“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.