Free McKean S02 Blood Tide by Thomas Hopp Page B

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.