McKean S01 A Dangerous Breed

Blood Evidence

“That’s where the bodies were found.” Sheriff Joe Tanner spat tobacco juice into a sagebrush thicket and nodded the brim of his smokey bear hat toward a flat patch of barren ground. We’d followed a game trail through the frying-pan heat of the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge until the sagebrush opened onto a rocky flat surrounded by low black basalt cliffs splotched with orange and chartreuse lichen. The landscape was baking, as we were, under the fierce sun of an Eastern Washington Indian summer day. Sweat had soaked the back of Tanner’s gray shirt and the sun scorched the top of my head where the hair has begun to thin, making me as uncomfortable as any day I’d spent in Iraq.

In contrast, Peyton McKean seemed cool, as though his lanky body could somehow radiate the heat back the way it came. Energetic despite the swelter, he moved around the open space quickly with his hands folded behind his back in a schoolteacherly way, shaded beneath his green canvas Stetson fedora and intent on absorbing every detail of the crime scene.

“They died here?” he asked, pausing where a wide bed of angular brown pebbles had been blackened by two large oily bloodstains, each four or five feet across.

“That’s right, Doc,” Tanner replied.

“Were the bodies badly decomposed?”

“Just scattered bones.”

“Scattered by whom or what?”

Tanner shrugged his meaty shoulders. “Coyotes?”

McKean bent far over to examine the ground closely. He made a somewhat comical show, given his tall skinny frame dressed in a safari shirt, cargo shorts and outsized hiking boots, and the thinness of his arms, the angularity of his boney elbows, the knobbiness of his knees and whiteness of his bare calves. Heedless of appearances, he hummed softly to himself while scouring every inch of the bloodstains with his gaze.

It had been a cool and foggy morning in Seattle when I fetched McKean at his labs for the ride to the east, and I’d thought him underdressed for the weather. Now I looked vainly for the hint of a cloud in the sky, feeling overdressed in a plaid flannel shirt and slacks, thanks to McKean’s habitual lack of warning as to exactly where we were going or what conditions we’d encounter on our trip.

The wildlife refuge seemed to me like no refuge at all. It was a harsh place for anything to live, a land of dry washes, baked dusty soil, sagebrush in profusion, and ridges and short cliffs of broken black basalt as far as the eye could see; a low land, a hard land, and an arid land that contrasted dramatically with the lush green forest lands that cover the half of the state west of the Cascade Mountains.

Tanner said, “You fellows came a long way to have a look without much to see.”

“Sorry to drag you out here in this heat, Sheriff,” McKean mumbled as he continued his quest for minute details. “But I don’t expect to be disappointed by what I observe here. This is the place where they say my DNA test failed and I’m here to find out why. I spent years perfecting that test and no one else has ever reported an issue with it. Perhaps this intense heat caused the problem.”

“I suppose that might be so,” Tanner responded. “But it sure wasn’t heat that killed two men.”

“No,” McKean agreed. “Heat stroke is an ever-present possibility when the mercury exceeds one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit, but other clues suggest a more heinous cause, don’t they?” He stood and glanced around the area. “Looks like they could have gotten cornered here,” he hypothesized. “Cliff faces on three sides. Columnar basalt forms such vertical rock walls that even a skilled mountain climber would have difficulty scaling them.”

“In Iraq,” I suggested, “we’d have considered a box canyon like this a natural killing zone, a perfect place to ambush somebody.”

Tanner nodded. “They got bushwhacked, that’s what I’d say.” He put his hands in the back pockets of his gray uniform trousers and stared around at the un-climbable walls. “Cliffs ain’t too tall, maybe twenty feet, but that’s enough.”

“Assuming they were cut off from the way they came in,” McKean observed, “then they’d have had nowhere to go, leaving them little choice but to die out in the open.”

“Like Custer’s last stand,” the sheriff remarked. “They probably covered each other’s backs, but it didn’t help. Whoever it was got ‘em anyway.’

“The coroner’s report mentioned shotguns,” McKean said.

“Each of ‘em had a shotgun,’ the sheriff said. ‘With birdshot rounds for duck hunting. Odd thing is, the guns weren’t stolen. They stayed right where they fell, one next to each bloodstain.’

“Had they been fired?” McKean asked.

“Yep, a buncha times. Nine shell casings on the ground from the one and seven from the other.”

“There’s quite a profusion of footprints here,” McKean observed, wandering to and fro like a bloodhound seeking a scent and following dusty tracks that crisscrossed the bloodstains. “Boot prints, shoe prints and, what are those, dog prints?”

“Dog or coyote,” Tanner replied. “Or both.”

McKean leaned his angular body to get a close look at a patch of dusty ground with a particularly heavy mixture of human and animal tracks. “Are any of these thought to be perpetrator footprints?” he asked.

“Not a one of ‘em,’ Tanner said. ‘Lots of tracks around here now, from the duck hunters that found them and the State Patrol Forensics Unit, but that’s one of the odd things about this case. There weren’t any human tracks here at all until the duck hunters showed up.’

“If not human tracks,” McKean remarked, “then what?”

“Just them coyote tracks. All over the place. A whole pack. Big pack.”

“What were they doing here?” I asked, half-guessing the answer.

“Eating,” Tanner answered disdainfully.

“Yes,” McKean said. “Ate every last bit of meat off both bodies. I read it in the report.” McKean spoke coolly and clinically, as was his habit, but I was shocked.

“You mean, really ate them?”

McKean shrugged his bony shoulders. “Coyotes are opportunistic, any carrion is fair game to them.”

The sheriff nodded, looking grim. “Wasn’t much left but bones and clothes. Varmints scattered the leavings around quite a bit before anyone came and found them.”

I shuddered despite the heat. “But coyotes didn’t kill them, did they?”

“Never heard of such a thing,” Tanner replied. “Coyotes might kill some old lady’s little frou-frou dog, but full-grown men with shotguns? No way.”

“So how did the men die?”

The sheriff shrugged. “Not much to go on. Forensics didn’t come up with anything special. Coroner’s exam found no bullet holes, no knife marks, just coyote tooth scrapes. I suppose the victims coulda been gut-shot by someone but you’d expect “em to move and leave a blood trail. But the blood’s all in one spot. Two spots, that is, one for each of “em.” He pointed to the bloodstain on his right. “That’s Nate Swanson, according to DNA tests. Other was Nate’s nephew, Tad Swanson.”

“Wait a minute,” I interjected. “I thought the DNA evidence was in doubt.”

“Not for Nate and Tad,” Tanner replied. “Family gave blood for matching. Positive IDs on both stains. On the bones too, just so’s we could sort them out, you know, for burial.”

McKean bent and picked up a small pinkish-white pebble from the bloodstain that had been Nate Swanson. He held it between his lanky index finger and thumb and eyed it down his long straight, shepherd-dog nose for a moment and then handed it to Tanner. “Here,” he said. “This one was overlooked.”

Tanner held the bit of white in his open palm and studied it for a moment and then nodded. “Bone all right.”

“Left pisiform,” McKean said.

“Pisi-what?” Tanner asked.

“Pisiform,” McKean repeated. “A pea-shaped wrist bone from the heel of the hand. That one’s from a big, older male.”

“That’d be Nate Swanson then,” Tanner said, slipping the bone into a breast pocket. “He was a big guy. Good guy. Wheat farmer. Friend of mine. Course, Warden’s a small town. Everybody’s friends here, mostly.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” McKean remarked. “Now, I believe there was one more blood stain.”

“Right,” Tanner said, motioning us to double back the way we’d come into the box canyon. “All that shooting Nate and Tad did, is what caused your little problem, isn’t it, Doc? Somebody, or something, got hit. C’mon, the other patch of blood’s over here.”

He led us just beyond a mound of angular lichen-splotched basalt boulders jumbled beside the entrance to the box canyon. Pointing to another dried black puddle, he said, “Forensics took a sample here and the rest you know. Beats me how a blood stain can have that many different things in it.”

“That’s what I’m here to clarify,” McKean asserted. “I intend to restore the reputation of my DNA test.”

“Not bad cover,” I remarked, looking across the rock mound to where the victims had died. “This spot’s protected from the place where the two men went down. If I were springing an ambush on armed men, I’d start from here. So this blood is likely to be from a wounded perpetrator.”

Tanner nodded and spat on the rocks. “That’s what Forensics figured.”

“Any sign of where this man went?” I asked.

“Man?” Tanner laughed, tipping his smokey hat back and grinning at me so widely I could inspect his bridgework. “Who said it was a man?”

“Person,” I corrected.

He shook his head. “Only signs on this ground were coyote. No boot prints. No shell casings, no nuttin’ that looked like people was here.”

Peyton McKean leaned and squinted hard at the bloodstain. “So, this is the source of my trouble,” he murmured. He pointed to a small scrape in the soil and asked Tanner, “Is this where the sample was taken?”

“Sure is,” Tanner said. “Look funny to you? Like it’s two bloods mixed or something? Don’t look funny to me.”

“Agreed,” McKean replied. “Simply mixing human and dog and coyote blood would be too simple to explain the facts.”

“Which are?” I prompted.

“Oh,” McKean responded. “I neglected to tell you the details, didn’t I, Fin?”

“You were expounding on everything else while I drove us here, Peyton.”

“Sorry,” McKean apologized without meaning it. “Traveling through the desert puts me into a reverie. The geology is spectacular. The lava flows - ”

“Yeah, you told me. Half the state flooded with lava fifteen million years ago. Then giant Ice Age floods tore these canyons out of solid ground. Then the place turned into a desert. But what about the blood test?”

McKean stroked his angular jaw. “My DNA test can detect twenty-five common species of animals, including man. With hunters involved, the chance that it was animal blood was strong, but with murder involved, the chance that it was human blood was likely as well.”

“Trouble is, Doc,” Tanner chimed in, “the results of your schmancy test said it was human and coyote and dog all at once.”

“Which,” McKean continued, “caused your forensics people to run more tests, including one to see if the human blood matched one of the victims, but they couldn’t tell. Whole sections of human DNA were entirely absent from this puddle of blood.”

“So, therefore,” I said, trying my hand at deduction, “the human result from the first test was in error.”

“Answer: no,” McKean said emphatically. “My test was developed over years of diligent lab work. It doesn’t give erroneous results.”

“You can’t tell everything from DNA,” a voice said. We wheeled around to see a man who’d come up silently behind us on the trail. He wore a dusty buckskin coat, an open leather vest, blue jeans and moccasins. His long gray hair was braided on both sides.

“We didn’t hear you coming,” I exclaimed, startled by his sudden appearance out of nowhere.

“Didn’t expect you to.” A wide, mocking smile spread across his darkly tanned, leathery face.

He had a bow slung over his shoulder along with a buckskin quiver of odd-looking arrows. A sheath knife hung on his belt, and he wore an eagle feather at the back of his head, cocked at a sharp angle.

The sheriff sneered, “Ain’t you a sight, Chief? We don’t get many of your kind around here, especially dressed like that.”

“No,” the man replied, “I s’pose you don’t. But this here land,” he swept the horizon with a gesture, “used to be my great grandfather’s hunting ground.” He moved to the bloodstain, squatted opposite McKean, bent and sniffed at it. “Smells funny.”

Tanner eyed him suspiciously. “What brings you here?”

“Canada geese.”

“Kinda early in the season for geese.”

The man stood and pointed to the north. “Cold winter coming.” A V-shaped flock of geese flew along the horizon.

Tanner seemed unimpressed. “Can I have a look at your bow?” He held out a hand but the man shook his head. “You can see it just fine from where you stand.”

Tanner frowned at him a moment and then asked, “What kinda arrows you got in that quiver?”

The man reached over his shoulder and pulled out an arrow with a shaft that split into three wooden tips, each with its own carved barb. He twirled it slowly in his thick brown fingers, letting Tanner get a good look at it.

“What do you do with an arrow like that?” Tanner asked.

“Indian shotgun,” the man said. “Three chances to hit a goose, just one shot.”

Tanner eyed the trio of wooden tips. “Wouldn’t leave much of a mark on bone,” he said.