Blood Games (46 page)

If I continue writing this, I’m liable to get suicidal.

More so than I am already.

Neal Henderson returned to Raleigh after telling his mother that he had taken part in a murder, and on Sunday morning, June 11, John Taylor and Lewis Young drove to Raleigh to pick him up. They took him back to Washington and had him direct them, as best he could, over the route he had followed to Smallwood. He went through his actions on the night of the murder step by step, showing the officers exactly where everything had taken place. Although there were things he didn’t remember, the officers had no doubt that he was telling the truth, for all that he told them fit their evidence.

Neal was expecting Bart to call him the following day at work about a loan to help him get out of town, and the officers persuaded Neal to arrange a meeting with Bart at Wendy’s. Neal was to wear a hidden microphone and transmitter and try to steer Bart into an incriminating conversation.

When Neal went to work at Wendy’s at six-thirty Monday morning, June 12, a squadron of SBI agents surrounded the restaurant. Taylor, Crone, and Melvin Hope, who had conducted the first stages of the investigation, also were there. A sophisticated SBI electronics van waited nearby, with technicians at the ready. As soon as Bart called, Neal was to step outside and give the officers a sign.

The officers watched the breakfast crowds come and go, then the lunch crowds, but Neal never emerged to give them the sign they were hoping for. When Neal’s shift ended at two-thirty, the bored and disappointed officers gave up their stakeout. Could James have gotten money somewhere else and already be far from their grasp?

They doubted it, and they fanned out over the area around the campus searching for him until midnight. Christy Newsom joined them in the hunt.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this again,” she said to John Taylor. If she’d had her way, Bart would have been in prison and no officer would have had any trouble finding him to serve him with a murder warrant. That was what peeved her most.

The officers spent the following day in another frustrating search of the campus area. Still no Moog. Late that afternoon, Taylor, Crone, and Hope drove back to Washington for a conference with the DA.

Washington City Manager Bruce Radford was overjoyed about the break in the case. But he was fearful that Moog might never be caught, that he might already have fled the state. He suspected that Bart’s family knew his whereabouts.

During a meeting with Crone, Radford, who sometimes couldn’t resist playing detective, picked up the phone and called Bart’s father in Caswell County. He identified himself as a friend of Bart’s from college.

“I’m going to be getting married in Myrtle Beach in a couple of weeks and we’re going to have the biggest throw-down bachelor party the world has ever seen,” he said. “I wanted to make sure Moog could come, but I don’t know how to get in touch with him. Can you tell me where to find him?”

“To be honest with you, I don’t know where he is,” Jim told him. “I haven’t heard from him in a good while.”

The missing baseball bat that had been used to beat Lieth and Bonnie was still puzzling the officers. Neal simply couldn’t remember whether Bart had the bat when he got back to the car. At one point, he said Bart might have thrown it into a creek that they crossed on the main highway after leaving town, or he could have tossed it away when he set the fire on the deserted roadside.

Police had thoroughly combed Smallwood at the time of the murder without finding any kind of a weapon that could have been used as a club. After Neal told the officers where he had parked to wait for Bart, they realized that one area never had been searched, a stretch of woods that lined Market Street Extension across from the front edge of Smallwood. If James ran back to the car as Neal said, then he had to pass those woods.

On Wednesday morning, as Taylor was getting ready to leave for Raleigh, intending to stay until he found Moog, Crone and Hope were about to begin a systematic search for the baseball bat, going to every location mentioned by Neal. Their first site would be the unsearched woods on the edge of Smallwood.

Not wanting to attract attention and stir up fresh rumors among Smallwood residents, Crone borrowed a city maintenance truck to use in the hunt. He and Hope wore street crew coveralls.

Before they set out, the chief made a friendly bet with Taylor. “Case of beer says we find the baseball bat before you catch Moog,” he said.

“You’re on,” said Taylor.

Fields also lined part of the route along which Bart supposedly had run, now planted in corn, shoulder-high. If he had tossed the bat into the fields, it might have been plowed under. Part of the quarter-mile route was lined in high grass and weeds, part in thick undergrowth along the wood’s edge. The search clearly would be difficult, and the sun, already growing blisteringly hot, wouldn’t make it any easier. Crone and Hope began at opposite ends of the route, working toward each other, and both were sweating heavily by the time they got started.

When Crone came to the large stretch of woods, he decided to go back into the trees about the distance a person could toss a baseball bat, fifty feet or so, where he could walk with fewer obstructions from undergrowth and with more protection from the sun. He had gone only a few hundred feet when he came upon a little depression in the ground. An opening in the undergrowth made a path from the street to the depression. There, lying in last year’s leaf fall, amidst decaying tree branches, was a baseball bat weathered gray, its handle wrapped with black tape, cracked and worn. Just above the bat’s trademark, a faded circle of small triangles drawn in ink was still visible.

Crone walked out to the street and summoned Hope with his hand radio. Hope came puffing up to find the chief grinning broadly.

“Melvin, how many baseball bats do you think would be in these woods,” Crone asked.

“Probably just one, Chief.”

Crone gleefully called the dispatcher to see if Taylor had left yet for Raleigh.

“No,” she said, “he’s still here.”

Have him detour by Smallwood, Crone said.

“You put that damn thing out there,” Taylor said when he walked out and saw the bat.

“You’re not getting out of this bet that easy,” Crone said.

Taylor delayed leaving for Raleigh to photograph the bat from every angle, collect it (termites had begun devouring it on the side that lay next to the ground), and process it as evidence. He took the film with him to drop off at the SBI lab in Raleigh when he finally left at mid-afternoon. Early that evening, he met Christy for supper at California Pizza. When Lewis Young came to join Taylor to begin the evening’s search, Young hadn’t eaten, so they returned to California, thinking it a place that Moog might appear. This time, Taylor took a photo of Bart and showed it to the waitress, who’d been working there only three days.

“Ever seen him?” Taylor asked.

“Oh, yeah, he comes in every day about five-thirty to have a beer,” she said.

But that day, he hadn’t come.

At that moment, Bart was indeed having supper, only a mile away, at the Burger King at Mission Valley Shopping Center, where he was writing in his diary.

The wonder of it all sometimes amazes me. In the past 12 hours I’ve run from the law, been asked for doses from a black guy I haven’t seen since last September, checked the new freshmen girls and cold-busted an incredible babe doing likewise to me in a Burger King (B.K. Lounge). Incidentally, she had the most beautiful smile when I caught her. It came naturally to her which doesn’t follow for everyone. Actually, she’s sitting 20 ft. away and if I wasn’t the most wanted man this side of D.B. Cooper I would endeavor to make her acquaintance.

We keep looking at each other, and in truth this is getting ridiculous. If she’s not in business, she damn well could be. Oh my misspent youth.

It would be his final entry.

Bart already had had several close calls with both the campus and the Raleigh police. The first came soon after he returned to campus from his friends’ apartment. He had been to Sullivan dorm looking for other friends. He had left the dorm and was walking along the trail between the soccer field and the tennis courts when two campus police cars went by with emergency lights flashing and stopped at the dorm. He went back to see what was going on and saw the officers emerging from the building. He heard one say, “Where did he go?”

“I said, ‘Man, I don’t like this,’” Bart recalled later. “‘I think they’re looking for me.’”

One thing that he learned was that the officers didn’t like to get far from their cars, and by avoiding their cars he usually could avoid them.

On a second occasion, Bart was on his way to campus, wearing swim trunks, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes, when he was distracted by several attractive young women in bikinis sunning by the pool at an apartment complex across from the campus. He decided to take the sun near them, hoping to strike up a conversation, he said.

After taking a dip, Bart went to a soft drink machine inside the clubhouse, where he left wet footprints across the floor and a small puddle in front of the machine. He had returned to poolside and was pouring rum into the Coke from a bottle in his pack, when a maintenance man approached, angry about the puddle he’d left inside.

“I have to clean that up,” the maintenance man said.

“Hey, man, it’s no big deal,” Bart told him.

“Do you live here?” the irritated man asked, now suddenly suspicious.

“Yeah.”

“What’s your apartment number?”

“Four-twelve.”

“You don’t live here,” the man said. “You stay right here.” And he stalked off to the clubhouse.

Bart put on his shoes and was leaving by the pool gate when the man returned and tried to grab him.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he said.

“I’ll be damned, if I’m not.”

“You don’t live here. You’re trespassing. You’re coming with me. I’ve called the law.”

“Man, you’re crazy as hell,” Bart said, breaking free.

He tried to walk away calmly, without attracting any more attention than had already been drawn to him, but before he got far, he saw a police car approaching. He ducked into some bushes, pulled himself over a low fence, cut across a parking lot, and crossed into some woods where he hid and waited, listening as two police officers nearby talked about his whereabouts on their handheld radios.

On a third occasion, Bart lurked near the campus library, waiting for Hank to go by on his way to work. After they had talked, standing by the sidewalk, Bart went into the library. A few minutes later, he looked out a window from the sixth floor and saw two police cars pull up at the spot where he and Hank had been talking. One car peeled away. The other pulled into a bank parking lot across the street and backed into a space from which the officer could watch the street and the library. Bart hurried downstairs and exited on the opposite side of the building, slipping away amidst the students.

One rainy afternoon, Bart walked into a bakery near the campus where one of his former roommates worked.

“Man, what are you doing here?” his friend said. “Police are crawling all over the place looking for you.”

“No kidding,” said Bart. “Man, that’s wild.”

“Yeah, the SBI said the net is out. They’re going to get you.”

His friend offered him a cinnamon bun, but Bart took a soft drink and a five-dollar loan instead.

Later, he remembered calling Neal once during this period, but didn’t recall asking for money. “I might have tried to get him to let me eat a free Super Bar,” he said. “I didn’t call him back. I thought he was acting funny.”

John Taylor and Lewis Young spent another fruitless night searching for Moog after leaving California Pizza on the night of Wednesday, June 14.

The following day they met with officials of the campus and Raleigh police to make sure that all officers on all shifts were alerted to be on the lookout.

At 4 P.M. they began a stakeout of California Pizza. SBI agents were parked out of sight near the restaurant. Taylor sat near the entrance in a sporty Mazda RX7 that he had borrowed from one of Christy’s friends to make him less likely to be spotted.

Once again the stakeout failed. The discouraged officers drove to an Applebee’s Restaurant near the Howard Johnson’s where they were staying. While they were eating, a vicious thunderstorm rolled in with roiling black clouds, sharp lightning, window-rattling thunder, and pelting rain.

“I’ll tell you, boys,” Taylor announced, “my ass ain’t going out in this mess tonight. Moog ain’t going to be out in this rain. I’m going to stay at the motel and man the phone. You fools can go out in this.”

And he ordered himself a beer, then another one. It was going to be his night to kick back and relax a little. Moog could wait another day for John Taylor to catch him.

Bart had gone to campus about noon that day, leaving his skateboard behind because he was carrying heavy books in his backpack and they would throw him off balance. He went by Sullivan dorm to call on friends and find out what they were planning for that night. He was wearing a boxerlike aquamarine swimsuit, and he went to the soccer field behind Lee dorm and lay in the sun, reading and listening to his GE stereo radio through headphones.