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Troy, Idaho

I t’s dark by the time the police chief gets close to the crime scene.

He doesn’t imagine for a second that any of these actions will come back to haunt him.

He doesn’t yet realize that every move he makes will be fodder for criticism from a press skeptical that a little police department in a little town can find whoever killed Xana, Ethan, Maddie, and Kaylee.

He doesn’t yet grasp the snobbery of the coastal elites, who consider Moscow the middle of nowhere and assume the police chief must therefore be inexperienced and inept.

He doesn’t yet comprehend that the media is going to hound him so much, he will have to cover his office windows with butcher paper.

He doesn’t yet realize that the job of a police chief in the modern era has little to do with the training and experience he’s gotten in thirty years on the job, including ten weeks spent at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia, a program for which only the country’s very best police officers are selected.

He doesn’t yet understand that what he will need over the next six weeks is a PhD in communications. And that is something he is not equipped with.

Fry is thinking about process, the well-being of his team, and protecting the investigation the way he knows how and the way Bill Thompson wants it.

With silence.

The good thing about having a small department is that Fry trusts his men implicitly. He knows there will be no leaks, whatever they find.

What he doesn’t yet know is that in the absence of a real story, people invent fictitious ones.

And that is where the real harm lies.