Cruel Doubt (20 page)

Crone wanted to shake the kid up. “Show him the pictures,” the chief barked. Upchurch had a smirk on his face.

Taylor leaned across the front seat and stuck a picture of the bloody, beaten body of Lieth Von Stein squarely into Upchurch's range of vision.

“Jesus, this is serious shit,” Upchurch said, still smirking but trying to turn his head away.

“Look at the goddamned picture,” John Crone said. “This man was brutally beaten and stabbed to death.”

Upchurch kept glancing at the picture out of the corner of his eye, but leaned farther from it, toward the car door.

“If you're gonna get sick,” John Taylor said, “open that door and puke on the sidewalk. Don't vomit in the chief's car. I got to ride in that seat going home.”

Upchurch paled and began to perspire, but the smirk never entirely left his face. Nor did he have anything new to say. It wasn't his thing, man. He didn't know anything about it.

When they walked back inside with him, Crone turned to Henderson, who seemed just a blob in the background, and said, “By the way, what we're trying to do here, in case no one has told you, is find out who committed a murder. It was Chris Prtichard's stepfather who was murdered, and we already know that Pritchard helped to arrange it. What we want now is anybody who knows anything about Dungeons and Dragons. We think the murder might have been just a scenario that got out of hand. Somebody on drugs might have taken it too far without really meaning to. We have no reason to think it was premeditated.

“But the fact is, a man got killed, and we're close to finding out who killed him. If anybody knows anything, pass the word around that we're ready to listen to the first person who talks. But the first person is the only person we'll listen to. Our ship is about to pull out, and we've got room for one person, and one person only, on board.”

* * *

The same day, Lewis Young was trying a different approach. He was speaking, off the record, to Wade Smith.

Young knew that by having accused her of deliberately covering up for her son, he had forever alienated Bonnie Von Stein. But he still believed that her cooperation could be tremendously helpful.

He remained convinced that Chris
was
the link to the killer, just as he'd said on May 2. But he also knew Chris had not committed the murder himself. That might be a bargaining chip. Maybe his involvement
had
been innocent. Maybe he'd made a map as part of a D&D game and then someone else, acting without Chris's approval or even awareness, had independently decided to drive to Washington and turn fantasy into blood-drenched reality.

If Bonnie could persuade Chris to admit he'd drawn the map and to disclose the identity of the person to whom he'd given it, then they'd know whom to go after at NC State.

Or maybe his involvement was not innocent. Maybe he had confessed to Bonnie and she'd chosen to protect him because he was all she had left. Young could understand that sort of motive, even if he could not condone it. If that was the case, she'd have to be shown—by someone she trusted—that eventually they'd get Chris anyway, and that his ultimate punishment would be far worse than if he stepped forward and told the truth now.

In either case, only someone whom Bonnie trusted—which meant no one from law enforcement—could possibly persuade her that there were valid reasons why Chris was a suspect.

It was Lewis Young's highly unorthodox idea to speak to her lawyer, Wade Smith. With no other attorney in the state would Young even have considered such a gambit. But Wade Smith was said to be different. Not only, in Young's view, “famous,” but from all reports, “a gentleman.” Young could tell him in good faith that Bonnie was not a target of the investigation. And if he could lay out the details of the case against Chris, maybe Smith could persuade Bonnie that it would be better for her son to admit his role, whatever it might have been.

Young called his supervisor in Raleigh and outlined his plan. The supervisor knew Wade Smith well. He said, “You can trust him with your life. If he tells you something, you can bank on it. He won't shit you. Go talk to him, tell him what you got, and if he agrees up front to try to help you, then he will. I guarantee you he won't tell anybody anything behind your back.”

Encouraged, Young approached Mitchell Norton, the Beaufort County district attorney. “It's not standard practice,” Young said, “but this is not a standard case.” Norton agreed and he himself being aware of the high esteem in which Wade Smith was held, authorized Young to make the contact.

And so, at eleven
A
.
M
. on June 1, Lewis Young found himself in Wade Smith's office, as Bonnie had less than five months earlier.

It was an impressive office, no doubt about it. There were books by authors ranging from Chaucer to Thoreau, as well as biographies of subjects as diverse as Winston Churchill and Pete Seeger.

There was a framed newspaper article about Wade, headlined “A Legend in His Prime,” in which he was described as “a lawyer who loves life, music and people.”

There was a banjo with a plaque on it that read, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender”—the same inscription found on Pete Seeger's banjo.

And there were photographs: Wade on Annapurna South, Wade with Prince Charles, with Sen. Sam Ervin, with rock musician Bon Jovi. And photographs Wade had taken, such as one of a storm moving across Kenya's Serengeti plain.

But there were also many family pictures: of his parents, of his daughters at various stages of development, of his grandchildren, and one of his wife—dressed as the Great Pumpkin.

It was a warm and somehow comforting office, which seemed to say to a visitor, if life means this much to the man who works here, surely he will care about me.

Lewis Young felt, as had Bonnie, that he had not made a mistake by coming here.

Still, he had a delicate task. He had to explain that he wanted to lay out all his evidence, right there and then, in the hope that Wade would feel it would be in Bonnie's best interests to persuade her son to cooperate. He could do so, however, only if Wade would agree in advance not to share the details with Osteen or Bonnie or Chris.

This request put Wade in a somewhat awkward position. Not only did he represent Bonnie, he'd also brought Osteen into the case. Nonetheless, persuaded that Young was acting in good faith, and with the understanding that there would be no evidence presented that implicated his own client, Wade agreed not to relay any
specifics
to anyone. He did, however, reserve the right to express to Osteen, or to Bonnie, his opinion of the merits of the evidence.

That was just what Young had been hoping for: the chance to show an unbiased, intelligent, and influential third party what they had. So he talked about Lieth's wealth and about Dungeons & Dragons. Then about the fire in the night and the hunting knife. But mostly he talked about the map. He showed Wade the photo of the map. Then he showed him the sample of Chris's printing on the housing card. Then he showed him the map Chris had drawn for the SBI in March.

From all three, the word LAWSON leapt out. Wade did not need an FBI handwriting expert to tell him the printing matched. Nor did anyone have to explain to him just how serious, for Chris, the consequences were.

“What we'd like,” Young said, “is for Pritchard to come over to our side. We recognize he didn't do the killing himself. But we believe he's involved and that he knows things he's not telling. You know how it goes, Mr. Smith; whoever comes through the door first. We'd honestly like for that person to be Chris, because, for one thing, we think in the end that would be easier for his mother.”

“Nothing about this,” Wade said, “has been or is going to be easy for his mother.”

* * *

For a long time after Lewis Young left, Wade sat alone in his office, not taking any calls. Then he made three of his own.

He called Bill Osteen to say he'd just had a visit from the SBI and without getting into specifics, which he'd promised he wouldn't, all he could say was that from Chris's point of view things were going to get worse fast. Indeed, he said, “Bill, I think you've got to be alert for what you may learn, because I think it is very possible that your client is a prime suspect.”

He also apologized. He said, “If I'd had any idea what this was going to turn into, I'd never have called you in the first place.”

To Bonnie, he said, in his most reassuring tone, that the SBI had again confirmed that she was not in any way a suspect. That was the good news. The not-so-good news was that they'd done a lot of investigating at NC State because that was where the road seemed to lead.

What road?
she kept asking.
What road are they talking about?
They'd always been so vague with her, always hinting, suggesting, implying, but never coming out and talking straight, which was the only kind of talk she understood.

Wade had promised not to tell her about the map, and so he didn't. But he did say that they'd given him the impression that they'd reached a dead end, and that without her help, and without help from Chris, which they were sure he could give, they didn't think they'd ever find the person who'd murdered Lieth.

“If there's anything,” Wade said, “anything at all that Chris could tell them that would be helpful, it might be better if he spoke up sooner rather than later.”

And then he assured her that whatever happened—whichever way events unfolded—he'd be there for her, as he had been from the start, prepared to offer any help he could.

But what he was already thinking was: what Bonnie's going to be needing soon is not a lawyer but a psychiatrist. A good one. Someone who can help her prepare for the worst, even without knowing what it is.

And so his third call was to the best psychiatrist he knew in the area, a woman named Jean Spaulding, who was a member of the faculty at the Duke University medical school and who also had a private practice.

He spoke to her for twenty minutes, not going into any of the specifics of the case against Chris, just saying he had a client who'd been through a terrible physical and emotional ordeal. It seemed likely that the ongoing investigation would produce results that would prove almost unbearably painful for her.

Wade said there was nothing that had to be done yet, but he'd like to have Jean standing by.

 

19

On June 2, John Taylor headed back to the NC State campus, this time bringing with him the one and only piece of potential evidence found at the crime scene—the green canvas knapsack that Bonnie, Angela, and Chris claimed never to have seen before. He thought it could do no harm to show it around and ask if anyone had ever seen it before, or could remember anyone who'd owned that sort of knapsack.

For the next three days, he trudged around the campus and the off-campus apartments, showing the knapsack to all those to whom he'd already spoken.

“It was disappointing,” he said. “There was no reaction from anyone.” Daniel Duyk, James Upchurch, Neal Henderson, Vince Hamrick, Karen, Kirsten—no one could identify the knapsack.

But then, on June 6, the day after he'd been shown the green canvas knapsack and had denied ever seeing it before, James Upchurch abruptly cut off the electronic band intended to monitor his whereabouts and disappeared.

* * *

Crone and Taylor got back to Raleigh on Friday, June 9. Lewis Young was already there, helping Raleigh and university police search for Upchurch.

Moog could have been a thousand miles away. But as far as they knew, he had very little money. Also, the last time he'd disappeared he hadn't gone far. Hide-and-seek again. Or Dungeons & Dragons. He was a thief or a hero magician, being pursued by agents of the king. Lewis Young half-expected to find him down in the steam tunnels, waving a wooden sword—or pulling a dagger out of his knapsack.

Crone and Taylor hoped to learn more about Upchurch from Neal Henderson, who had not only provided Moog with floor space, but who had known him since they'd gone to high school together back in rural Caswell County.

They met Henderson just off campus, at a Wendy's restaurant where he worked. They arrived at two forty-five
P
.
M
., just as the lunch crowd was thinning. The three of them took seats in a plastic booth.

They talked about Dungeons & Dragons for forty-five minutes. Henderson seemed as eager as Chris Pritchard and James Upchurch to talk about Dungeons & Dragons. His face lit up, the pace of his speech quickened, his overall energy level seemed to rise.

Crone suddenly changed the subject. He asked, “If Chris were involved, what would you think?”

“I don't know.” Henderson said. “What makes you think Chris was involved?” The question seemed to disturb him.

“Never mind,” Crone said pleasantly. Then he asked about Upchurch. Henderson said, “James does know some pretty shady people, and he could find someone to do a murder.” He added that Moog had recently seemed worried about “something worse than a probation violation,” but that if Upchurch had been involved, it would have been “an uncharacteristic risk.”

Chief Crone looked at his wristwatch. It was Friday afternoon. He and his wife were supposed to visit her parents in Mooresville again. He'd told her to meet him at the Apex exit of I-40, just west of Raleigh, at four
P
.
M
. If he wasn't there, he'd told her, she should call Lewis Young on his beeper and get further instructions on where and when to meet. The one thing he didn't want was an argument with his wife over his being late, especially if he was just sitting in Wendy's listening to bullshit that would never turn out to be of any use.

It was quarter to four. Even if he left immediately, he realized, he wouldn't get to the Apex exit for at least forty-five minutes.
Oh, shit!
Crone thought.
And I forgot to tell Lewis that my wife would be calling on the beeper
.

“John,” he said to Taylor. “Go outside and give the SBI a call and have them get in touch with Lewis to tell him that my wife will be calling him on the beeper. He should tell her to just sit tight. I'm almost done here. I'll be there as fast as I can.”

Taylor stepped outside to call from a phone booth in the Wendy's parking lot. He had to wait for ten minutes while Young was located through his pager and called back. Young said there was nothing new to report on the search for Upchurch, but he'd come by and check in with them before they went their separate ways for the weekend.

As Taylor was making the call, John Crone looked back across the booth at this placid, brown-haired, blank-faced young man.
Well, damn
, he thought,
we're not getting anywhere here. I'll try one last hit: give him the old “If you know anything, tell us, because if we find you're withholding anything, it could be trouble.”
He'd never been a homicide detective, but Crone had seen enough television and movies to know how it was done.

* * *

“So I run that spiel by him,” the chief said later. “I say, ‘We know
for a fact
that Chris Pritchard is involved!' And I notice again that this scares the crap out of him. So I keep going with it. I say, ‘Our attorneys are already talking with his attorneys, and he's just about ready to go down. And when he does go, if anybody knows anything and didn't tell us, they're in trouble.'

“Now Henderson is just sitting there, arms folded, not saying a word. But I'm thinking, just like with a fish, I can feel a nibble. So I yank the rod a little. I say, ‘Whoever is found guilty here—of
any
kind of involvement—could get the death penalty. That's the gas chamber here in this state.' ”

At that point, Crone paused.

Neal Henderson said, “What if I just gave them advice?”

“I'm thinking,” Crone said later, “
‘Holy shit! Did I just hear what I thought I heard!'
But outwardly I'm staying calm. You know, chief of police, calm, cool, collected. Got the biggest break of the biggest case of my life unfolding right in the middle of goddamned
Wendy's!
But I've got to sit there like we're talking about the price of bacon cheeseburgers, because I don't want to spook this kid. I'd been hearing so much fantasy bullshit for so long, there's no way I'm sure that this is for real.

“So I said, ‘Well, it depends on what kind of advice you gave them. You know, how much you were involved. If it's just a little bit, or if you just know something that could help us, you can clear it up right here and now by telling us.' ”

Henderson was still sitting there, arms folded, saying no more.

So Crone continued, “On the other hand, if you're
really
involved, I'd better get the DA up here.”

“So he hesitates,” Crone said later, “and then he says, in a real calm voice, no inflection, ‘I guess you'd better get the DA.'

“I'm thinking, ‘Holy shit! Oh, my God! I don't believe I'm hearing this.' And then I thought, ‘Now I
really
don't want to screw this up.' ”

“Listen,” Crone said to Henderson, “it's a two-hour drive. It's late Friday afternoon. We've got a weekend coming up. Are you really sure it would be worth his while?”

“Let's just say,” Henderson replied, still in that eerily unemphatic voice, “I can lay the whole thing out for you. I just want to get it off my mind.”

* * *

At this point John Taylor stepped back inside Wendy's, having finally made contact with Lewis Young. “I get three steps inside the door,” Taylor said, “and here's the chief, coming at me.”

“Come back outside a minute,” Crone said. Once through the front door, Crone exclaimed, “He says he can lay the whole thing out!”

“Don't fuck with me,” Taylor said. “That's bullshit.”

“No, it's not. The guy wants the DA! I told him, ‘If you know a little bit, tell me. If you know a lot, you'd better tell the DA.' And he says, ‘Get the DA.' ”

“Shit! Shit!” John Taylor said. “I can't believe it! What did you do, stick your gun into his balls under the table?”

They went back and got Henderson, and the three of them found a seat at one of the outdoor tables, an umbrella shielding them from the late-afternoon sun.

Now that he'd taken the first big step, Henderson wanted to pour out his heart and soul, tell them everything. And this was the news they'd been craving for months. But without a representative from the district attorney's office present, they couldn't let him say a word about it for fear they'd later be accused of violating his right to seek an attorney, remain silent, or whatever other goddamned rights these people had these days.

This time, Crone himself went to the phone and called Young. “We're at Wendy's! He says he can lay it all out! He wants to talk to the DA!” Young called Little Washington and spoke to Keith Mason and said he and his boss, Mitchell Norton, had better get to Raleigh in a hurry because they were sitting with someone who wanted to confess in the Von Stein case.

It took Young only five minutes to get to Wendy's. And then there were four of them, constrained from talking about the one and only subject in which any of them had any interest.

“You've just got to wait, Neal,” Lewis Young said. “You've just got to wait until the DA gets here. We want to be sure we do this right.” Then Crone's wife called in on the beeper. Crone said, “Better tell her to do some shopping. I'm gonna be a little while.”

* * *

For the next five hours—Mitchell Norton had been hard to find, and then slow to get moving once he was found, and it got to be nine
P
.
M
. before he and Keith Mason arrived in Raleigh—the three investigators sat with Neal Henderson. First, they took him home to change clothes. Then they brought him to the SBI office. Then they all went out to eat.

They went to Captain Stanley's seafood restaurant, choking down french fries and greasy fish and trying desperately not to give in to the temptation to ask Henderson any questions. They also kept declining to answer the one question by which Henderson seemed obsessed: How had they discovered Chris Pritchard's involvement?

As time passed, the three detectives grew more nervous than Henderson. “He was calm,” Crone said, “trying to be as cool as he could be. But at any moment he could have just got up and left, and we couldn't have done a thing to stop him. This was strictly voluntary on his part. Not only did we have no evidence on this kid, we hadn't even had any
suspicion
.

“I had no idea what had motivated him to decide to talk in the first place, but I was scared to death the same thing might suddenly unmotivate him. We obviously didn't want him to go anywhere, but he wasn't in custody either. It was really like ‘The Odd Couple' for all of us. Every hour that passed I just kept praying harder that that boy wasn't going to change his mind.”

Still, it wasn't so bad at the restaurant. At least they were surrounded by other people, and though no one could eat anything, they had the distraction of their food. Only when they got back downtown, to SBI headquarters, and led Henderson into an interrogation room did he look as if he was having second thoughts.

Then, when Mitchell Norton did finally arrive, he announced that he himself would not speak to Henderson for fear of later being called as a witness, which could have prevented him from serving as prosecutor at a trial. He announced that only his assistant, Keith Mason, would speak to Henderson.

“Oh, boy,” Crone said later, “I had a hard time coping with
that
. We wait five hours and then the guy won't even talk to him!” Norton remained at the opposite end of a hallway, not even introducing himself, while Crone, Taylor, Young, Mason, and Henderson all filed into an office.

By now it was almost ten
P
.
M
. Six hours had passed since Neal Henderson had said he wanted to tell the story of his involvement in the murder of Lieth Von Stein. So far, no one had been willing to let him. Henderson was beginning to look discouraged.

He looked even more discouraged when Keith Mason, gently and politely, explained that they could not offer any sort of plea bargain, no matter what he might say. They were making no promises. If he wanted to talk, he should talk, but he would have to take it on faith that talking would be in his best interest, because any information given in return for a promise of leniency could be considered less credible by a jury. Of course, a judge might someday take his cooperation into account when imposing a sentence—if matters ever progressed to that point—but there could be no promises made even about that.

Henderson began shaking his head and looking around the room. It didn't happen this way on TV. On TV—which Henderson watched quite a bit of—you came forward and said you wanted to confess and they signed a piece of paper promising to let you off easy, and then you told your story and then the cops were your buddies—or at least they treated you with courtesy—and the whole thing ended, if not happily, at least with no alarming consequences.

It had been one thing talking to John Crone, whom Henderson considered a genuinely nice man, in the comforting din and fluorescent light of Wendy's on a sunny Friday afternoon in late spring.

Now late at night, sitting in some sort of interrogation room that came out of a bad dream somewhere, here was some assistant district attorney they'd suddenly sprung on him—a young lawyer with a manner every bit as pleasant as John Crone's, but a total stranger, nonetheless—telling him that being first to come forward might do him no good at all.

“You could tell,” Crone said later, “that he was really getting depressed, upset, in a panic. The very thing I'd been trying to avoid. So I said to the others, ‘Why don't you guys go out for a while and let me talk to the boy.' I could see he was getting a little spooked, not just by what Keith had told him, but by the fact we had him outnumbered four to one. And after all, I'd been the one he'd spoken to in the first place.”

When the others left, Crone asked Henderson, in the softest tone possible, if he understood why no deals were possible. Glumly, Henderson said yes. Then Crone reminded him that he'd said earlier that he wanted to talk about this to “get it off his mind,” and not simply in return for some sort of plea bargain.