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