Perched at the crest of a small hill south of Main Street, The Grove was not, as the lyrical name suggested, a leafy copse, but rather a newish assembly of dull-colored three-story buildings. The structures spread out nearly end to end over the incline and provided, the developer’s promotional brochure boasted, “first-class off-campus student housing.”
It was a very popular address despite the narrow, prison-cell-like rooms fitted with desks finished in a plastic veneer meant to look like wood. It wasn’t the accommodations, though, that had students opting out of dorms and frat houses to move in. The real attraction was that The Grove was one big party house. It offered up all the glittering toys that could stoke a good time: a gargantuan, shimmering blue pool; a beach volleyball court complete with sand; a barbecue setup that could grill franks and burgers for a hungover army of revelers; and, not least, a wide, parabolic-shaped deck that crawled around the pool, leaving plenty of room for mingling, dancing, and rows of coolers stocked with beer and Trulys.
Bryan parked in front of the Community Club building, people would recall, and by the time he arrived, maybe 4:00-ish, the music was already blasting. He had worn his newly purchased swim trunks under his jeans, and now he quickly stripped down in his Hyundai. Following the noise, he made his way to the pool.
Cartwright, the food science PhD, now calling himself “DJ Grape Vinyl” (it wouldn’t be long, though, before he settled on the professional name “Catalyst,” making sure to spell it out using triangles instead of the as) manned the turntable. Bad Bunny wailed from the speakers, imploring, “Party! Party! Party!” Chicken and steak were being grilled to make tacos. There was wine, beer, and tequila. There must have been a hundred or more college kids on the deck. Bryan in his new swimsuit, ghostly pale but still looking good, bulked up, with a mop of brown curls, perched on a step at the shallow end of the pool. He was taking it all in, and his large blue eyes gave out an air of angelic perplexity.
Grabbing a seat next to Bryan was Basseth Salamjohn, a laid-back, darkly handsome off-and-on WSU undergraduate who was part of the crowd that ran with Martinez and Cartwright. The two started talking, and Salamjohn quickly decided there was something odd about Bryan’s intensity. “The dude would talk chin up, straight into my face,” he’d recall. “We were just shooting the shit, but he was definitely one serious dude. Nice enough, though.” After a while, Salamjohn stood up and went off to dance.
So Bryan, perhaps not wanting to be left sitting alone on the pool steps like some loser, headed over to talk to the DJ. Cartwright was an imposing figure with a jet-black man bun, and he stood with a martial erectness over the turntable as he orchestrated the festivities. The time had come, his instincts told him, to take things higher, to let the music swell. He needed to focus. But he was by breeding and nature polite, so when the guy approached, Cartwright was friendly. He looked a bit lost, Cartwright decided.
Bryan started asking about the speakers. He had lots of questions, technical stuff. At first Cartwright did his best to answer; in truth, he had a nerdy streak, too, when it came to electronics, and he was proud of his knowledge. But the conversation quickly grew grating. “He had this way about him,” the DJ would remember. “You know those people who don’t understand personal space? He was one of them. He’d get real close. It was off-putting.” Finally, Cartwright told his new acquaintance, “I’m DJing, man. I’ll catch you later.”
So Bryan returned to the shallow end of the pool, and before too long Salamjohn joined him, too. And he watched what happened next with a growing curiosity.
Without a word to him, Bryan abruptly jumped up and approached a girl in a black thong bikini with pink hair and an intricate tattoo running up her left thigh. There was only a brief conversation before Bryan asked her for her phone number. And he got it.
Next, to Salamjohn’s further fascination, Bryan, as if a man on a mission, focused on the pink-haired woman’s friend. She was also in a black two-piece. He asked her for her number, too. And he got it.
Dude’s a player, Salamjohn marveled. Got the digits! Who’da thought it? But before he could congratulate the conquering hero, Bryan did an abrupt about-face. Just as things were picking up, he left the party.
The music was loud in Bryan’s ears as he drove down the hill from the complex, heading straight past the Moscow Police headquarters on the way back to Pullman. Things, he undoubtedly felt, were taking on a brighter look.
And there was a footnote to the day’s events that only many months later would provoke interest and speculation. Bryan never telephoned either of the two women. Perhaps he had lost interest. Or maybe he had only wanted to establish that he could get a spark from a pretty woman. After all, in middle school the girls had mocked him, laughed at the overweight kid. When he boldly sat down next to one of the good-looking ones in the lunchroom, they’d tell him to get lost, and an embarrassed Bryan would slink over to a table filled with his loser friends, people he secretly detested. It might very well have been he simply lacked the will—or was it confidence?—to take the next step. Maybe he felt he’d always be an outsider, someone destined to be on the periphery of the good times others would be having. All that was certain was that in the aftermath of the pool party, both women received several hang-up calls, and it wasn’t until much, much later that they put a possible name to the annoying caller.