that case.”

We entered a large, bare, concrete-floored and -walled warehouse space with rows of suspended fluorescent lights high overhead. The place was nearly empty except for a forklift jitney parked near a large stack of wooden loading pallets, with more pallets on the floor beside the stack. Cedar logs trimmed into mill-ready rectangular shingle bolts one foot by one foot by four feet long, rested on those pallets.

We went to a small well-lit office adjacent to the pile of bolts, where two plainclothes police and a uniformed officer had gathered around a man seated in a dirt-smudged gray leather swivel chair at the desk. The fellow of interest was a tall, firmly built man in jeans and a heavy shirt-coat of red buffalo plaid felt. The expression on his face - knit wooly eyebrows, downturned mouth amid bristling, half-week-old blond beard stubble, and narrowed gray eyes - suggested he was not having a good day.

A fellow whom I assumed was a police detective was sitting on a corner of the desk interrogating the man. Plainclothesed, plainfaced, middle aged, and balding, he said in an exasperated tone, “One more time, where’d you come by all that wood?”

“I told ya,” the man replied angrily in the raspy voice of a heavy smoker, “I cut a cedar tree in my back yard at home. Brought some pieces here to trim into shingle bolts. That’s all.”

The detective shook his head. “And I told you, we’ve already had two officers stop by the premises. There’s a stump all right, but no sawdust or signs of cutting.”

“Yeah, well, what I meant to say was, I cut it a couple years ago and brought the wood here. Just got around to trimming it now.”

“Hi, Doctor McKean!” the uniformed officer called. This dark-haired and dark-eyed young woman who had been scribbling notes on a pad of paper was Emma Stanwood. She pointed a thumb at the interrogator. “Detective Reynolds is in charge here.”

Reynolds got up and turned to us. “Yes, I’m in charge and I’ll have to ask you gentlemen to leave. This is a police matter. We don’t need any interference from - ”

“Peyton McKean,” my friend said, thrusting a thin hand at the detective so quickly that the man clasped it and shook it reflexively. “We’ll keep out of your way.”

Reynolds looked angrily at Stanwood, who shrugged sheepishly. “He was a big help with the Torvald case.”

“Just get him away from here while I talk to Mr. Sturgis, okay?”

Stanwood motioned us to follow her out the office door. We paused by the cedar pile and she pointed a thumb back inside. “The man is Jay Sturgis, nephew of the warehouse’s owner. He’s a felon, convicted for dealing cocaine. He’s on parole and probably sweating a bit right now. The dead man’s another convicted drug dealer. Consorting with a felon’s enough to get his parole revoked. He claims he’s never heard of Bradley Peter Olafsen.”

“He looks unlikely to divulge anything useful,” McKean said. “But let’s consider the evidence. For instance, that ax over there leaning against the wall and, what’s this, a second handle beside it, with no head?” He went to where the ax handle leaned against the wall, lifted it and felt its heft.

“Something wrong with a wood-cutter owning an ax handle?” called Sturgis, who had come to the office door.

“Answer: no,” McKean replied. “But you’ll have to admit, this seems about right for the murder weapon.” He swung the handle left and then right. “That would put a good dent in somebody’s skull.”

“You won’t find anything on it.”

McKean inspected it closely. “It looks extremely clean for a woodsman’s tool.”

“It’s brand new,” Sturgis muttered. “Never used. Never used for nothin,” you understand?”

“Just as clean as your freshly washed pickup,” McKean murmured, “which of course has no incriminating mud on its tires.”

Sturgis spat tobacco juice on the concrete floor. “Is it a crime to wash your ride?”

Stanwood said to McKean, “The tires match the second set of tracks. But without a trace of mud on them, forensics doesn’t have much to go on.”

Detective Reynolds pushed through the doorway past Sturgis and came out of the office. He barked at McKean, “Sir, would you mind keeping your hands off the evidence?”

McKean set the handle down.

“It ain’t evidence of nothing,” Sturgis called.

“Perhaps that’s true,” McKean said. “But this pile of bolts is quite another matter, wouldn’t you agree, Mister Sturgis?”

Sturgis slumped against the doorjamb with a hard set to his jaw. “I wanna talk to my lawyer before this goes any farther.” He went inside the office, picked up the desk phone and started dialing.

Stanwood gestured helplessly to McKean. Speaking in a quiet tone that Sturgis wouldn’t hear in the office, she said, “You can see we’re getting nowhere. He’s not going to cooperate and the evidence is far from convincing.”

“A shame,” McKean replied. “I was hoping to find a viable alternative suspect to Henry George, whom I’m convinced is innocent.”

“Sorry,” Reynolds responded, having joined us along with the other cop. “Until we get something more to go on, we can’t hold Sturgis, and Henry George is still the prime suspect.”

“This is why I called Doctor McKean,” Stanwood said to Reynolds. Then she turned to McKean. “Isn’t there some way to tell different cedar trees apart, like people’s fingerprints? Something in the tree rings, maybe?”

“You could piece together the bolts and trimmings and try to match the stump rings,” McKean replied, “but a good defense attorney would attack the match and probably present some mismatches to confound the argument.” He began to pace with his hands clasped behind his back. Then he abruptly stopped and smiled. “But DNA should offer a much more irrefutable argument. Henry George said every tree has its own spirit. Regardless of the veracity of that claim, it is most certainly true that every tree has its own DNA.”

Stanwood brightened. “You see, I knew calling you was a good idea.” She looked at Reynolds exultantly and he returned a look that implied he remained unconvinced. He eyed McKean narrowly.

“You’re saying you could do some kind of test to compare the DNA of this woodpile to the stump in Puget Creek Canyon?”