Page 48

Moscow, Idaho

The man who gets out, patrol officer Mitch Nunes, is twenty-two. The same age as Hunter Johnson.

Nunes joined the Moscow PD only a year ago.

The kids look at him, slightly stunned to see someone their age in an officer’s uniform. Nunes is expecting a routine situation. He asks Hunter Johnson, who is standing just inside, still holding the kitchen knife, to come with him to show him the unconscious person. He’s ready to administer CPR.

But right from the get-go something tells him this isn’t the usual case of a student who has over-imbibed.

Hunter Johnson doesn’t let go of the knife.

He takes Nunes up to Xana’s room. He shows him Xana and Ethan. Nunes takes their pulses.

They are dead, clearly the victims of a brutal stabbing.

Nunes can see that in addition to other wounds, Xana’s fingers are almost severed. It looks like she put up a fight against someone advancing into the room.

Ethan looks as if he died while sleeping. He’s on his side in the bed, facing the wall, stabbed in the buttocks and the neck.

Nunes takes out his gun.

He might be the department baby, but he knows how to follow protocols from his time in the army and his police training.

He knows that while he waits for backup, he needs to look around for a perpetrator.

His first priority is to clear the residence of any threat.

His second is to get medical aid to anyone who needs it.

Nunes casts his eyes around. There’s no sign of a perpetrator.

And it’s clear that Xana and Ethan are beyond requiring medical assistance.

He calls for backup. He takes Hunter down to the living room. Then he makes his way up to the top of the house, his body cam recording every second of his movements and the horrific visual of what he sees.

Upstairs, on the top floor, Nunes finds a dog, a goldendoodle, in the room on the left. He enters the room on the right, Maddie’s room, and sees two young women, Kaylee and Maddie, lying in Maddie’s bed.

Also stabbed to death.

Even before he takes their pulses, he knows they are dead.

Nunes hasn’t seen anything as horrific as this in his short time at the Moscow PD. The last murder in town happened long before he joined the force.

Two other patrol officers, Corbin Smith and Eric Warner, are on their way, but Nunes knows he needs to go up the chain of command fast. This is way serious.