Of the stories I’ve written about my misadventures following Dr. Peyton McKean on his biomedical crime-solving path, none is more satisfying than the desperate race for salvation from a murderer we encountered in “Blood Tide.” I suppose that satisfaction comes in some measure from the fact that it is the most recently-published of Dr. McKean’s exploits, but it is also true that it satisfies me greatly just to know I am alive after what seemed a very terminal bout with a cold and calculating killer.<\/p>\n
There is a warm and positive thread to the story as well, and that involves members of the Duwamish Indian Tribe whom we met in the course of the investigation and who, with rare exception, were most generous with their sympathy and help when death seemed our only option.<\/p>\n
On the chance that these remarks spark your interest, I’m including below a short passage from the beginning of the story. If your appetite for “Blood Tide” is wetted, then perhaps you’ll do us both a favor and pick up a copy of Seattle Noir at your local bookstore or online. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.<\/p>\n
-Fin Morton<\/p>\n
\u201cThe body lay here?\u201d McKean asked, drawing an imaginary oblong line around a spot in the middle of the damp gravel.<\/p>\n
\u201cUh huh,\u201d answered the officer, stashing tape in a black garbage bag.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd the victim\u2019s pickup, parked here?\u201d said McKean, sawing a transect line from the parking bumpers out into the lot with his long-fingered hands.<\/p>\n
\u201c \u2019At\u2019s right,\u201d said the officer, cinching the bag and pausing to gaze amusedly at McKean, who moved animatedly around the rain drizzled lot quickly on long legs, marching off distances with his hands tucked behind his back like some intense, gangly schoolteacher. McKean was, I could tell, worried that he\u2019d lack some detail of the circumstances surrounding Erik Torvald\u2019s death, when the last cop who had actually seen Torvald lying face down in the parking lot was gone and done with the case. As the officer got in his squad car and prepared to close the door, McKean called somewhat desperately, \u201cAnything else I should know?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNuttin\u2019,\u201d said the cop, slamming his door and backing away, making a half-friendly wave at McKean as he left us alone in the lot.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s more here than meets the eye, Fin Morton,\u201d muttered McKean, lifting his olive green canvas fedora and scratching in the dark hair of one temple.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s nothing here that meets my eye,\u201d I replied, zipping up my windbreaker against the drizzle that had begun as soon as we got out of my Mustang. I looked around the otherwise empty quadrangle of gravel, the alder woods that stretched down to the bank of the Duwamish River below the lot, and the mudpuddled gravel footpaths, without much hope of spotting a clue. The park was devoid of people on a wet Thursday afternoon. \u201cMaybe the cops are right. Maybe he just had shellfish poisoning. Don\u2019t you think that\u2019s possible?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnswer: no,\u201d said McKean in his pedagogical way. \u201cThe levels of red tide poison in him were without precedent, off scale by any measure. To get the dose Kay Erwin found in his blood, he\u2019d have had to eat ten buckets of steamers, or a dozen geoducks\u201d \u2014he pronounced the word properly: gooey ducks. \u201cAnd yet,\u201d he continued, \u201cmy immunoassay tests for shellfish residues in his guts came up strictly negative. He hadn\u2019t eaten a bit of shellfish. The police may be satisfied that he poisoned himself, but neither Kay nor I believe it. Foul play is at work here, Fin. Somebody killed him, and I\u2019d like to know who.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now,\u201d I said, moving to the driver\u2019s door of my midnight-blue Ford Mustang, \u201cI\u2019d like to get out of this drizzle.\u201d McKean took one last look around the park as if wishing there were more to see than bare alder trees against a gloomy gray Seattle sky. Then he acquiesced, lapsing into thoughtful silence as I drove us out onto West Marginal Way and headed north past the Duwamish Tribal Office in an old gray house beside a construction site with a sign that read: \u201cFuture Site of the Duwamish Longhouse.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMuckleshoot Casino cash finally having an impact,\u201d mumbled McKean absentmindedly as I headed for McKean\u2019s labs on the downtown waterfront, where I had picked him up earlier. McKean suddenly cried, \u201cTurn right, right here!\u201d<\/p>\n
I yanked the wheel hard and we bounded across some railroad tracks and onto a gravel drive that took us to another riverside parking lot, this one with a sign reading, \u201cTerminal 105 Salmon Habitat Restoration Site and Public Access Park.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s here?\u201d I asked, pulling up at a dismal postage stamp of greenery wedged between a scrap yard downriver and a defunct container terminal pier upriver, irked at how easily McKean had yanked my chain.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not what\u2019s here,\u201d he said, opening his door with a cerebral glow in his eyes, \u201cbut who\u2019s here.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the end of a graveled path an observation platform overlooked the Duwamish River. McKean leaned his lanky frame on the rail and pointed a thin finger out across the expanse of muddy water to where several strings of dayglow red plastic gillnet floats drifted on a slow upstream tide, overshadowed in the distance by the container cranes and skyscrapers of Seattle. A fisherman in a small dingy was at the nets, pulling a big sockeye salmon into his boat. He quickly disengaged the netting from its gills and returned the net to the water. A fine drizzle dappled the brown water and lent a sheen to the fisherman\u2019s dark green raincoat and hood. It put a damp chill on the back of my neck. \u201cUnless I miss my guess,\u201d said McKean, \u201cthat\u2019s my old high school chum, Frank Squalco.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHow can you be sure that\u2019s him?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI recall Franky Squalco from Art Class at West Seattle High School,\u201d said McKean. \u201cBased on that fisherman\u2019s humble stature and his rather square form, I guessed it might be Frank when I saw him as you drove. Furthermore, as you see, he\u2019s gillnetting salmon, and only tribal people can use gillnets, so the odds improve. I\u2019d like to get his take on this shellfish poisoning business.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy would he know anything about it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause Erik Torvald was a geoduck fisherman, and Natives hold half the rights to geoduck licenses in this state, by law.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the fisherman drew in another salmon, our view of him was cut off when an outbound tug came down the shipping channel pulling an immense black barge piled with rusty cargo containers, so stupendously huge and near that it seemed for a dizzy moment that our viewing platform was moving past its black metallic hulk, rather than the other way around. When the barge passed downriver under the gray concrete rainbow of the West Seattle Freeway Bridge, the fisherman was already steering his dingy toward our shore. McKean waited, unaffected by the clammy air or the cold droplets that beaded his olive green canvas field coat and were getting down the neck of my jogging shell. I knit my arms around myself for warmth and wondered why I never dressed sufficiently for the weather I inevitably encountered when I tagged along on these adventures.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeyton McKean!\u201d A grin of recognition spread across his broad, brown, forty-ish Northwest Native American face. \u201cI haven\u2019t seen you in a while. What you doin\u2019 down here where us poor Indians fish?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re investigating a murder.\u201d<\/p>\n
Squalco\u2019s face clouded as he stepped out of his boat and pulled it onto the muddy shore with a bowline, his black rubber rain boots splutching and slurping in the muck. \u201cTorvald?\u201d he said. \u201cYeah. Too bad. Good geoduck man. But why they got you on the case? You\u2019re not a cop. You\u2019re a DNA man, so I heard. Pretty famous around here. When the Jihad Virus came, your vaccine saved a lot of lives, they say.\u201d<\/p>\n
McKean brushed the compliment aside. \u201cNot DNA and not vaccines this time. I\u2019m looking into a case of deliberate red tide poisoning.\u201d<\/p>\n
Squalco had been transferring three big salmon from the bottom of his boat into a large plastic bucket on the shore. At McKean\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know something?\u201d McKean asked encouragingly.<\/p>\n
Squalco\u2019s eyes shot sideways. \u201cRed tide? Sure,\u201d he said. \u201cPuts poison in the clams. State of Washington orders us not to dig \u2019em then. We usually do anyway. I never got more\u2019n a little buzz or two from it. Maybe threw up once or twice\u2014but that coulda been the booze, y\u2019know.\u201d He laughed thinly.<\/p>\n
\u201cI meant,\u201d McKean persisted, \u201cdo you know something about red tide in the murder of Erik Torvald?\u201d At six-foot three, McKean has 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, \u201cGotta go. Got plenty-a hungry mouths to feed.\u201d He closed the tailgate, came back in a hurry, tied the boat\u2019s bowline to the trunk of a small Douglas fir tree and turned to go. As he reached his truck door, McKean called to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cInteresting case.\u201d<\/p>\n
Squalco paused before getting in. \u201cYeah?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMassive dose of red tide poison. Died quick. No trace of shellfish in his stomach contents. Any idea why?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d Squalco lied with eyebrows high and mouth round.<\/p>\n
\u201cRed tide poison,\u201d said McKean, \u201cis one of the most toxic substances known; a paralytic toxin. First the tongue and lips tingle, then general paralysis sets in.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI gotta go,\u201d said Squalco.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, Frank,\u201d he said with a note of regret. \u201cWhat has my old pal got himself mixed up in?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An excerpt from “Blood Tide” suitable to wet your appetite for the mystery. But don’t touch that bucket of clams. Continue reading