Last week, I set off to do research in the area of my current WIP (Work In Progress). It is book 15 in the Gabriel Hawke Mystery series.

I was at the halfway point and had used Google Earth, maps, and the internet to navigate Hawke in an area he wasn’t familiar with, and neither was I. After seeing some discrepancies in information, I decided to go there myself.

So I dropped Nia, my chiweenie, off at my daughter’s house and took off for Nez Perce County in Idaho. This county encompasses Lewiston, Idaho, as well as the lands the Nez Perce were forced to live on after the treaty of 1855. It is in north-central Idaho.

The first place I needed to go was the Nez Perce County Courthouse and find the County Prosecutor’s office. I have Hawke visit there and wanted to make sure, since I was using a real place, that I had how it looked correct. Walking in, my first sight was a man in his late twenties or early thirties trying to get through the detector at the front entrance.

The man seemed to be with two women who were behind him. He had taken everything but his clothes off when one of them told him to check his back pocket, which was sagging his pants down. He pulled out a pair of vice grips! Which the guard handed back to him when he’d made it through the detector with it beeping.

I walked through with no problem. Then I walked to the elevator, saw it went to the third floor, where the county prosecutor’s offices were, but I wanted to see if there was an elevator at the back of the building, where I had Hawke enter on a Sunday. So I walked down the long wide hallway. Oh, they were still putting the siding on the outside of this newly constructed building which was one of the reasons I wanted to see it in person. All I could find online were photos of the outside and them working on it.

After going down the hallway, finding the back door, I wrote Hawke would enter, I realized there wasn’t an elevator, only stairs, which as I stood typing on my phone the vise grip guy came down the hall, opened the door and went up the stairs. I backtracked to the front, took the elevator up and then scoped out the hallway and where the prosecutors office was along with what it looked like walking into the office. Then I walked to the end of the hall, saw it was the same stair case to the side of the windows as I’d seen the vise grrip guy to through. So I opened the fire stair door and walked down, noting the sounds and new building smell. At the first floor, I crossed my fingers and hoped the door opened and I wouldn’t be locked in until someone used the stairs. The door opened!

I sat down on a bench, typed in what I’d discovered, and then I left the courthouse, headed to the Clearwater River Casino and hotel. That was where I needed to do some looking around next and spend the night.

At the hotel, I checked in and immediately realized what I hadn’t seen online. The hotel had a small hallway that connected it to the casino. I had my characters going outside the casino and back into the hotel. Now I knew the real layout. I also discovered that the cafe in the casino that I had them meeting at wouldn’t work and changed it to the sports bar.

Using Google Earth, I’d had Hawke parked in the casino parking lot instead of the hotel, and that changed where he let Dog out to relieve himself. I was glad I’d made the trip to make sure things were correct. I wasn’t happy that all night long the blasted TV kept coming on without me doing anything. It woke me up and upset me so much, I didn’t get very much sleep. When I checked out and told the receptionist about it, she made it sound like it was my fault for not calling the desk to have someone come fix it. In the middle of the night, all I wanted to do was pull it off the wall. I wasn’t thinking straight. She did tell me about places in Lapwai, my next stop that had breakfast.

In Lapwai, I stopped at Donald’s Diner and had a tasty breakfast of ham and egg while I listened to the locals visiting. An uncle and nephew were talking about a fishing trip and a man about my age was reading a paper at the counter and talking to the waitress about people he knew that were in the paper.

From there, I scoped out the tribal police station to see how my character would access the building. I had that wrong and fixed it.

Then I drove to where the victim’s house sat in my story and saw how to make the abduction work. Then my sister-in-law told me about a road from Lapwai to Lewiston. I didn’t have GPS or a map, and I couldn’t figure out what road to take, so I went to the Chamber of Commerce. A nice woman there gave me directions, but asked if I’d seen the heritage museum. I told her it was closed when I drove by earlier. She said it was open now, so I backtracked through the museum, then went back to Lapwai and passed it to find the road that led me to the top of the hill with residences and down to the main roads.

After typing in more information, I headed back home, enjoying the drive down Rattlesnake grade between Anatone, WA, and Enterprise, OR.

I’m closing in on the ending of Captured Hummingbird.

I wasn’t focused on taking photos as much as writing down what I saw.