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Clarkson, Idaho

W hat a beautiful Sunday!

Blaine Eckles, the UI dean of students, is nearing the Costco in Clarkson, near Lewiston, a forty-minute drive from Moscow. He’s admiring the morning. He and his wife, Shelley, are doing the grocery run they normally do every six weeks.

He’s seen a Vandal Alert about an unconscious person, and he hopes whoever needed first aid received it and is okay. More than likely an alcohol-related mishap after game day. Not unusual.

But as they are about to pull into the Costco parking lot, his phone rings.

It’s Tyson Berrett.

“Blaine,” says the police captain, “we’ve got four dead bodies and we think they may be students.”

“What?” Eckles gestures to his wife to go on into Costco; he sits in the car and speaks to the captain.

“We don’t have it confirmed yet. But given the proximity of where they are to campus, at King Road, and their ages, it’s a good chance they are.”

“Call me back as soon as you know anything,” says Eckles.

Just like the police, Eckles has a checklist of what to do and whom to call.

His first call is to University of Idaho president Scott Green. His line is busy, so Eckles suspects someone else—Tyson, probably—is giving him the news.

Then he calls the provost, Torrey Lawrence, and informs him.

Jake Nichols, the director of campus safety, is temporarily unreachable because, it will emerge, he is on a boat on a river.

Eckles leaves a voicemail asking Greg Lambeth, the director of the counseling center, to phone him as soon as possible. (Lambeth, it turns out, is hiking in the woods.)

But the small group of people he can reach have an impromptu conference call, then decide to convene ASAP on campus.

Eckles goes into Costco and retrieves Shelley. He asks her to drive so he can set about putting things in order.

Eckles is trying to stay one step ahead of what to do, what to set in motion.

Berrett mentioned that the manner of the deaths was suspicious, but Eckles has no clue as to how the four students, if indeed they are students, died.

He wonders if it’s drug-related; more likely, he thinks, they were shot.

So when a bewildered, irate Stacy Chapin reaches him, he genuinely has nothing new to tell her. He doesn’t know what happened. But even if he did, he explains, it’s up to the police, not him, to talk to her.

He notes that she doesn’t ask his name, that in her panic, she may not be aware that it’s him. Eckles does not know Stacy Chapin, but he knows who she is. When you’re the dean, you notice when triplets enroll. Doesn’t happen every day.

Nor does a mass murder.

Eckles started at UI in 2015, so he wasn’t here for the previous horrific campus tragedy, in 2011, when Katy Benoit was murdered by her professor, who then holed up in the Best Western and, when the cops tried to bash down the door, turned the gun on himself.

Now, as the administrators huddle in a conference room, they have a whole host of questions to think about. Like security, and how to beef that up. Whether to cancel classes and, if so, for how long.

For Eckles, the priority is student care. He needs to find out where the kids lived, whether they were members of a Greek house, so he can reach out.

Tyson Berrett continues phoning him intermittently, and Eckles tells the captain that he will cooperate as best he can with any investigation.

But what no one in that room of university leaders considers is something that will become a problem for Chief Fry and his officers: By deciding to cancel classes, they are effectively sending home thousands of possible witnesses. Key people the police need to speak to.

Fry later shakes his head in exasperation at this, wishing the school had asked him first. But part of being a cop is knowing that you can control only so much. The university is not answerable to him and they need to make their decisions for their reasons, not his.

Fortunately, there is another law enforcement agency that has branches all over the country and can get to out-of-towners easily.

Fry knows he’ll be calling it soon.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation.