Page 66

Moscow, Idaho

C anceling classes for the rest of that week doesn’t prove to be straightforward.

Provost Torrey Lawrence canvasses his senior administrators, including dean of students Blaine Eckles and the head of the faculty senate, Kelly Quinnett, before making the decision that classes will be offered remotely—but also optionally—all the way through Thanksgiving.

Quinnett is the outspoken head of the drama department, and her husband, Brian, has already started a new routine of walking her down the ten-foot garden path from her office to her car.

Quinnett doesn’t hesitate before rendering her opinion: Of course students shouldn’t have to show up to class in the wake of a trauma like this.

A number of the parents agree. They want the school to cancel classes all the way to Christmas.

But Eckles is worried that a large number of students, who have already paid for their housing, don’t have the ability to go anywhere else.

He’s concerned that those students, especially the ones who never met Xana, Ethan, Maddie, and Kaylee, might blame the university for depriving them of the education they have already paid for.

One of these unlucky students is Alex Salvador, a recruited tennis star from Spain.

When not attending classes, Alex divides his time between practicing on the UI courts and traveling to intercollegiate matches. The serious athletes at UI don’t have the time or desire to join Greek life, effectively separating their campus experiences from that of the party kids.

But now, Alex and three tennis teammates—all on scholarships, all from Europe—are holed up in their shared apartment just three minutes from the King Road house.

They’d once or twice fleetingly dropped in at parties there, but now they can think of little else but the gruesome fate of the four victims.

“Then it really hit me,” Alex said.

As the town empties of the students who can easily drive home, Alex and his roommates find themselves confined indoors once the sun goes down, at around four p.m. They each buy handguns.

Lock their door. And spend sleepless nights mostly peering out of their windows into the darkness, seeing just the blue lights of police cars endlessly circling the streets.

No one wants to venture onto streets where a murderer might be lurking.

“We were not safe there,” Alex said, then refined his words: “We thought we were not safe.”

Fear isn’t the only emotion they feel. They are confused by seemingly conflicting directions from the administration: They can take their classes remotely, but in some cases, people don’t have to take them at all.

As Alex reflected, “It was a mess.”

A stone’s throw from Alex and his roommates, Ben DeWitt, who had been in Xana’s high-school class, is also staying put. As a features writer for the Argonaut, DeWitt has work to do.

Like many University of Idaho kids his age, he packs heat. He knows that it’s legal to conceal and carry in Idaho—just not on campus. Even though he has a gun, DeWitt pushes his couch against his apartment door at night. An extra precaution.

Over in Pullman, Evan Ellis is in his studio by himself during a commercial break from his broadcasting. A hard-bitten journalist, he still locks the studio door.

“I’ve never done that before,” he said. “That’s how uneasy it was. I had this weird gut feeling, and I came to this realization: What if this animal is still here?”

Doug Wilson, the gray-bearded pastor of Christ Church, a conservative evangelical congregation of around three thousand, goes to get his car keys fixed and learns the local locksmith is overwhelmed.

“The guy told me that people who never locked their doors were coming in and ordering locks installed,” he said.

Wilson is used to being treated with some hostility by his neighbors, but even he has never experienced a mass panic like this.

Dr. Rand Walker, a trusted local therapist whom Chief Fry has put on standby to treat his traumatized officers and their families, is observing rare and frightening instances of the six-degrees-of-separation connections among the town’s residents.

The fact that everyone in Moscow knows everyone else has morphed overnight from a source of comfort to something deeply unsettling.

Neighbor suddenly mistrusts neighbor. Friend mistrusts friend.

Customer mistrusts vendor. People are shutting themselves in. Hiding from one another.

Walker is hearing from his patients, from townspeople, from members of his own family, that suddenly the connectivity between them all feels toxic.

Walker’s son Kristian, a former UI student, knew the victims. His girlfriend is the daughter of the owner of the Mad Greek, where Xana and Maddie worked.

Now the restaurant is closed, and a handwritten placard is in the window:

We are closed temporarily to mourn the loss of two staff members. We will update FB on status of store soon. Please keep all the family and friends of yesterday’s victims in your thoughts.—MG Family

It’s all too close to feel comfortable. Because who knows who among them is the murderer?

For Jeff “Smitty” Smith, the owner of Moscow Bagel and Deli, the sudden emptiness has an immediate economic consequence. His customer base is almost entirely wiped out days earlier than he budgeted for.

His girlfriend, Sarah Wicks, the owner of Vine wine bar, has a slightly different problem, one she shares with Marc Trivelpiece, her close friend and the owner of the Corner Club: They don’t think it’s fair to ask employees to work alone behind a bar at night.

Who knows who might show up or approach them outside in the dark while they walk to their cars?

Trivelpiece solves this by taking on all the shifts himself. He tells his remaining student workers—a dozen or so have already gone home—to stay away. He’s got their backs.

Local lawyer Mike Pattinson’s chief concern is his twenty-two-year-old daughter, Lexi, who lives in an apartment at the Bricks, barely fifty yards from 1122 King Road.

She lives so close that some of her neighbors reported to police that at around four a.m. on November 13, they heard a scream.

They were interviewed down at the police station.

Lexi had been in APhi and found Kaylee to be a generous, thoughtful sister—a “bright personality” Lexi liked so much that the two roomed together during their second semester. They wound up becoming neighbors in their senior year.

Whenever Murphy the pooch wandered into Lexi’s apartment, she returned the goldendoodle to Kaylee.

Most evenings Lexi walked past the back of the King Road home to get to her car in the parking lot and saw Maddie through her window, putting on her makeup at her vanity.

And just a few days before the murders, Lexi played beer pong with Xana, who, dressed in a yellow jumpsuit, was dancing and hugging every person who walked into the room.

So Lexi is badly shaken.

Her boyfriend puts his hunting rifle under the bed.

Her father tells her to get out of that apartment and come home immediately.

Pattinson has faith in Chief Fry’s ability to catch whoever did this. He bets that when the cops get the perpetrator, they’ll find a fraternity rivalry or some equally simple motive behind the murders.

But he’s worried that the timing of this—right before Thanksgiving—and the brutality of the murders are going to take the cops into a media storm they’ve never seen before.

He’s not at all sure that the chief is trained for that part.

And he’s worried about Bill Thompson, who is in the twilight of his career and doesn’t get a homicide every day.

Certainly not a mass homicide. He may have to trim that beard a bit for prime time, Pattinson thinks cynically.

Meanwhile, though, he’s genuinely scared of who is out there, just like everyone else.

For the first time in his twenty-plus years of marriage, he does not tease his wife, Marcela, when she bolts the door at night. He’s always told her to relax, that she’s not living in her native Colombia. “Honey, this is not South America, it’s Moscow,” he’s often said.

He doesn’t say it anymore.

Whoever did this is the sick person who skinned the dog.

Claire Qualls, a twenty-year-old student and first responder, was driving back to Moscow from Spokane when she got the alert. No big deal, she thought about the 911 alert that all the EMT volunteers get.

Until the news started ricocheting around about the four murders.

Today, she’s haunted by them.

Her cousin was close friends with Ethan. And 1122 King Road is just two blocks from her basement apartment, which is at the bottom of a dark set of covered stairs, in what is generally considered the shittiest neighborhood in all of Moscow.

Every time Claire comes home, her thoughts turn dark.

She’ll walk down those steps, and he’ll attack her, and she’ll hit her head on the concrete, and no one will see her lying there, dying…

Claire has never wanted a gun. She doesn’t know how to use one, and as a trained first responder, she knows the statistics: The majority of firearm deaths are caused by accidents in the home.

Now, though, she’s going to go buy a handgun and she’ll ask Katie, her roommate, to teach her how to use it. And her dad is going to come and replace her cheap window that can easily be opened from the outside with a better one.

He and her mom want her to move home. But Claire doesn’t want to.

She’s not sure their home is any safer.

She’s certain that whoever committed the murders is the same sick fuck who skinned her parents’ neighbors’ dog.

Two nights before the murders, the animal, a pet of close family friends, had been running around in the backyard as usual, but then it had not appeared indoors to eat. Unusual.

The next morning it was found—skinned. In a hunting community, skinning wild beasts is not uncommon. But a pet dog?

Claire shivers.

She’s going to get a personal safety alarm and clip it on her backpack and keep it next to her at night. To activate it, you don’t need to press a button. You simply pull it apart and it goes off, and its piercing sound rings out until it’s put back together.

That way, Claire figures she’ll have a fighting chance if someone attacks her on the stairs or in her bed.

Without an alarm, she thinks, poor Maddie, Kaylee, Xana, and Ethan didn’t stand a chance.