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Moscow, Idaho

T his is the worst crime scene yet.

Latah County prosecutor Bill Thompson pulls up close to the King Road house and makes his way toward the police tape.

He braces himself, knowing what lies within its perimeter.

He’s never had to deal with a crime this violent and of this magnitude—and Thompson has led the county prosecutorial office for three decades. The previous week was his thirty-year anniversary.

Some anniversary gift! Four students stabbed to death in their beds.

He ducks under the police tape and tells the officer outside he’s going to do a tour of the interior of the house.

The officers are deferential, making way for him, trying to be helpful. They revere Thompson. He might look like Santa Claus, with his long white beard and spectacles, but appearances can be deceptive. To the cops, Thompson is the epitome of the adage “iron fist, velvet glove.”

At this point, he’s a legend.

If, in thirty years of being Latah County’s lead prosecutor, an elected position, Thompson has lost a case, no one can remember it.

He has no intention of letting this one blot his record.

Whoever did this will pay for it.

Thompson makes his way up to the main level, where he sees Xana and Ethan, and then to the upper level, where he sees Maddie and Kaylee.

He also sees the knife sheath beside the bed that Corporal Payne and the others had noticed earlier.

That’s going to be a critical piece of evidence, if there is DNA on it.

Whoever did this made a mistake.

Thanks to the popularity of public genealogical websites like Ancestry and 23andMe, forensics can now take the smallest piece of DNA and construct an entire family tree around it in a method called investigative genetic genealogy—IGG for short.

It’s a game-changing scientific development for investigators.

Leaving the knife sheath might be the murderer’s only mistake. Time will tell. There’s no sign right now of a murder weapon, of prints. But they are just starting.

Thompson is confident they will find the perpetrator. They will find a motive. What he doesn’t know is how long it will take.

But Thompson is patient. He prides himself on his patience.

His most famous case was that of Moscow automotive repairman Charles Capone.

In April 2010 Capone’s estranged wife, Rachael Anderson, vanished.

Her body was never found, but Thompson was nonetheless able to convict Capone of her murder.

Because he waited. And waited. For two years—until an accomplice who’d helped Capone strangle his wife and throw her body, wrapped in a tarpaulin, into the Snake River started talking.

Ultimately, he became Thompson’s star witness and testified as to exactly what had happened.

Capone was sentenced to life in prison.

Another famous case was the murder of UI football player Eric McMillan, who was gunned down on campus by two brothers from Seattle, James and Matthew Wells.

There was no obvious connection between McMillan and the Wells brothers, but again, Thompson was patient.

He wound up indicting not just the two brothers but multiple family members who’d committed perjury to cover up what had happened.

So no one who has worked closely with Bill Thompson—and that includes all thirty-six members of the Moscow PD—considers him soft.

True, he votes Democrat. Which makes him unusual in a Republican state.

True, he has advocated for the community to create more resources to treat mental illness, saying that this would prevent crime.

He’d pushed publicly for this in 2007 after a local janitor, Jason Hamilton, who was known to be mentally unstable, went out drinking, then shot his wife, Crystal, in the head and went on a shooting spree at the sheriff’s office, killing a total of four people, including beloved Moscow police officer Lee Newbill, and wounding another deputy, Brannon Jordan, before turning the gun on himself.

And true, he didn’t press for a trial in the case of John Lee, a schizophrenic kid who was known to many, many people in Moscow.

In 2015, Lee shot his adoptive mother, Terri Grzebielski, a popular nurse practitioner; his landlord; and two more people at the local Arby’s.

He’d then sped off to Pullman, where cops had made the arrest.

Everyone in Moscow knew and loved Terri. Everyone had watched John Lee grow up. They’d witnessed his mental struggle. So, yes, Thompson had accepted a plea agreement whereby Lee was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

You could argue that that was soft, or you could argue that it was pragmatic. No one believed John Lee was in his right mind when he went on his killing spree.

But this case?

Four bodies? In a student house?

Stab wounds? Rivers of blood? Murders committed in the middle of the night in a densely populated area? With two survivors who, for whatever reason, waited eight hours to call 911?

Thompson knows that the chief will likely agree that the attack was targeted. The two meet every morning at eight. They know each other’s thought patterns inside out.

It may take weeks to go through all the stuff on these kids’ phones to find the link they need.

But they will find it.

There’s always a clue. He and Fry know that from experience.

Back in 2009 a local man, Silas Parks, claimed his pregnant wife, Sarah, had died in a tragic house fire. In fact, he’d strangled her first, then set the fire himself.

James Fry had been the lead investigator on that case, Bill Thompson the prosecutor, and in the end, it was the autopsy of the mother and fetus that gave Silas away: Sarah did not have any smoke in her lungs. And the fetus had petechial hemorrhage in her eyes, an indication of trauma.

Thompson had told Sarah’s family to hang tough and let justice unfold, as it surely would.

Now, he watches as the state police forensics team arrives with a trailer full of equipment.

When they’ve gathered all the evidence they need—fingernails, skin scrapings, everything and anything—the police will call the county coroner, Cathy Mabbutt.

She’s probably already been told to cancel her dinner plans.

Thompson considers if he might go down to the police station where the roommates and immediate circle of friends are being questioned. He needs to learn what happened in the hours before and after the murders. The timeline is essential.

He also wants to ensure that whatever he learns is kept secret. Leaks can kill investigations; they can literally obstruct justice. He never talks publicly about a case until the very end—until sentencing—and even then, he’s brief.

Beyond the evidence truck, a crowd is gathering with microphones and cameras.

This one is going to attract more press attention than usual.

Oh, well. They can gather. But they are all going to have to wait.

It’s business as usual.