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
“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
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