McKean S02 Blood Tide

by Thomas Hopp

  When we arrived at Herring’s House Park, the police were clearing off the yellow warning tape and packing their forensics bags and boxes, closing their case of an odd death in a parking lot and moving on. Kay Erwin, epidemiologist at Seattle Public Health Hospital, had declared it shellfish poisoning and the cops had quickly lost interest. Peyton McKean, however, was of a different mindset. Bundled in his green canvas field coat, olive canvas safari-style fedora, and plaid cashmere scarf against the cold and wet of the day, he moved around the lot quickly, getting the lay of what had happened forty-eight hours before. As he did so he interrogated a young uniformed cop, rapid fire, while the officer rolled up the crime scene tape.

  “The body lay here?” McKean asked, his leather-gloved hands drawing an imaginary oblong line around a spot in the middle of the damp gravel.

  “Uh huh,” the officer answered, stashing tape in a black garbage bag.

  “And the victim’s pickup, parked here?” McKean sawed a transect line from the concrete parking bumpers out into the lot with his long-fingered hands.

  “‘At’s right.” The officer cinched the bag and paused to gaze amusedly as McKean hurried around the rain-drizzled lot on long legs, marching off distances with his hands tucked behind his back like some intense, gangly schoolteacher. I could tell McKean was worried he’d lack some detail of the circumstances surrounding Erik Torvald’s death when the last cop who’d actually seen Torvald lying facedown in the parking lot was gone and done with the case.

  The officer got into his squad car and prepared to close the door, prompting McKean to call somewhat desperately, “Anything else I should know?”

  “Nuttin’,” mumbled the cop, slamming his door. He fired the engine and backed away, making a half-friendly wave at McKean as he left us alone in the lot.

  “There’s more here than meets the eye, Phineus Morton,” McKean remarked to me. He lifted his hat and scratched in the dark hair of one temple.

  “There’s nothing here that meets my eye,” I replied, zipping up my windbreaker against the drizzle that had begun as soon as we got out of my Mustang. I glanced around the otherwise empty quadrangle of gravel and then eyed the alder woods that stretched down to the bank of the Duwamish River below the lot, penetrated by mud-puddled gravel footpaths, without much hope of spotting a clue. The park was devoid of people on a wet Thursday afternoon. “Maybe the cops are right. Maybe he just had shellfish poisoning. Don’t you think that’s possible?”

  “Answer: no,” McKean retorted in his pedagogical way, his dark eyes aglow with intellectual light. “The levels of red tide poison in him were without precedent, off the scale by any measure. To get the dose Kay Erwin found in his blood, he’d have to have eaten ten buckets of steamers or a dozen geoducks” - he uttered this last word with the proper native pronunciation: gooey-ducks. “And yet,” he continued, “my immunoassay tests for shellfish residues in his guts came up strictly negative. The hospital’s careful assessment of the contents of his stomach and intestines proved to my satisfaction that he hadn’t eaten a bit of shellfish. The police may be satisfied to think that he poisoned himself but neither Kay nor I believe it. Foul play is at work here, Fin. Somebody murdered him and I’d like to know who.”

  “Right now,” I replied, moving to the door of my rain-beaded midnight blue Mustang, “I’d like to get out of this drizzle. As usual, you neglected to mention that I’d be driving you to an outdoor crime scene, let alone a rainy, soggy parking lot.”

  Unapologetic, 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 and got into the passenger seat, lapsing into thoughtful silence as I drove us out onto West Marginal Way and headed north.

  We passed the Duwamish Tribal Office on our left, an old gray house beside a construction site with a sign that read, Future Site of the Duwamish Longhouse, prompting the hyper-observant McKean to murmur absentmindedly, “Muckleshoot Casino cash finally having an impact on the local tribespeople.”

  “And grant money from the Gates and Allen foundations,” I added.

  McKean nodded as if he’d already known that fact as well. He said nothing more as I drove along West Marginal Way headed for the downtown waterfront and the lab building where I’d picked him up earlier, until he suddenly cried, “Turn right! Right here!”

  I pulled the wheel hard and we skidded onto a wet driveway and bounded across some railroad tracks and onto a muddy gravel lane that took us to another riverside parking lot, this one with a sign reading, Terminal 105 Salmon Habitat Restoration Site and Public Access Park.

  “What’s here?” I asked, pulling up at a dismal postage stamp park of recently-planted greenery wedged between a scrap yard downriver and a defunct container terminal pier upriver. As was often true, I was a bit irked at how easily McKean had yanked my chain.

  “It’s not what’s here,” he said, opening his door with that cerebral glow in his eyes, “but who’s here.”

  We followed a short graveled path to a recently constructed concrete observation platform overlooking the Duwamish River. McKean leaned his lanky frame on a rail and pointed a thin finger out across the expanse of muddy water to where several strings of DayGlo 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 dinghy 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 river and lent a sheen to the fisherman’s red life vest and dark green raincoat and hood. It put a damp chill on the back of my neck.

  “Unless I miss my guess,” McKean mused, “that’s my old high school chum, Frank Squalco.”

  “How can you be sure that’s him?”

  “I recall Franky Squalco from art class at West Seattle High School,” McKean replied. “Based on that fisherman’s 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’s gillnetting salmon, and only those few Duwamish tribesmen who live in Seattle can use gillnets here, so the odds improve. I’d like to get his take on this shellfish poisoning business.”

  “Why would he know anything about it?”

  “Because Erik Torvald was a geoduck fisherman and Natives hold half the rights to geoduck licenses in this state, by law.”

  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. The barge was 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 dinghy toward our shore. McKean waited, unaffected by the clammy air or the cold droplets that beaded his canvas field coat and were getting down the neck of my jogging shell. I knit my arms around myself and wondered why I never dressed warmly enough for the weather I inevitably encountered when tagging along on these adventures.

  The fisherman throttled the boat down and glided into a small inlet on our right. He helloed up at us absentmindedly and then paused to take a long second look as his dinghy 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 white 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.

  McKean asked encouragingly, “You know something?”

  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 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, “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 his mouth round.

  “Red tide poison,” McKean expounded, “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,” Squalco asserted. He got in and slammed his door and drove off spraying gravel.

  Watching him speed along the driveway and turn south on West Marginal Way, McKean shook his head. “Oh, Frank,” he murmured with a note of regret. “What has my old pal gotten himself mixed up in?”

  * * * * *

  Earlier that morning, I’d been far from such doings both physically and mentally, working at my computer in my writing office on the fifth floor of one of the last standing, funky old brick buildings in Seattle’s Downtown Pioneer Square District. I was putting the finishing touches on a sensationalistic piece of medical reporting about a new gene therapy for baldness, in which a virus intended to induce hair growth on bare craniums had spread over the skin of several test patients until the unfortunate men had sprouted hair over every inch of their bodies except the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet. Although their lycanthropic metamorphosis had been horrific enough, I was detailing a further admission by the head of the clinic where the trial had taken place that one study nurse had begun to develop a suspicious case of hirsutism, when the phone rang. It was McKean, asking for a ride and inviting me to join him on this case.

  He’d called from the Seattle Public Health Hospital on Pill Hill. “Kay Erwin’s got an interesting problem for us to solve,” he’d said. “A dead man with all the signs of red tide poisoning, but there are reasons to suspect foul play. Want to follow this one?”

  Like always, I’d agreed and gone to meet him without hesitation, figuring the balding gentlemen of the world could wait a few more days to learn of their new debacle. Writing about the exploits of the brilliant Dr. McKean is how I make my best money these days.

  Within the fortress-like walls of Seattle Public Health Hospital, I penetrated a warren of corridors and elevators to find him in the Epidemiology Department in Kay Erwin’s office. Kay is another person of interest to me. Head of the Epidemiology Service, she’s a small, cute and dynamic brunette with a pageboy haircut, about forty-two. Though a bit old for me to successfully ask on a date, she always scintillates with some engaging 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, and then launched into a quick update on my behalf.

  “Torvald,” she explained, “was found lying comatose beside his pickup, scarcely breathing. The passerby who discovered him called for help and Torvald was rushed to our Emergency Room 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,” McKean interjected.

  “Yes,” Erwin agreed. “He died that evening. Post mortem analysis of his stomach and intestinal contents by several means, including your new and wonderful immunoassay, Peyton, showed that neither contained residues of a shellfish meal. In fact, they matched what was found in his truck - 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,” McKean explained for my benefit.

  “But the most anomalous thing,” Kay went on, “is that this case doesn’t coincide with an actual red tide. The only bloom of red tide algae on Puget Sound this year was a small one in August and it’s now late October. Something fishy’s going on.”

  “Or rather,” McKean quipped, “something clammy.”

  * * * * *

  After Frank Squalco left us at Terminal 105 Park, I drove us back to McKean’s labs at Immune Corporation, feeling that my day had already been long enough. McKean, however, seemed indefatigable. On the way, noting that it was only 4:15 p.m., he cell-phoned 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 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 McKea
n 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.