BACK IN THE CAR, I LOADED THE ADDRESS FOR THE Sholeetsa Project into the GPS and headed for Columbia City down by Boeing Field. It seemed ironic. Here I was using modern technology to search for even more modern technology, but I was using all that technology to do antiquated police work. You pick up one lead and follow that to the next one. Back in the old days, we called it “shoe leather.” If there’s a more current bit of jargon, I’m unaware of it.
Harborview Medical Center is on the edge of Capitol Hill, east of downtown Seattle. Columbia City is just south of downtown proper. I hopped on I-5 southbound, and ten minutes after waving good-bye to Dr. Roz, I was pulling in to the Sholeetsa Project’s parking lot.
Columbia City, just north of Boeing Field, is mostly industrial these days. Relatively narrow streets are lined with old-fashioned redbrick buildings. I seemed to remember that once upon a time the building housing the Sholeetsa Project had been a paint store. The façade remained unchanged. With my collection of plastic bags in hand, I headed inside. As soon as I stepped through the front door, I felt as though I’d landed on a Federation starship. The place had been gutted. All trace of the space’s humble retail origins had been stripped away, leaving behind an interior that was shiny, sleek, and modern. The well-lit lobby area was relatively small but not at all cramped. Beyond that, a thick glass wall allowed visitors a view into the working guts of the place—a scientific lab so up to date that it would have been the envy of a lot of universities. Inside the lab several white-coated technicians were hard at work. At the far end of the lobby a sliding door operated by a key card opened into the lab. A stern message had been stenciled onto the glass—NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE.
I approached the reception desk and handed my business card over to the young woman seated there. “I’m here to see Loretta Hawk,” I told her.
The receptionist nodded. “I believe she’s expecting you. Her office is just over there,” she added, pointing behind me.
I was a little surprised at this casual approach. “I just let myself in?”
“As long as her door’s open, people are welcome,” the receptionist replied. “It looks open to me.”
As soon as I appeared in the doorway, I spied a woman seated behind a desk covered with neat stacks of what were evidently well-organized files. Everything about Loretta Hawk spoke of her origins. She was Native American through and through. I estimated her age to be somewhere in her fifties. Her face was narrow, her nose aquiline. Her facial wrinkles weren’t furrows so much as they were laugh lines. Her shoulder-length hair was smooth and straight. It was mostly black but with hints of gray—that natural kind of gray you earn by putting in your time on this planet. When she stood up and stepped around the desk to greet me, I saw she was wearing a pair of jeans (with no holes in the legs, by the way) and a western shirt as well as a pair of snakeskin boots. There was an eye-popping turquoise squash-blossom necklace at the base of her throat, and an assortment of showy turquoise rings adorned her hands.
“You must be white man with heap big wampum looking for DNA,” she said with a welcoming smile.
That amazingly politically incorrect comment stunned me to momentary silence.
She grinned at me, her brown eyes twinkling. “That was a joke!” she explained. “I usually start out by telling my visitors if we’da sunk that Mayflower when it first showed up, we’d never have had any of this trouble. But Roz told me I might be able to wheedle some money out of you, so I decided to play nice. Have a seat, won’t you?”
I sat, placing my collection of clear plastic bags on the part of her desk that was closest to my chair and next to an engraved brass nameplate that said LORETTA M. HAWK, PH.D.
“These are the three samples you want profiled?” Loretta asked.
I nodded. “The comb, hairbrush, and toothbrush are all from one individual. The cheek swabs are from two others.”
“What’s the story here?”
I gave her an abbreviated version. When I finished, there was a momentary pause. “So what do you know about me and about this?” Loretta asked, with an expansive wave that included the whole operation.
“Not much,” I admitted, “other than the fact that you’re trying to increase the Native American presence in national DNA databases.”
“All right,” she said, with the twinkle back in her dark eyes, “now that you’ve shown me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
It was another politically incorrect joke, a slightly off-color one. The woman behind the desk had a barbed sense of humor. No wonder Dr. Roz liked her. So did I.
“Understood,” I said, smiling back to let her know I got it.
“There’s nothing wrong with the term ‘Native American,’ ” she added, drawing air quotes around the words, “but I consider myself to be an American, period. I grew up on the Rosebud Sioux. Back then I was called an Indian, and as far as I’m concerned, I still am. If people are offended by that, too bad. I’m also Lakota. What other people call me doesn’t matter in the least. As long as the people throwing names around stay out of my way so I can get the job done, they can call me Grandma Moses for all I care.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” I told her.
“There were a lot of obstacles growing up on the reservation,” she continued, “but I was a smart kid—a very smart kid—and my teachers noticed. When I said I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up, they didn’t tell me it was impossible. No, they took me seriously. My home life might have been a disaster, but the people at school—the teachers, coaches, and counselors—encouraged me and kept me going. Once I was in high school, they helped me track down scholarships. I was in my first year of medical school in Grand Forks, North Dakota, when my mother was murdered back home. She died in an unlit parking lot behind a scuzzy bar just off the res.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Loretta nodded. “Thank you. It’s more than thirty years since that happened. I was in my early twenties, but it still hurts. I had to drop out of school, go back home, and take care of my younger brothers and sisters. I got a job with the tribal police to make ends meet and wound up working as a dispatcher.”
“Was your mother’s case ever solved?” I asked.
“Not at the time,” she said. “As I said, the murder happened off the reservation rather than on it. The case got tossed back and forth between the tribal police and the local authorities, and the cops who were eventually assigned to solve it showed very little interest. There are a few places in the Dakotas where the idea that ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’ still prevails. That was far more pervasive back then than it is now. My mother was an Indian. She was also a diabetic with a serious drinking problem. She never went anywhere without a purse filled with little booze bottles in case she woke up in the morning and the bars were closed.
“But then, a number of years ago, something changed. Suddenly there was a new sheriff in town, and he decided to create a cold-case unit. My mother’s case was one of the first ones he ordered reopened. The murder happened in the seventies, so DNA identifications simply didn’t exist back then. Amazingly enough, however, physical evidence from my mother’s homicide had been preserved, and not just preserved but properly preserved. When it was examined in the state police lab, not only were they able to create a profile of the assailant, they also got a hit. The perpetrator, John Turpin, turned out to be a friend of my mother’s—an old drinking buddy, really—who by the early two thousands was doing time in prison on multiple sexual-assault charges.”
“His DNA must have turned up in the national criminal DNA database,” I suggested.
“You got it.”
“Is that why you started all this?”
Loretta nodded. “That was the original inspiration. Once my brothers and sisters were out of school and launched, I figured it was too late for me to go back to medical school—too much time had passed. Instead I got a Ph.D. in microbiology. And all the while, both back on the reservation and while I was in school, I kept seeing my family’s history repeated over and over for other families. Horrible crimes would be committed and, likely as not, they went unsolved. Even before I got my Ph.D., the idea of doing something like this was niggling at the back of my mind. It’s all I ever talked about, and then one day when I was here in Seattle on a job search, someone put me in touch with a guy named Bill Patton. Ever heard of him?”
“The name sounds vaguely familiar,” I said.
“I’m not surprised. His younger brother, Robby, was murdered when they were both in their teens. Robby’s homicide was never solved—until last year, by Seattle PD’s Cold Case Unit. They used one of those open-source familial DNA databases to home in on a guy who had never been on law enforcement’s radar for Robby’s murder. Unfortunately, Bill didn’t live long enough to see his brother’s killer go to prison. But as soon as I talked with Bill Patton, he and I were on the same page. We had both lived with the same kinds of unsolved tragedies haunting our lives, and he was determined to try fixing that problem for others.
“Bill was a multimillionaire in his own right. When he died, he left me this building along with enough money to gut it, rehab it, build the lab, and purchase equipment. It was his idea that we use Chief Sealth’s mother’s name. He also left an ongoing trust fund to cover expenses, but it seems like there’s usually a shortfall in that category, which is why we’re always looking for money.
“Back when I was a kid, diabetes was one of the biggest concerns in the Native American community. As part of the research, I remember a team of people showing up at my elementary school and asking for all the kids to leave urine samples. Even though the adults were dead serious about it, we kids thought it was hilarious that we all had to pee in bottles. I don’t think it’s funny anymore, and we’re using that diabetes research as a model. We’re sending teams of people out to schools and churches on reservations, to tribal council meetings, dances, and rodeos, to collect as many cheek swabs as possible. Those samples are what we use to create profiles that we’re adding to DNA databases across the country. And you know what? It’s working. So far we’ve been instrumental in solving several long-cold cases. We’ve used familial DNA taken from kids who are currently attending grade school to locate perpetrators in homicides that happened decades before those kids were even born.”
Damn. Loretta Hawk was a cagey woman all right, and she had just nailed me square in the sweet spot. When it comes to my personal hot button, tempting me with solving cold cases does the job.
“Where do I sign up?” I asked.
“Sign up?”
“You’ll take my Amex, won’t you, or do I need to write out a check?”
“Amex would work,” Loretta said. “How much do you have in mind?”
“Ten for starters,” I said.
“Ten dollars?” she asked with a disappointed frown.
“I meant ten thousand.”
“Whoa,” she said, brightening. “Heap big wampum indeed!”
I briefly considered cracking a joke about spending money like a drunken Indian, but I didn’t. It was okay for Loretta to be politically incorrect, but I doubted that was a two-way street. Instead I pulled out my Platinum Card and handed it over. It took a few minutes and a call to the Amex concierge desk to make sure all was in order. When we finished the transaction and I stood up to leave, Loretta reached across her desk and gathered my assortment of plastic bags.
“How soon would you like your profiles?” she asked.
“As soon as possible.”
“It figures,” she said. “Anglos are always in a rush. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Indian time.”
“Never,” I admitted.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll do these on white-man time, and I’ll call you as soon as they’re ready.”