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Pullman, Washington

No big deal, she thinks.

Bryan has always been nice. Polite. He started coming to her in July. Since then, he’s popped in every few weeks and become one of her regulars.

He left her a voicemail yesterday asking if she could fit him in the next day. She was able to see him at Powers Barbershop, just off the main street in Pullman, where she works most days.

So today he shows up, and as she clips using the scissors and the blade, they talk the way they usually do. She learns he’ll be heading home to Pennsylvania for Christmas soon. But he plans to be back in January.

It’s a routine visit on a routine day.

But in four weeks, Rose won’t think anything about it or him was routine.

When she sees his mug shot on TV, she falls on the floor.

“It’s crazy to find out I interacted with this person,” she later said. “I touched this person’s hair. I made this person look and feel good about themselves.”

Like everyone whom Bryan ran into over the next few weeks, she wonders if she missed any signs.

But Bryan is a good actor.

He’s confident.

And the Pullman police have no idea that the suspect is in their midst. Or what he looks like. Or, in fact, anything, because for once, in an unprecedented fashion, Moscow hasn’t been looping them in or sharing any details—and that makes them unhappy.

Glenn Johnson, the Pullman mayor at the time, later reflected: “Everyone was so frustrated. ‘Where’s the information?’ they kept asking.”

The Pullman cops have an unwritten rule never to have less than half a tank of gas in their cars, in case Moscow needs them to pursue someone who committed a crime there.

But now the Pullman cops are sitting in their cars, idle. They have nothing to go on.

When WSU police chief Gary Jenkins considered how Bryan resumed his normal activities in Pullman in the days and weeks following the murders, he believed his actions denoted a growing confidence.

“I would think with every day that went by that he wasn’t caught that his chances were getting better and better [that he wouldn’t be],” Jenkins said.

But cockiness, it turns out, can be misplaced.