Cruel Doubt (6 page)

Besides, Young could not erase from his mind the content of the blood-spattered pages he'd read that afternoon.

Chris told Young he was sorry he'd been so hard to contact, but he didn't know anything helpful, anyway. He'd been enrolled at NC State's summer session and hadn't been home much since early June. Hadn't been home much all year, in fact. He'd just finished his freshman year at State. Had a few problems with his grades. You know how that goes. That's why he was in the summer session.

The last time he had seen any member of his family was Saturday night, one of the few occasions when he had been home for dinner. He'd actually cooked the meal himself. With his sister's help, he'd prepared hamburger patties for a barbecue. It had been a nice meal, everyone happy and relaxed. After dinner, he'd driven back to school because he had a term paper to work on.

Sunday night, he'd been up late—
real
late, until about three-thirty
A
.
M
.—playing cards and drinking beer with a couple of girls and another friend of his. When Angela had called, he'd been so out of it that it had taken him five minutes to understand what she was talking about. And then he hadn't been able to find his car keys and had wound up calling campus security to get a ride home.

He wasn't aware of any family problems, didn't know of any enemies whom either his stepfather or mother had. He did know that his stepfather had recently come into a large inheritance and spent a lot of time working on stock investments, but Chris himself “did not know about that stuff” and had no idea how much money was involved.

Young was struck by how fidgety and skittish Chris was. Hyper, jittery, all revved up. He couldn't sit still. His head twitched, his hands jumped, his legs quivered. He couldn't seem to focus on the questions.

And neither he nor his sister had seemed to express the slightest bit of sadness at their stepfather's death, or concern about their mother's condition.

* * *

At six-thirty the next morning, Lewis Young received a phone call from a woman who identified herself as the wife of Bonnie Von Stein's brother. She said she and her husband were staying at the Holiday Inn, along with other members of Bonnie's family who had rushed to Little Washington as soon as they'd heard the news. She told Young that she and her husband wanted to speak to him as soon as possible. And she said it would have to be kept confidential: she and her husband did not want other family members—and especially not Bonnie herself—to know that they'd contacted the police.

Young told them he'd be waiting at headquarters. They were there within fifteen minutes.

Bonnie's brother, George, stood just less than six feet tall. He was a thin man, with a mustache and a small beard that covered only his chin, not his jaw. He struck Young immediately as being honest and unassuming. He worked as a chemist for a paint manufacturer in High Point, a city in the middle of the state, not far from Greensboro and Winston-Salem. Young sized him up as a man who would do what he believed to be the right thing, even if it made him uncomfortable.

His wife, Peggy, who had been raised in Washington, D.C., was slim and attractive, with long red fingernails and short brown hair. She, like her husband, spoke plainly and with feeling. They both said, right away, that the decision to seek out Lewis Young had not been an easy one; that, in fact, they'd stayed up most of the night, talking about what they should do.

The problem, they said, was Chris Pritchard, and to a lesser extent, perhaps Angela. From the moment they'd first seen Chris the day before, they had sensed that something was not right.

“It's hard to put into words,” George Bates said, “but I don't understand the way he's acting. Yesterday, he didn't act like his mother had just been stabbed in bed and almost died. And like his stepfather had been murdered.”

“I never saw a tear in his eye,” Peggy Bates said.

“He didn't seem upset,” George said. “He didn't seem distraught. He was just his normal, run-here, run-there, can't-sit-still, nervous personality.”

Young had thought Chris's nervousness might have been just a reaction to the shocking news he'd been given early that morning. But Chris's uncle said, “He's been that way as long as I can remember.”

The big point they wanted to make—and this was a very hard thing for them to say—was that, based on what they'd seen of Chris since their arrival in Washington, they feared he might have some involvement in the crime.

Angela's behavior had bothered them, too.

“I never saw a one of them shed a tear,” George Bates said. “It was like
nothing
had happened. It was like if I just went to their house and they've got some friends over and it's, ‘Hey, how you doin'?'—same kind of nonchalant way. Like, hey, they're makin' plans to go get pizza and whatnot, up to the mall.”

George Bates looked Lewis Young squarely in the eye. “I could almost rationalize losing a stepfather and not being in tears, but
their mother is in intensive care. She was almost murdered!
This wasn't a car accident. Someone intentionally tried to
murder
their mother. And they show no concern whatsoever. Why aren't those kids in tears? Why aren't they sitting up at that hospital right now, protecting their mother? If I were them, I'd be there day and night.”

Then Peggy Bates said, “The first people you need to give your attention to are Chris and Angela.”

And George Bates said, “Look, I'm not convinced about anything. I'm just bothered. I'm bothered enough to be sitting here talking to you about my own family. I don't like doing it, but I want you to at least be sure you keep someone there at the hospital, looking out for Bonnie. Because, heaven forbid, if the kids did have something to do with it, they might try something else.”

* * *

A policeman had been assigned to guard the door of Bonnie's room the day before. Young called to be sure someone was still on duty. Then, at ten
A
.
M
., he went to the hospital himself to have his first talk with Bonnie, and to see for himself how badly hurt she really was. Her brother might have feared for her life, and she might have been—as she appeared—an innocent victim, but she was also, Young said later, “already something of a suspect.”

Lieth had been dead for only a day, but Little Washington was filled with rumors about her possible involvement in the murder.

Had Bonnie been well known in the community, had she had a broad range of friends, acquaintances, or civic activities, the suspicion might have been slower to spread. But who had really known this Bonnie Von Stein? For years, she'd been a stranger beside them. Of such a person, it was easy to believe the worst.

This, as much as anything, might have been what led to the first wave of suspicion, although the existence of a $2 million inheritance—and it was not long before news of this swept the town—was no doubt a contributing factor.

The rumors had begun even before the neighbors had finished scrubbing the blood from the bedroom walls. Even the local paper referred to them, with a spokesman for the Washington police department quoted as saying he had “heard rumors about the incident but discounted most of them as ill-informed or malicious.”

Still, even as Bonnie lay in her hospital bed with the chest tube firmly in place, all over Little Washington people she had never met were muttering their doubts about the existence of genuine intruders in the night.

“I must say,” Lewis Young recalled later, “she looked pretty incapacitated. Her head looked bad. My head was hurting just looking at her. If there was all that money involved, she obviously had a motive, but I'd never seen a crime where a person inflicted injuries that serious to themselves, or had them inflicted by somebody else, just to take the heat off.”

He asked her to tell him about the weekend. She said Chris had been home that Saturday night and had barbecued hamburgers for them all. The next morning, she and Lieth had slept late and then gone to Greenville for breakfast. They'd eaten at The Waffle House.

It was the sort of thing they liked to do on weekends, the sort of thing they considered recreation. Twenty-five miles might seem a long drive just to get to a place called The Waffle House, but if you stayed in Little Washington, your breakfast options were McDonald's or Burger King.

She'd asked Angela if she wanted to join them, but Angela was on her way to the Five Points Equestrian Center to spend the day among horses. Angela loved horses, always had. The chance to ride was about the only thing that could get her up at eight-thirty on a weekend morning. Chris had gone back to school the night before, after the barbecue, saying he had to work on a term paper.

So it had been just the two of them. After breakfast, they'd made a brief stop to look at mobile homes. Having just come into a large inheritance—Bonnie said it was $1.3 million—Lieth had been planning to quit his job at the end of the year and devote full time to managing his investments. With both children finally in college, they'd be free to travel.

That afternoon, they'd spent a couple of hours at the computer, entering and updating stock market data. Then, she said with some embarrassment, they'd enjoyed some “private moments” in their bedroom.

They drove back to Greenville that night, and because their favorite restaurant, The King and Queen, was closed, they'd eaten at Sweet Caroline's. Lieth drank a couple of vodka martinis and Bonnie a Tom Collins before the meal. He ordered the chicken and wild rice special. She had the blackened steak. They'd had wine with the meal, too, though she herself had drunk, at most, a single glass.

He'd gone to bed as soon as they got home. Lieth did that. He went to bed early. As she'd said the day before, she had stayed up to watch the Ted Bundy miniseries. Not because she cared about Ted Bundy: just because she happened to like the actor who played the role. Yes, her rooster had been with her. She'd grown up in farm country, she'd loved animals all her life, and she didn't see anything strange about either having thirteen cats in her house or about bringing her rooster inside while she watched television.

She had turned off the television shortly after the eleven o'clock news had begun. Then she'd gone upstairs and awakened Lieth to ask him if he'd like a glass of tea. He had said no and had immediately fallen back to sleep. Then she'd had her little chat with Angela—Bonnie had been thinking of going to the beach the next day, and they discussed bathing suits, and also a cassette tape of Angela's that Bonnie wanted to bring in her car.

She'd spent a few minutes reading in bed—a paperback Harlequin romance, she couldn't remember the title. But the music from Angela's tape player or radio was distracting, so she'd gone to her daughter's room and closed the door. She'd also closed her own bedroom door. Soon, she had fallen asleep. The next thing she heard was Lieth screaming.

During the attack, she'd heard a “whooshing” and a “thumping” sound each time that Lieth was hit. She recalled that the attacker, upon leaving her room, had closed the door “softly,” he hadn't slammed it. Later, she'd heard the same “whooshing” and “thumping” in the hallway, causing her to fear that Angela was being killed, too.

Young asked if she had any better impression of her assailant than she'd had the day before. Bonnie said she thought he'd been a big man, strong, with broad shoulders that had “blended” into his head, “almost as if he had no neck.” She also said she thought he'd been wearing a ski mask.

Young wanted to know more about Lieth. Bonnie said he was a gentle man who would not allow weapons in the house. She was not aware of his having any problems at work. She had no knowledge or suspicions of any extramarital affairs. Their marriage had been filled with happiness.

Lieth had been kind to her children, had wanted them to have good educations. A vocal man, he would let you know right away if something was bothering him, but he didn't carry a grudge. He'd had no problems with Chris or Angela or with any of their friends. They really had been, she said, just one medium-sized happy family. Nothing out of the ordinary in any way, except that maybe, over the past couple of years, faced with the stress of his parents' illnesses and deaths—and the death, too, of an uncle who had been almost like a father to him—and the need, through all this time of sickness and death, to make the four-and-a-half-hour trip to Winston-Salem almost every weekend, Lieth had begun to drink more than she thought was good for him.

He showed her a picture of the green canvas knapsack that had been found on the floor of the hall that led from the back door to the kitchen. She said it did not belong to anyone in her family and that she'd never seen it before.

Next, Young asked about the inheritance. She said Angela and Chris both knew Lieth had inherited a significant sum, but because theirs was not a family in which such matters were openly discussed, she doubted that either child had any idea just how much was involved. One thing the children
did
know was that in the event she and Lieth were both to die, whatever assets they left behind—and when Lieth's life insurance was added to what he had inherited, the total came to almost $2 million—would be held in a trust until Angela, the younger child, turned thirty-five.

When Young asked her if she had any new ideas about who might have committed the crime, she said he might want to consider the trust department of the North Carolina National Bank. Lieth had informed them of his decision to close out their $1.3 million account because he was dissatisfied with their performance and fees. Perhaps, she said, the bank had arranged Lieth's murder to prevent him from taking the money away from them.

This struck Lewis Young as the most ridiculous notion he'd heard yet concerning a motive for the murder. But looking again at Bonnie's battered forehead, he was inclined to think that the combination of physical injury and emotional shock might be responsible for any sort of farfetched idea.