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. But Peyton McKean was of a different mind. He was getting the lay of what had happened two days before by interrogating a young cop, rapid fire, as the officer rolled up the crime scene tape.
“The body lay here?” McKean asked, drawing an imaginary oblong line around a spot in the middle of the damp gravel.
“Uh huh,” answered the officer, stashing tape in a black garbage bag.
“And the victim’s pickup, parked here?” said McKean, sawing a transect line from the parking bumpers out into the lot with his long-fingered hands.
“’At’s right,” 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’d lack some detail of the circumstances surrounding Erik Torvald’s death, when the last cop who had actually seen Torvald lying facedown 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, “Anything else I should know?”
“Nuttin’,” said the cop, slamming his door and backing away, making a half-friendly wave at McKean as he left us alone in the lot.
“There’s more here than meets the eye, Fin Morton,” muttered McKean, lifting his olive-green canvas fedora and scratching 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 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 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,” said McKean in his pedagogical way. “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 pronounced the word properly: gooey ducks. “And yet,” he continued, “my immunoassay tests for shellfish residues in his guts came up strictly negative. He hadn’t 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’d like to know who.”
“Right now,” I said, moving to the door of my midnight-blue Ford Mustang, “I’d like to get out of this drizzle.”
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, an old gray house beside a construction site with a sign that read: Future Site of the Duwamish Longhouse.
“Muckleshoot Casino cash finally having an impact,” mumbled McKean absentmindedly as I headed for his labs on the downtown waterfront, where I had picked him up earlier. McKean suddenly cried, “Turn right, right here!”
I pulled 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, Terminal 105 Salmon Habitat Restoration Site and Public Access Park.
“What’s here?” 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.
“It’s not what’s here,” he said, opening his door with a cerebral glow in his eyes, “but who’s here.”
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 Day-Glo–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’s dark green raincoat and hood. It put a damp chill on the back of my neck.
“Unless I miss my guess,” said McKean, “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,” said McKean. “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 tribal people can use gillnets, 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, 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.
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 but 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.
“You can dilute antisera vastly. A little may go a long way.”
Panicky minutes followed as my car roared and McKean described the very symptoms I was experiencing. “Depending upon the toxin dose, the sensation of tingling lips progresses to tingling of fingers and toes—” I felt my fingers tingle as I wrenched the steering wheel and skidded onto the ramp of the West Seattle Bridge; my toes tingled as I floored the accelerator and the tires screamed. “Next,” McKean continued as we streaked across the highrise span above the Duwamish River, “you may lose control of your arms and legs—” I struggled to keep in my lane as the Mustang rocketed northbound on the Alaskan Way Viaduct toward downtown. “Some victims experience a sense of floating or vertigo—” My head swam and my vision grew hazy while I fought to keep from driving through the railings and dropping us fifty feet onto the railroad tracks.
“How about going blind?” I gasped. “I’m having trouble seeing the road. It’s all going red.”
McKean thought a moment. “Blindness is not a part of this syndrome. But seeing red is common when people feel extreme rage or fear.”
“I’m feeling both right now.”
“Is your heart pounding?”
“Isn’t yours?”
“Seeing red occurs when blood pumps so rapidly it floods the retina of the eye until one can actually see it. I suggest you keep cool, Fin.”
“Keep—” I tried to protest but gagged on my pounding heartbeat.
My vision grew redder, my hearing roared, and McKean’s voice receded as he said, “Finally, the chest muscles become paralyzed and the victim stops breathing.”
Just two blocks from the lab, my vision went from red to black.
“Wake up, Fin.”
An angelic voice brought me back and I looked around groggily. “Wha—? Where?”
“You’re with me, Fin,” said Kay Erwin, her pretty face coming into focus above me. “You’re at Seattle Public Health Hospital. How do you feel?”
“Better than yesterday,” I said, noticing Peyton McKean leaning over her shoulder, observing me like I was a lab rat.
“Better than two days ago,” he corrected. “You’ve been comatose for forty-eight hours. Took one sip more than I did. The antibodies barely pulled you through.”
“But your vital signs are great this morning,” said Kay. “No permanent damage.”
“How’d I get here?” I asked, struggling to remember missing events.
“You managed to get us to the lab, Fin,” said McKean, “though it was close. Janet met us at the curbside and injected half the antibodies into each of us, then called an ambulance. Kay tended us through the crisis. We’re both well on the way to recovery. My antiserum worked!”
The next day, as Kay signed my release papers, McKean rushed into my room. “I hope you’re up for a drive, Fin. Vince Nagumo just called with news. The police are after Craig Showalter. They raided his home and found a methamphetamine lab. Two of his henchmen dead in a gun battle, but Showalter’s still on the loose. He hightailed it the evening before, according to his girlfriend.”
“So, what next?” I asked.
“Let’s go have a powwow.”
An hour later, sitting in Clara’s living room, McKean showed Frank and Clara his photo of the man by the pickup. Clara gasped, “That’s my nephew, Billy Seaweed. He’s a good kid.”
Frank shook his head. “Got some strange friends, though, like Erik Torvald. For a white guy, he was all right, but still a white man to the bone, because he was using Billy’s tribal rights to get geoduck licenses. Used power gear to siphon up half the sea bottom when he took ’em. Not like we used to do: dig ’em up with a stick and fill in the hole. Still, Torvald was a lot nicer than Billy’s new partner.”
“Craig Showalter?” asked McKean.
“How’d you know that?”
“I’ve got connections. Vince Nagumo, FBI.”
“Billy’s an Internet addict,” said Frank. “A kinda Indian Goth. Obsessed with darkness and apocalyptic stuff. But I don’t think Billy’s a killer.”
“Showalter’s a bad choice of friends,” said McKean. “According to Nagumo, he’s got quite a rap sheet: ex-con, home invasion robbery, drug dealer.”
The scruffy dog came to its place beside me and began nibbling a bare patch at the base of its tail. I withheld my dismay, but the dog abandoned itself to a frenzy of licking and nibbling, raising a stench that nauseated me. I got up, trying to look nonchalant by wandering to a back window while McKean continued his discussion with Frank and Clara. I gazed at the trees overarching the house but then spotted something on a back drive that sent a chill through me: a black Dodge Ram pickup exactly like the one at the park when we were poisoned. Immediately certain it was Craig Showalter’s, I made a small wave to catch McKean’s eye, then pointed out the window.
“What is it, Fin?” he asked without the faintest effort to keep my concern a secret. He came to the window, saw what I had seen, and turned to look expectantly at the people in the room. Clara flinched first.
“Oh dear,” she moaned, her eyes welling with tears. She fanned her throat, and then quit trying to hide the obvious.
“He’s here!” she sobbed. “Billy’s in the basement. He’s been staying here for a couple of days now.” She covered her eyes and wept. “Poor Billy!” she gushed between wet hands.
McKean went to her solicitously. “Don’t be so sure we’re here to get Billy in trouble, Clara. He’s unlikely to be the murderer.”
A voice came from a back doorway. “I’m just as much to blame as Craig Showalter. I made the poison he used.”
We all turned to see Billy Seaweed standing at the top of a stairway that came from the basement. “It’s all gonna come out pretty quick,” he said. “So why hide anymore?”
He stood in the doorway with one hand braced on the jamb, an odd, faraway look on his face, seeming not to hear anyone’s exclamations of concern or questions.
“I was just tryin’ out the old man’s recipe,” he said. “Internet guys were stoked. I thought we’d test it on somebody’s dog or something. But Craig talked me into giving him some. When Erik Torvald turned up dead, I knew I was in deep shit. Show-alter poisoned Torvald so he could take over his business.”
“I figured that,” said McKean.
“Showalter was looking for a way to get out of the meth business; go legitimate.”
“If you can call it legitimate,” I said, “to kill a man for a few geoducks.”
“Lotsa money in geoducks these days.”
“Was it him who tried to kill us at the park?” asked McKean.
Billy nodded. “We was here at Aunt Clara’s the first time you guys came by. We heard what you said to Frank, so we knew you were onto us. Craig jimmied your car door and poisoned your Cokes while I was in the woods yelling at you guys. I didn’t know it till later. I was tryin’ to protect the old man, but Craig was tryin’ to get rid of you for good.”
“We were on the right track,” said McKean, “but unfortunately you were a step ahead of us.”
Billy laughed in an odd, sad way. “I’m still one step ahead.”
McKean’s dark eyebrows knit. “How’s that?”
After a long moment, Billy turned robotically and said, to no one in particular, “C’mon. I’ve got something to show you.”
Frank, McKean, and I followed him down the stairs, leaving Clara weeping in the living room. In the basement day room a TV blared a sequence from Dancing with the Stars. At one end of the room was a door through which a sink and toilet could be seen. Through a second we glimpsed a disheveled bed. In a corner of the day room a man appeared to be sleeping in a reclining chair facing the TV, and my pulse shot up when I realized it must be Craig Showalter. McKean went to him and pressed his fingertips to a carotid artery, then straightened and looked from Frank to Billy to me, shaking his head in the negative.
“I killed him with the poison,” said Billy, “after we got high on some red wine, so he wouldn’t feel it coming on.”
“The police are gonna wanna talk to you,” said Frank.
Billy shook his head slowly. “No, they won’t.”
I said, “I don’t see how you can stop that.”
“I do,” said Billy. “I saved enough poison for me. Gettin’ a little woozy right now.” His eyelids drooped.
McKean called for an ambulance but Billy was nearly gone when it arrived, slumped on the bed in the basement bedroom.
He was on death’s door as Kay Erwin admitted him to Seattle Public Health Hospital, and although McKean had double-checked with Janet about antiserum while we followed the ambulance, Janet only confirmed that the antiserum had been consumed completely in saving him and me. With no other source of antiserum, Billy’s death was a foregone conclusion.
* * *
Several days later, McKean and I went to find the old shaman in his lean-to. He came out to the riverbank with us and we stood listening to a bald eagle crying from a snag tree on a little island. Two more flew overhead and the first flapped off to follow them toward the mouth of the Duwamish, under the gray arch of the freeway bridge.
“That’s a fledgling,” said Henry George. “Joining Mom and Dad for his first hunt. Going fishing along Alki Beach. Maybe Billy Seaweed’s spirit is in that eagle.”
“Too bad about Billy,” lamented McKean.
“Billy’s buried now,” said George, “in the white man way. Highpoint Cemetery. Should be over there on Muddy Island, left in a canoe until the birds pick his bones clean. Then you put ’im in a cedarwood box and maybe make a totem. Billy wasn’t famous enough for a totem, I suppose.”
We stood in silent contemplation until the old man said, “Look at Muddy Island over there. White men cut it in half, shrank it, polluted it, gave it a white man’s name, Kellogg Island. Treated it just like they treated the Duwamish people. We’re a little polluted island of Indians in a white man’s world nowadays. New things like freeway bridges and Microsoft computers and Boeing airplanes and Amazon books go right over our heads.”
“I’m sorry,” said McKean.
“Oh, don’t feel sorry,” replied George. “You see, the old ways aren’t all dead yet. The river still snakes past here like A’yahos, slithering this way and that with the tide. Billy proved A’yahos’s medicine is still strong. And President Bush, he took his pen and wiped us Duwamish people off the map, but we’re still here, and now there’s a new president. A’yahos knows better than presidents. The tide will turn again.”