by Curt Colbert
The fisherman throttled the boat down and glided into a small inlet on our right, helloed up at us absentmindedly, and then paused to take a long second look as his dingy bumped the beach.
“Peyton McKean!” A grin of recognition spread across his broad, brown, forty-ish Northwest Native American face. “I haven’t seen you in a while. What you doin’ down here where us poor Indians fish?”
“We’re investigating a murder.”
Squalco’s face clouded as he stepped out of his boat and pulled it onto the muddy shore with a bowline, his black rubber rain boots slurping in the muck.
“Torvald?” he said. “Yeah. Too bad. Good geoduck man. But why they got you on the case? You’re not a cop. You’re a DNA man, so I heard. Pretty famous around here. When the Jihad Virus came, your vaccine saved a lot of lives, they say.”
McKean brushed the compliment aside. “Not DNA and not vaccines this time. I’m looking into a case of deliberate red tide poisoning.”
Squalco was transferring three big salmon from the bottom of his boat into a large plastic bucket on the shore. At McKean’s remark, he paused, the third salmon cradled in his arms, one boot in the boat and one in the mud, stooped over. The pause was just momentary, and then he put the salmon in the bucket and turned and faced us where we stood above him on the observation deck. He swallowed hard but said nothing.
“You know something?” McKean asked encouragingly.
Squalco’s eyes shot sideways. “Red tide? Sure,” he said. “Puts poison in the clams. State of Washington orders us not to dig ’em then. We usually do anyway. I never got more’n a little buzz or two from it. Maybe threw up once or twice—but that coulda been the booze, y’know.” He laughed thinly.
“I meant,” McKean persisted, “do you know something about red tide in the murder of Erik Torvald?” At 6'6", McKean had a way of looking imperiously down his long nose at people, and our height above Squalco on the deck amplified this effect until the man flinched. He cast his eyes aside again, and then bent and picked up the bucket with both gloved hands, grunting at its weight. He walked up the mud bank to a dented old blue pickup truck, where he huffed the bucket onto the waiting lowered tailgate, and then said to us, “Gotta go. Got plenty-a hungry mouths to feed.” He closed the tailgate, came back in a hurry, tied the boat’s bowline to the trunk of a small Douglas fir tree, and turned to go. As he reached his truck door, McKean called to him.
“Interesting case.”
Squalco paused before getting in. “Yeah?”
“Massive dose of red tide poison. Died quick. No trace of shellfish in his stomach contents. Any idea why?”
“No,” Squalco replied without conviction, his eyebrows high and mouth round.
“Red tide poison,” said McKean, “is one of the most toxic substances known; a paralytic toxin. First the tongue and lips tingle, then general paralysis sets in.”
“I gotta go,” said Squalco.
He got in and slammed his door and drove off spraying gravel. Watching him speed down the driveway and turn south on West Marginal Way, McKean shook his head.
“Oh, Frank,” he said with a note of regret. “What has my old pal got himself mixed up in?”
Earlier that morning, I had sat at my computer keyboard in my funky old Pioneer Square writing office, working on a boring piece of medical reporting about a new gene therapy for baldness, when I got the phone call from McKean that put me on this case.
He was at the Seattle Public Health Hospital on Pill Hill. “Kay Erwin’s got an interesting case for us,” he’d said. “A dead man with all the signs of red tide poisoning, but there are reasons to suspect foul play. Wanna follow this one?”
Like always, I’d said, “Sure,” and went to meet him. Writing about the exploits of the brilliant Dr. McKean is how I make my best money these days. I caught up with him at the hospital in epidemiologist Kay Erwin’s office.
Kay is another person of interest to me. She’s a small, cute, pageboy brunette, about forty-five, a bit too old for me to ask on a date, but she always has some piece of news for the medical journalist side of me. White lab–coated, she sat behind her office desk and motioned me into a guest chair with McKean in the other, then launched into a quick update.
“Torvald,” she explained, “was found lying comatose beside his pickup, scarcely breathing. The passerby who found him called for help and Torvald was rushed to our ER, where it became clear he had shellfish poisoning symptoms. They pumped his stomach, worked up a blood sample for toxins, and called me in on the case.”
“That’s when things got interesting,” said McKean.
“Yes,” agreed Erwin. “His stomach contents didn’t contain shellfish. In fact, they matched what was found in his car: the remnants of a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder, fries, and a Coke. But the symptoms and the lab analysis are consistent: a massive dose of saxitoxin.”
“Saxitoxin is about a thousand times more toxic than nerve gas,” said McKean.
“But the most anomalous thing,” said Kay, “is that this case doesn’t coincide with an actual red tide. The only red tide on Puget Sound this year was in August, and it’s now late October. Something fishy’s going on.”
“Or rather,” said McKean, “something clammy.”
After Frank Squalco left, I drove us back to McKean’s labs at Immune Corporation, feeling that a long-enough day had already transpired, but McKean was indefatigable. On the way, noting that it was only 4:15 p.m., he called his head technician, Janet Emerson, and barraged her with concepts for a new project. As I chauffeured him back across the West Seattle Bridge, he bubbled to her about red tide microbes and toxins, and ways and means to create a new treatment for paralytic shellfish poisoning.
“Get some saxitoxin and crosslink it 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 the new burden of lab work. And I had little doubt that a creation 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 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. But 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,” said McKean. “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 antibodies could bind saxitoxin molecules and remove them from a victim’s circulation. Eventually, I dropped him off at Immune Corporation’s waterfront headquarters and headed home to my apartment in Belltown with a head full of wonder at how quickly McKean could get involved in a new science project, and doubts as to how all this could solve the case at hand.
Nothing happened for a week or two, but then on a morning that dawned gray and cold, Peyton McKean summoned me to pick him up at his labs and drive to West Seattle to follow a new lead he was exploring. Back on West Marginal Way, McKean pointed me onto Puget Way, which branched off and snaked up the Puget Creek canyon, a damp, fern-bottomed, tree-choked gorge. Up canyon, McKean directed me onto a small moss-covered alleyway that led to a tree-shrouded homesite. The large old house had brick red–painted cedar shingles on its sides, a few of which had dropped loose, a mossy roof with a blue plastic tarp covering a patch where rain had breached the decaying shingles, and a chimney spewing a lazy stream of wood smoke. The hillside yard was home to a jumble of trash, including black plastic garbage bags tossed in the underbrush and
overgrown with blackberry brambles. There was a car behind the house without wheels, held up on wooden blocks, and a chaotic pile of alder cordwood next to the porch.
We got out of my car and climbed the mossy concrete steps, but 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 “tloo” here, a “t’say” there. McKean nodded in thoughtful recognition.
“Lushootseed,” he whispered.
“Lu-what?”
“The local dialect of the Salish language. 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 weather-beaten door and soon we were greeted by an old, gray, short, and almost toothless lady 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!”
She ushered us into a dim, cluttered front room, where a dilapidated couch was occupied by two mongrel dogs that appeared too tired to lift their heads let alone bark and, leaning forward in an overstuffed chair whose arms were losing their stuffing, Frank Squalco, holding a round tambourine-like drum in one hand and a leather-headed mallet in the other.
“Hui!” he said, smiling up at my tall companion, who nodded a hello.
“Peyton McKean,” the old woman said. “I was teaching Franky a song to call the salmon home, and instead we called Franky’s old friend.”
She introduced herself to me as Clara Seaweed, then brought us Cokes on ice and offered McKean a comfortable rocking chair near the fireplace, relegating me to the only other seat available, a corner of the couch next to an almost hairless spotted mongrel. I sank into the mangy-smelling cushion with a set of rusty springs croaking.
“So,” said Frank, “what brings you here?”
“I came to discuss red tide poison,” replied McKean firmly.
“I know you did,” said Frank, his smile fading. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking nervously from McKean to Clara as if realizing the only words possible in this room were truthful ones. He started without prompting.
“Shamans used to make a kind of potion from red tide.”
“How was that done?” asked McKean, perking 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 said, to a resounding silence.
“Naw,” said Frank. “He’s a harmless old geezer, part Muckleshoot and part Suquamish.”
“And all crazy,” interjected Clara. “Stays with folks on charity. Been under this roof a few times.”
“But he’s a real shaman,” said Frank. “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 said. “I didn’t see any Indian village down there.”
“Our village is gone,” said Squalco. “White folks burned us out in the 1890s—nothin’ left standing. Used to be across the street from where they’re building the new longhouse.”
“Or,” said Clara, “try upriver at Terminal 107. Our village was all along there, for a mile or more by the Duwamish riverbanks. You look for Henry anywhere in there. A lot of bushes and trees and places to camp.”
We left to search for Henry George, but first went to The Spud at Alki Beach on the west side of West Seattle to get some fish and chips and Cokes to go. At Herring’s House Park we ate lunch in the car to avoid a drizzle and then got out to find George. After some searching along trails in the wet undergrowth that paralleled a meandering loop of the main channel, we checked a culvert through which Puget Creek trickled into the Duwamish River and found the old man camped in a lean-to made of blue tarps.
“Poison?” he said bitterly 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 god, 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 a 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 said, flashing 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 it 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,” said McKean.
“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 wine from a pint flask until his eyelids drooped and he lay down and fell asleep next to his cold fire.
Heading back along the footpath to the parking lot, we found our way blocked by a young Indian man. He was dressed in a long black leather coat, had his black hair braided on each side, wore a scowl on his otherwise handsome dark face, and, ominously, carried a woodsman’s hatchet.
“What you white folks want with Henry George?”
McKean said, “We’re here about a poisoning. 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?”
“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. He tailed us back to the 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 b
ut footprints,” he said, “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 DNA forensic tests, so he is 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 Show-alter, age thirty, of White Center. McKean asked him to look into the man’s background and Nagumo promised to get on it right away. I had another sip of Coke and then set it down in its cup holder.
“Do your lips tingle?” I asked McKean.
“I was hoping it was just the chill air,” replied McKean thoughtfully.
Adrenaline ran through me like an electric shock and I pulled to the side of the road. “Have we just been poisoned?” I asked. Without comment, McKean opened his door, put a finger down his throat and vomited. I followed suit, splattering the pavement on my side as well.
“That may be too little prevention, too late,” said McKean. “Depending on the dose. Can you drive, Fin?”
“To the hospital?”
“No. Take us to my labs, quickly.”
I floored the gas and he got on his phone. “Janet, get all the mouse antiserum together. Get it ready for injection into two patients.”
“There’s not enough blood in a mouse—” I began, but McKean interrupted.