Blood Games (36 page)

“Looks like you’ve got your man,” Captain Reynolds said.

“The son-of-bitch drew the map,” Taylor said to himself in amazement. “He drew the damn map.”

It was after dark when Taylor did get back to Washington. He drove straight to the chief’s house. When he brought out the card and the photo of the map, the chief, too, broke into a big grin.

Now their suspicions had been confirmed. Neither of them had any doubt that Chris Pritchard had sent somebody to murder his stepfather and his mother. And John Taylor had a good idea of who that might have been.

31

The SBI had been part of the Von Stein murder investigation from the beginning, and John Crone knew that he would have to involve the agency in the renewed effort. The district attorney’s office would see to that. Crone’s first few months in office had told him that the district attorney’s office essentially viewed the Washington police “as a bunch of dummies,” new chief or not, and had little confidence that the department could solve the case alone. So after conferring with City Manager Bruce Radford, who still was requiring regular reports on the case, Crone put in a request for help from the SBI.

The agency responded not only by freeing Lewis Young to work on the case again, but by assigning three agents from its special Murder Unsolved Team to help when needed. A strategy session was set between the agents and the Washington police for Monday morning, March 20.

Crone and Taylor filled in the agents on the progress of the case. Crone also brought up his Dungeons and Dragons theory. He could tell that the SBI agents were skeptical about it, but he let them know that he planned to pursue it anyway.

The primary purpose of the meeting was to plan an immediate strategy. The almost identical handwriting on the map and Chris’s housing card clearly made Chris and his friends the focus of the investigation, even if it wasn’t solid evidence. More samples needed to be compared, but the officers didn’t want to go to Chris or Bonnie asking for handwriting samples, because that would let Chris know that they had the map, one of the few key facts in the case that they had been able to keep secret. If, however, they could use some ruse to get Chris to draw a map of Smallwood, that would strengthen their hand.

Having new officers assigned to the case gave them a plausible reason to try that. A new officer could tell Bonnie and Chris that he wanted them to go over their entire stories once more so that he could become acquainted firsthand with the case. Not being familiar with Washington and the Smallwood subdivision, he could, presumably, ask Chris to draw a map of Smallwood without arousing suspicion.

SBI Agent Terry Newell, a member of the Murder Unsolved Team, was assigned that task. He called Bonnie and arranged the interviews for two days later. Chris worked at a tire store until 7 P.M., and Newell and Agent Tom Sturgill arranged to meet him at the sheriff’s department at eight-fifteen, after he’d had a chance to clean up and have supper.

Chris repeated the story he earlier had told Hope and Young, this time adding a bit more detail. He told of going home on the weekend of the murder and returning to campus the following day. On Sunday, the day before the murder, he said, he and his roommate, Chuck Jackson, his friends Moog and Brew, and two girls named Sandra and Sybil (he didn’t know their last names) went out to eat and drink beer. After they returned to the dorm, he said, Chuck and Moog went off to study and he and Brew went to Sybil’s room to play cards.

Asked how Chuck and Moog could study after drinking beer, Chris said that they didn’t drink that much, but he noted that this was one of the few times he could recall Moog studying.

He and Brew didn’t leave Sybil’s room until after three, he said, when he went to his own room and to bed. When his sister called about five, he tried to find his car keys but couldn’t. He went to his car, thinking he might have left his keys inside, but found the car locked. The car only could be locked with the key, so he knew that the keys weren’t inside. He returned to his room to search some more, he said, but still couldn’t find them. He then went for a walk to try to decide what to do, saw the call box, and summoned the campus police. Chuck later found his keys in a chair in the room, Chris said.

Sandra Goodman and Sybil Cook had told John Taylor that when they had returned to the campus with beer they had bought on the night before the murder, Chris had done something that he hadn’t done before. He parked in an isolated lot about a quarter of a mile from the dorm, when plenty of spaces were available in the dorm lot where he usually parked.

Why did he do that? Newell wanted to know.

Because there was a big light there, Chris replied, and his car had been broken into and his radio stolen on a trip to South Carolina a few weeks earlier.

This didn’t make sense. Why would he suddenly begin parking in a different spot three weeks after his radio was stolen? But Newell chose not to press Chris on it and risk alienating him.

Chris said that after the campus police took him to Washington, he ran into his mother’s neighbor, Peggy Smith, at the hospital, and she had given him a ride to Donna Brady’s house in Smallwood.

This gave Newell a chance to ask about the comment Chris had made to Peggy Smith that morning about the possible identity of the killer: “Do you mean it could have been one of my best friends?”

Did he say it?

Chris acknowledged that he did.

What did he mean by that?

He only meant that whoever did it must have been familiar with the inside of the house, he said, and the only people he could think of who fit the description and would have known the layout of the house were his friends in Washington.

Had any of his friends from State been inside his house?

Yes, Chuck Jackson had been once or twice. And Brew Simpson once.

How about Moog? Newell asked.

Never.

What was Smallwood like? Newell wanted to know. Chris said that it was a “real nice” section. All the houses were nice, and every house had a lot of about an acre. But the houses were bigger and nicer in the back part of the subdivision, where the rich people lived. His family lived in the front part.

Would Chris mind drawing a map of the subdivision, so the detectives could see just where his house was situated? Chris said he’d be happy to. The detectives tried not to smile as Chris sketched out the map, twice scribbling “Lawson” on the line representing the street where he drew the little block indicating his house.

The mission accomplished, the detectives still had to ask the obligatory questions. How did he get along with Lieth? No real problems. Was there any trouble between his real father and Lieth? None that Chris knew about. What if his mother had died and Chris and Angela had ended up inheriting Lieth’s money and his real father had come to him asking for money, would Chris have given it to him? Probably so. Who did he think might have killed Lieth? Maybe somebody in the trust department at the bank.

Asked about his current situation, Chris said that he had a new car, an ’87 Volkswagen GTI that he was paying for himself, that he had met a girl from High Point who was a student at Appalachian State University in Boone, and he drove there to see her most weekends. He had no intention of returning to N.C. State, he said, but he might go to Appalachian in the fall.

“They’ve got a great business school,” he said, “and I’m planning on getting an M.B.A.”

Brew Simpson was still in his underwear when he answered the knock at his mother’s apartment door on Thursday, March 23, and found John Taylor and Lewis Young standing there. They were investigating the murder of the stepfather of his friend, Chris Pritchard, they told him, and wanted to ask a few questions. Brew appeared nervous as he invited them in.

He’d known Chris since the first semester of Chris’s freshman year, he said. He’d met him through Chuck Jackson, who had become a friend of one of his high school friends who had gone to State. They’d all played D&D together. Brew said that he’d been playing D&D since he was in seventh grade and all of his friends had started playing before they got to college. They’d started playing more regularly during the summer session, he said, after they met a guy named Moog, who posted a notice on the bulletin board for D&D players. Then they’d played maybe every other day for four or five hours at a time.

Brew named the other players, some of whose last names he didn’t know, but he was closest he said to Chris and Moog. All three had become good friends. And he even had roomed with Moog for about a month the previous fall. He described Chris as “a sweetheart, a real nice guy, but easily led.” He said that Chris could be led by Moog, whom he described as “real friendly” and “a near genius.”

“All Moog is interested in is partying,” he said

Both Chris and Moog used acid and other drugs, he said. Chris had started using marijuana and acid heavily last summer, he said, and he’d tried to get him to stop on several occasions, but without success “Moog is worse about drugs than Chris is, though,” he added.

He couldn’t picture Chris being involved in the murder. He never spoke badly of his parents, Brew said, and he had the impression that Chris loved his parents very much. He’d heard him tell his mother and Lieth that he loved them when he talked with them on the telephone.

Asked about the weekend of the murder, Brew said he’d gone to Chris’s room on Sunday night after he got off work, arriving about nine-thirty. Chuck, Chris, Sandra, and Sybil were there, he said, and they went to Sybil’s room to play cards and drink beer.

“What about Moog?” Taylor asked.

He didn’t remember seeing him, Brew said, but that wasn’t unusual.

Taylor made special note of that. When he had talked with Sandra and Sybil separately the week before, neither had remembered seeing Moog that night. He thought that he knew where Moog was: on his way to Washington.

On the other hand, Brew didn’t remember Sybil asking several times that night that they stop playing cards, as she had told Taylor, but he did recall that they played much later than usual, leaving after three. He went home and to bed, only to have Chuck call him about seven to tell him that something awful had happened to Chris’s parents. Chris didn’t talk much about the murder afterward, he said, but Chris did tell him that the campus police had taken him home that morning because he couldn’t find his car keys.

“Sounds kind of suspicious, doesn’t it?” he added, as if the thought had just occurred to him for the first time.

Taylor and Young climbed three flights up the rusty steel steps at the back of an old red brick apartment building on Hillsborough Street near the campus of N.C. State. A young woman answered their knock and left them standing in the rain while she went to fetch Hank. They waited several minutes before Hank peered around the edge of the door, looking extremely edgy, his long, bleached hair unkempt.

“You mind if we come in?” Young asked.

“We can talk here,” Hank said.

The detectives’ patience was wearing thin. “Look, man, it’s raining,” Taylor said. “We’re not going to cause you any trouble. We’re not going to search your house. We just want to ask you a few questions about Chris Pritchard.”

Hank grudgingly let them inside the door, but not far beyond it. Taylor and Young stood in the kitchen to ask their questions, which Hank clearly didn’t want to answer.

He’d met Chris at the restaurant where he worked, Hank said, and they had gotten drunk together a lot. He hadn’t seen Chris since the previous fall, however.

Had Chris ever talked to him about the murder of his stepfather?

“He keeps switching his stories about it,” Hank said. Once he’d told him that his parents came home and surprised a burglar. Another time, Chris told him that a burglar had broken in, raped his mother, and killed his stepfather.

Had Chris ever spoken ill of his family? Not to him, Hank said. He always spoke about his mother and stepfather as if he loved them.

Did Chris ever talk about his family having money?

He once had said that his family owned thirty-five percent of all of R. J. Reynolds stock, Hank said, but Angela had told him that it actually was only thirty-two percent.

Chris always took care of his friends, Hank noted, always bought expensive beer for them.

Did he know Chuck, Brew, and Moog?

“Yeah,” Hank acknowledged.

Had he seen them recently?

Yes, he said, but only in passing on the street.

Did he know where Moog might be?

He’d heard that he was working somewhere on campus, maybe in microfilm. He wasn’t sure.

The detectives couldn’t resist letting Hank know one bit of information in their possession.

“We told him that we had information that he was supplying the acid for Chris and his friends,” Taylor recalled later with a laugh. “He was just flabbergasted. He didn’t do that type of thing and had never heard of Chris being involved with acid.”

Taylor and Young still had lots of questions that they wanted to ask Moog, but they realized that their chances of finding him on their own were slim. Their best hope lay in Christy Newsom, Moog’s spunky probation officer, who knew his friends, his habits, his hangouts, even if she hadn’t been able to find him herself in months. Earlier that day, they had gone to her office to meet her for the first time.