Page 67

Moscow, Idaho

Berrett says he’s spoken to Blaine Eckles and asked him to pass on anything that could be useful.

Thus begins a pattern: Twice a day, Eckles passes on details about the four victims—their clubs, classes, professors—to the university general counsel, who passes them on to Berrett. There has to be a wall between them for all sorts of reasons, including protecting students’ privacy.

Both Chief Fry and Captain Berrett know they must not tell Eckles—or anyone who doesn’t need to know—how the victims died. It’s imperative that no one has any inkling of that until after the knife sheath has been properly photographed, analyzed, and sent off to the labs to check for trace DNA.

Privately, the chief grouses when he hears that the university has released the kids to go home. Inadvertently, they’ve made the cops’ lives so much harder.

Officer Dani Vargas is known to be one heck of an interviewer, and yesterday she, Lawrence Mowery, Mitch Nunes, and John Lawrence got the best they could out of those poor, shocked kids, the friends of the victims, before they checked out of the Best Western.

But there’s not much point in having a great interviewer in Moscow if the students you need to question are en route to, say, Florida or Texas.

Fry and his team are still trying to get their arms around what they’ve got at the crime scene.

The Idaho State Police has a crack team of forensic lab rats, and they’re headed over now from Meridian, a five-hour drive away. Their mandate is to go over all the evidence for a second time before it’s scooped up and shipped off for processing. No one wants any fuckups.

It will take serious manpower and a vast network to sift through it all.

People assume that technology makes a cop’s life easier. In some ways, it does. But it might take a whole day just to download the contents of the kids’ phones; simply deciphering the data is going to take hours, days, maybe weeks.

Fry looks down at his laptop and sees the sticky-note reminder from the receptionist.

Call back the FBI.

Fry knows he needs to call the feds in. In fact, he’ll be screwed if he doesn’t, given the mass exodus from Moscow already underway. He’ll need the FBI’s extra manpower and nationwide reach—and who knows what else.

The nearest Bureau field office is up in Coeur d’Alene, near the homes of Maddie’s and Kaylee’s families.

Fry prides himself on having built up great relationships with both the ISP—the Idaho State Police—and the local federal agents.

That doesn’t always happen, especially not in big cities like LA and Chicago, where, infamously, pride and testosterone can cause unhelpful friction between the local and federal arms of law enforcement.

One of Fry’s federal contacts, Lance Hart out of ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives), had found him an accelerant-detection dog to help solve the Silas Parks case.

Five years later, in the immediate aftermath of the John Lee shootings, Hart was ready to help.

“I hear the water down there is tainted again,” the guy joshed.

“What do you need?” What Fry needed was a ballistics analysis.

“Send us the stuff,” Hart said. And up it went so the deadly bullets could be analyzed and submitted into evidence.

It’s a pity, the chief thinks, that Hart is now retired.

Yesterday, Fry saw a guy in an FBI jacket at the King Road crime scene, probably there at the invitation of the ISP, he assumed. It wasn’t one of the guys he knew well.

As it happens, that same agent is now standing in the briefing room at the police station with the lead from State, ready for the eight a.m. meeting.

“We’ve been trying to get ahold of you,” the agent says.

“I know,” says Fry. “I’ve been a little busy.”

“Need us to come in?”

Both men understand the protocol. The FBI cannot officially assist on a case unless the local police chief explicitly asks them to.

“Yes,” says Fry. “And fast.”

And with that, the FBI special agent in charge calls his boss, the regional special agent in charge, and the government machinery clicks into gear. The scale and speed of it deserves respect.

In Salt Lake City, Utah, and elsewhere around the country, an operation begins to unfold. Fry imagines dozens of agents leaping onto planes that will bring them to Moscow, Idaho.

In the station briefing room, Fry and Bill Thompson are technically the bosses, but right now they’re staying out of the way as three law enforcement representatives—one from the Moscow PD, one from the ISP, one from the FBI—stand at a whiteboard.

With the FBI, the task force is now composed of approximately forty-five law enforcement officers from local, state, and federal agencies. It’s a tight squeeze, with a few folks standing at the back, but all eyes are forward as the leads divide them into teams:

Victimology. The officers on this team will assemble a profile of each victim by reaching out to family, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, teachers—anyone who can tell them who Xana, Kaylee, Maddie, and Ethan were over the past two years.

As the adage goes, “In order to know how a person died, you first need to know how they lived.”

Interviewers. Detectives Vargas, Lawrence, Mowery, Payne, and others on this team will reach out and interview anyone who was near the scene of the crime, any possible witness.

Forensics. Fry still doesn’t know how the guys on this team do what they do, but he knows what they are capable of doing: sifting through cell phone data, putting together DNA profiles, analyzing prints and blood.

Videos and local CCTV. Some camera somewhere must have caught something. The analysts on this team know what they’re looking for.

Tip management. This team will handle the calls that are starting to come in on the phone number listed in yesterday’s press release, all of which need to be answered and documented.

Note-taking. This team will keep a record of assignments, progress, and to-do lists.

No one complains about where they are assigned, setting a tenor that Fry will later point to with pride. The absence of agency infighting is extraordinary in an investigation of this complexity and significance.

Brett Payne is the Moscow PD leader in front of the whiteboard; he scribbles down names from his department.

Payne, whose hair is tightly cropped, reminding the room of his former military career, is short, just over five feet, wiry, and tattooed.

Payne may be young, but he’s whip-smart.

Fry hired him in 2020 because he has the talent to be an extraordinary investigator.

He’s good with details. And very good at getting information out of people.

Every good detective possesses “the gift of the gab,” as Fry refers to this key skill.

But more than that, a good detective needs to be wily like a fox.

Payne will do very well, the chief thinks as he watches him dole out responsibilities.

Even so, this job is going to be the challenge of his career. Of all their careers.

Braggadocio is not Fry’s style, but there’s no disputing that the chief himself is a damned good investigator. One time he got a written confession out of a pedophile because he suggested, convincingly, that the guy might feel better if he wrote an apology letter to his teenage victims.

Before the first full meeting wraps up, Payne lays out the structure of the investigation. At eight a.m. daily, assignments will be made. Then at around five or six p.m., they’ll regroup. The team leaders want to hear status reports from everyone in the room. No detail is to be held back.

After the briefing ends and they all head off, Fry calls in one of his captains.

Anthony Dahlinger is an experienced officer and the likeliest to succeed Fry as chief.

When Fry double-checks on whether Dahlinger is comfortable taking on the role of public information officer, the captain says of course, even though this is not an area he’s had training in.

As busy as he’s been, Fry would have to have been blind not to notice the hordes of press assembling in Moscow. They cram into the area around the King Road house like bees around a hive. His inbox is blowing up with media requests.

Fry ignores them all for now.

He is well aware that anything the police put out in the media, they are putting out to the suspect as well—and to a potential jury pool. The biggest mistake a police chief or sheriff can make, Fry believes, is to overshare.

Yet it happens all the time.

In 2017, the state police superintendent spoke during his press conferences directly to whoever had killed two teenage girls in Delphi, Indiana. Fry found this tactic inappropriate and possibly damaging to the case and vows to do things differently.

Fry shakes his head and goes back to work. He’ll get to the press when he’s ready. They want a story, but they will have to wait.

He’s got an investigation to run.