Blood Games (9 page)

Fine, she said. Just fine.

Did she have any idea who might have wanted to kill her stepfather?

The only thing she could think of was that it might be somebody he had fired at work. But she didn’t know whether he had fired anybody or not.

At least the detectives came out of the interview with one bit of pleasing information. Angela had never seen the faded army knapsack that had been found on the back porch, and she was certain that nobody in the family owned it. Chances seemed good that the killer had left it behind. Perhaps it could help lead them to him.

This was one of the busiest and most critical times of the year for Noel Lee. Priming time, time for harvesting tobacco, his primary cash crop. Temporary workers were prowling his fields in the hot sun, stripping the heavy leaves from the stalks. Others were packing the crop into bulk barns—long, trailerlike containers—where it would be cured golden with gas heat. Lee had little time for thinking as he oversaw his field hands, going from one field to another. But he couldn’t get out of his mind the strange fire he had seen early that morning after he had sent his hogs off to market.

Lee told his mother about the fire when he went to her house for lunch. Later, she told his brother, Edward, with whom he farmed, about it, and his brother stopped by the fire site out of curiosity.

When Noel Lee got home after finishing work that Monday, his phone was ringing. His mother was on the line. Did he think the fire he’d seen that morning might have had something to do with that murder in Washington?

What murder? Lee hadn’t heard about any murder.

It was right there on the front page of the Washington
Daily News
his mother said. On the TV news, too. A big executive had been killed in Smallwood. And it had happened just about the time that Noel had seen that fire. Could it be connected? Edward had stopped by the fire site, she told him, and he said it looked as if some kind of clothing might have been burned.

It seemed a strange coincidence, Noel agreed. And after talking with his mother, he got his newspaper and read about the attack on the Von Steins. It did seem possible that the fire could be connected, he thought. He considered calling the police, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to look foolish. But the suspicious fire wouldn’t leave his mind, and an hour and a half later he picked up the telephone and called the Washington Police Department.

Lee finally was switched to a detective who didn’t seem especially interested in what he had to tell him. The detective took the information and thanked him, but Lee had the distinct impression that that would be the last he’d hear of it. He thought the detective figured that he was just another kook trying to get in on a big event. He almost wished he hadn’t called, but he had done his civic duty. If the fire had anything to do with the murder—and the thought caused another shiver to course up his spine—at least he’d told the police about it.

The police were discovering that most of the Von Steins’ neighbors considered them private and standoffish. Visitors to the Von Steins’ house tended to be teenage friends of their children more than adults. The only adult neighbors who knew them well were David and Peggy Smith, who lived across the street. David had his own business, and he and Lieth occasionally got together to shoot pool or talk sports. Peggy, like Bonnie, didn’t work outside the house, and she and Bonnie visited frequently. Peggy had gone to the hospital to visit Bonnie that morning, and that afternoon David had organized a group of neighbors to clean up the Von Steins’ bloody bedroom. Peggy couldn’t understand why the police had cut large chunks out of the walls and carpet in the room.

At nine-forty-five Monday night, Lewis Young and Melvin Hope went to the Smiths’ house to talk with them and learned some things that proved to be of great interest.

Lieth had a million dollars in life insurance, David told the officers. Only that morning, Hope had learned that Lieth recently had inherited a million dollars. A second million in life insurance would make his death a lucrative venture indeed. Did the Smiths know who might be beneficiaries? They were certain that Bonnie was, and David thought that her children might be co-beneficiaries. Furthermore, David was highly suspicious of both Angela and Chris. It simply isn’t normal to go on as if nothing had happened after something like this, he said, and both Angela and Chris were doing just that. Beyond that, Angela said she had slept through the entire attack, and he just didn’t see how that was possible, she being only a room away.

Peggy admitted that Chris and Angela seemed to be acting strangely, but she couldn’t conceive that they might have had something to do with attacking their mother and killing their stepfather. Bonnie loved them and they loved her. Why, Bonnie was “everyone’s mother,” a second mother to all of Chris’s and Angela’s friends as well as to other neighborhood teenagers. They would go to her to talk about their problems when they wouldn’t go to anybody else. Peggy wasn’t troubled by Angela’s lack of emotion. Angela was just like her mother, Peggy said. Neither showed emotion. At least not publicly.

The Smiths agreed that Angela and Chris seemed to get along well with their parents, but David said that Lieth had told him that he would be glad when the children finally were gone off to college.

The Smiths also offered some other possibilities for the officers to check. One neighborhood young man was fascinated with guns and other weapons and into “blood and gore,” they said. They called him “weird” and said he had once been a frequent visitor at the Von Stein house. And this young man had a friend who used to walk Lawson Road a lot. They went on to tell about a neighbor who had noticed suspicious traffic on the road the night before the murder. And somebody had rattled another neighbor’s door late Sunday night, they said. All things for the detectives to check out.

Asked if they could think of anybody who might have held a grudge against the Von Steins, Peggy remembered that Bonnie had been involved in an unpleasant incident a year or so earlier. Bonnie and Chris were at the dentist’s office when a man struck Lieth’s car with his truck. The man got angry when the police came to investigate and tried to attack the officers with a knife. They pulled their weapons, subdued him, and took him to jail. Bonnie later was called to testify against him, and the man was sent to prison.

The Von Steins were good, kind people, Peggy said, and that was the only person she could think of who might have held something against them.

The detectives left the house realizing more than ever that their work was just beginning.

It had been a long day for Young, and an even longer one for Hope, but there was one more person they wanted to talk with before they quit for the night. They had been having trouble meeting up with Chris all day. Apparently, he had gone off to Greenville with a high school buddy, they discovered. But at ten-forty that night, after leaving the Smiths’ house, the detectives stopped by Donna Brady’s house and found Chris there.

He seemed nervous. He sat on a sofa with the officers and smoked one cigarette after another as they questioned him.

He’d come home for a visit that weekend, he said. He’d stayed Friday night but he had to go back Saturday night to work on a school paper that was due. On Sunday night, he said, he’d gone out with friends, then stayed up playing cards and drinking beer with them until three or three-thirty. He’d only been in bed a short time when his sister called to tell him about the attack. Public safety officers from N.C. State had brought him to Washington, he said, because he was distraught and couldn’t find his car keys.

Were his parents having any problems? Young asked.

No, Chris said, none that he knew about. They were getting along fine with one another. And he couldn’t imagine them having trouble with anybody. He didn’t even know anybody who disliked them. He had no idea why anybody would want to do this.

David Smith’s suspicions caused Hope to watch Chris closely as he talked, taking note of the fluttery hand gestures, the nervous glances. He disliked Chris instinctively and distrusted him. Yet he tried not to show it. This, after all, was a friendly interview. The detectives were just looking for background information, a direction in which to set the path of their investigation. At this point nobody and everybody was a suspect.

Did he and Lieth get along okay? Chris was asked.

Oh, yes, very well.

How about his real father? Did his father and stepfather know each other?

Yes, and they got along very well, too.

Did Chris know anything about his stepfather dealing in stocks?

Well, he knew that Lieth had inherited some stocks, and maybe some cash, too, but he didn’t know how much, or anything about it. He just didn’t keep up with that kind of stuff.

One possibility the detectives were considering was that somebody in the crew that recently had painted the Von Stein house its muted aquamarine color might have come back and tried to rob them. Chris said that he wasn’t at home while the house was being painted but he knew that the job had been done by a man who worked as custodian at the high school, and the detectives probably wouldn’t have any trouble finding him.

As Young and Hope were getting ready to leave, they asked if Chris had ever owned a green canvas knapsack.

No, he said, and he’d never known of one being in his parents’ house.

On the way back to the police station, Hope and Young talked about the case, which both now knew was going to be a tough one.

They had a dead man with a million-dollar inheritance and another million in life insurance. In murder cases, detectives always ask themselves one basic question that guides their investigations: Who stands to gain from this death? In this case, that seemed to be Bonnie Von Stein and her children. But Bonnie had been viciously attacked, too. Was she meant to be killed or not? Could she be involved? They thought it unlikely. She almost had died. Would anybody run that risk for money? Had the whole thing been set up by her children? Could Angela actually have slept through the attack on her parents? Was Chris’s presence in Raleigh during the murder all too convenient? Was there somebody else who would gain from Lieth Von Stein’s death that the detectives didn’t yet know about? Were the Von Steins simply the victims of a random, maniacal killer?

As tired as they were, the detectives could hardly wait for the next day, when they could talk with Bonnie and begin trying to ferret out answers to some of these questions.

9

Bonnie was wearing a fresh pink gown when Young, Hope, and Chief Stokes arrived at her room in the intensive care section of Beaufort County Memorial Hospital shortly after ten Tuesday morning. Her head was swathed in bandages, her eyes purpled from the blows she had received. The bed had been cranked up so that she could be in a sitting position to talk more comfortably. The detectives introduced themselves and Bonnie received them cordially. Stokes, who had talked with her briefly the day before, explained that the detectives needed to question her in more depth, and they began by asking her to recall the events of the previous weekend.

She told about Chris arriving home on Friday night and recited all the family activities right on through Sunday. When she told about going to Caroline’s in Greenville for dinner Sunday night, the detectives asked if she remembered what she and her husband had ordered. Yes, the Sunday night specials. She’d had the beef. Lieth had chicken with rice. That fit with the autopsy results, the detectives knew, and they were careful to ask about the time of the meal. They’d arrived at the restaurant about seven-thirty, Bonnie said. They left no later than nine. That would have put six or seven hours between the meal and the attack, and the detectives knew from the medical examiner that such a meal should have been gone from Lieth’s stomach within a couple of hours unless his digestive system was severely distressed.

Wincing with pain whenever she moved, Bonnie went on to tell about the attack, and again the detectives were careful to question her about one aspect of it: Lieth’s screams. Was he screaming loud? “At the top of his lungs,” Bonnie said. How many times did he scream? She couldn’t be sure, but at least fifteen, maybe twenty or more.

The detectives had already been wondering how Angela could have slept through the attack on her parents. This only made them more suspicious.

Bonnie went through the details of the attack matter-of-factly, her story interrupted only by the questions of the detectives. She still was unable to give any better description of the attacker, or whether more than one intruder had been in the room.

Had Lieth done anything to provoke such an attack? Did he have problems with anybody? Was he prone to violence?

“He was a gentle soul,” Bonnie said. “He wouldn’t hurt anything. He was a very nonviolent person. He wouldn’t even allow a gun in the house.”

She knew of no problems he’d had with anybody, of nothing he or she had done to cause somebody to do such a vicious thing.

Questioned about Angela’s theory that the attack might have been revenge from somebody Lieth had fired at work, Bonnie could recall only one person Lieth had to let go. That had been a few years ago, and it really wasn’t his doing. Another employee had written an anonymous letter to top officials about the man’s work habits and Lieth had been instructed to fire him. Bonnie could think of nothing from Lieth’s work that might have prompted the attack.