Blood Games (31 page)

“I didn’t know his parents had money,” Bart said later. “I knew he’d call up his mom and ask for fifty or a hundred bucks and he’d get it. I said, ‘Damn, I wish I could call my parents and do that.’ But I didn’t know they had that kind of money.”

How did his old man get that money? somebody asked. Chris said he had inherited it.

“Hey, man, you ought to just off your parents and go ahead and get that money,” somebody said, although later nobody would recall who.

“Yeah, I could buy a big house in the woods,” Chris said.

“Up in north Raleigh,” somebody said.

“Got to have a swimming pool,” somebody else put in.

“And a Ferrari,” Chris added.

“A satellite dish. And a big-screen TV.”

“And a pool table.”

They began fantasizing about the possibilities. They all could live together, buy plenty of drugs and booze, play D&D whenever they wanted, attract fabulous babes. Chris said he would buy a “killer” stereo system, and two “serious” computers for him and Brew to write on. He might just buy the Swenson’s ice cream parlor near the campus, too, and turn it into a restaurant and club for Bart to run.

Later, Chris called this session “bullshitting and daydreaming.”

“We were all joking,” Bart said. “Just being ridiculous. We were wish-listing”

27

By the fifth and final week of the first session of summer school, Bart and Chris had stopped going to class.

Chris had been upset to learn that even though he had changed to auditing his calculus class, he still was expected to do homework and take exams. He had no intention of doing either. He explained to his mother that there had been a misunderstanding, and he was getting no credit for his class. That was fine with her, but she tried to talk him out of staying for the second summer session, telling him that he needed a break from classes and a chance to enjoy himself before starting his sophomore year. Chris was already enjoying himself almost more than he could stand, however, and he insisted on enrolling for the second session, this time taking chemistry and a political science course in American government.

Although Bart had paid little attention to his studies in the final weeks of the first summer session, he thought that he would slip by in cultural anthropology and get an incomplete in prehistoric archeology, and that was how it turned out. For the second summer session, he signed up for math and English, and his grandmother, Carolyn, whom he rarely saw anymore, ended up paying his tuition.

When the first summer session ended on June 28, Chris’s closest friend from his freshman year, Chuck Jackson, moved into the dorm room with Chris. Like Chris, he was a Dungeons and Dragons player, but unlike Chris, he was a serious student who refused to neglect his studies. Chuck brought an air conditioner with him and installed it in the dorm window, ensuring that the room would be the gathering place for all of Chris’s friends. After Chuck moved in, he and Chris completed the sleeping loft that Chris had been intending to erect but never had gotten around to, making even more room for friends to gather to party, and play D&D.

On Thursday, June 30, during the week-long break between summer sessions, Bart and Chris were finishing off a pitcher of beer at California Pizza*. Both had smoked pot and taken a hit of acid earlier and were waiting for the acid rush to hit.

California had become the chief gathering spot away from campus for Bart, Chris, and their friends. It seemed an unlikely choice, for it was a yuppie establishment in a suburban shopping center. Bart had worked there briefly, soon after the place opened. California’s chief appeal to Bart, Chris, and their friends was that they could buy beer there without question, although they were under age. Chris usually drank at least a pitcher of beer at California every day, sometimes two or three. When friends from home visited, he loved to take them there and show off by buying beer. He spent so much time at California and depended so much upon it that he had begun to call it “the center of the universe,” and for him and his friends that summer, it was.

On this day, Chris and Bart were bored. Chris hadn’t gone to work at his clothing store job the day before and hadn’t even bothered to call and explain why. He was tired of the job and ready to quit. It interfered with his drinking and pot smoking and kept him from playing Dungeons and Dragons.

With July 4 weekend looming, many of Chris’s and Bart’s friends had left town. Bart and Chris had made no plans.

“Hey, we can go to South Carolina,” Chris said. “We can visit my aunt. She’ll have a party waiting for us.”

Bart was skeptical. Partying with an aunt?

“Hey, she’s cool,” Chris said. “She parties heavy. First time I ever got drunk was at a party at her house. I always have a good time down there.”

Beyond that, Chris said, he knew a girl there, and his aunt, who was his mother’s younger sister, had a daughter. “My cousin’s good-looking. I’ll set you up with her.”

It was only a matter of a telephone call, Chris said. Bart was agreeable, and Chris called collect from the restaurant. He returned to the table to report that the party was on.

They went back to the dorm to pick up a few things, loaded a case of Michelob into Chris’s Mustang, and headed for I-85 and South Carolina.

On the way, they drank most of the case of beer and were drunk but still frenetic from the acid when they stopped at a truck stop near the state line to call Chris’s aunt in Inman. They arrived at her house to find numerous vehicles, including several pickup trucks with gun racks in the back window. A party was in full swing inside the small brick house, many of the participants members of a local volunteer fire department

Later, neither Chris nor Bart would remember many details of the party. Bart would recall somebody showing off a .357 magnum and being offered his fill of moonshine liquor. He would recall somebody offering him what was called a “blueberry daiquiri,” actually a mixture of moonshine and ipecac syrup, which he declined but Chris accepted to his dismay and the great amusement of the partygoers, as Bart later told it. Bart also would recall being called a “city boy” by the rural firefighters, a charge he found especially ironic when he thought of the wilds of Caswell County where he had spent most of his life.

Bart later remembered being distressingly hung over the following day, but by afternoon he and Chris had recovered sufficiently to accompany Chris’s cousin on a visit to a nearby zoo. That night, Chris wanted to go to another party with a girl he had gone out with previously, a friend of his cousin. Bart declined and stayed behind with Chris’s aunt, who changed the dressings on wounds on his elbow and shoulder that he had incurred from an earlier skateboarding fall.

Chris returned bragging of taking the girl to a motel room and of partying with big-time drug dealers who showed off Uzis, Bart said later.

On Saturday, Bart was loading his stuff into Chris’s car when he saw wires dangling from the dashboard and an empty space where the expensive stereo radio and tape player that Chris’s mother and stepfather had given him for Christmas had been.

“Hey, man, somebody stole your stereo,” Bart said.

Chris didn’t believe it.

“Go look,” Bart said.

Chris was angry and worried about what Bonnie and Lieth would say. They didn’t even know where he was. His mother had called, asking her sister if she had seen or heard from Chris, but Chris had asked his aunt to say she hadn’t heard from him, and she had covered for him. Now his aunt called the sheriff’s department to report the theft. A deputy came and took a report, but Chris knew he would have to tell his parents that the theft occurred elsewhere.

On the trip back to Raleigh, Chris began to worry about what to tell his mother of his whereabouts for the past three days. His mother called him several times each week, sometimes daily, and he knew by the call she had made to his aunt’s house on Friday that she was worried about him. He had no idea just how worried she was, however.

Bonnie and Lieth had planned to spend that weekend in Winston-Salem. Chris’s sister, Angela, and her friend Donna Brady were going to leave on Thursday and spend the night with Chris in Raleigh, then drive on to Winston-Salem to join Bonnie and Lieth on Friday. Angela had called and arranged it all with Chris, who had forgotten about it. Angela and Donna arrived in Raleigh Thursday night, while Chris and Bart were just reaching South Carolina. Unable to find Chris, Angela and Donna later reported that they slept in Angela’s car in a campus parking lot, before driving on to Winston-Salem.

When Angela told her mother about being unable to find Chris, Bonnie began calling all of Chris’s friends and all of her relatives looking for him. When she still hadn’t located him by Saturday morning, she called the campus police. The police seemed less than concerned after Bonnie had told her story, but she insisted that Chris was very good at remembering appointments and wouldn’t have forgotten that his sister was coming. He always called in to work when he couldn’t be there, she said, and he always called her if he was going someplace. She was certain that something terrible had happened to her son. The campus police told Bonnie that she would have to send a letter stating that she felt that Chris was missing involuntarily. But they could begin an investigation immediately if she made a recorded statement to that effect. Bonnie recorded the statement by telephone at 4:06 P.M., five hours after making her first call to the campus police. By that time, Chris and Bart were on their way back to Raleigh.

The campus police meanwhile were checking with the Raleigh police and with all area hospitals, including the nearby mental hospital, and a missing persons report went out to police agencies across the state.

“You either have to tell the truth or just make up something totally outlandish,” Bart was telling Chris as they drove toward Raleigh. “If it’s wild enough, they’ll believe it.”

Laughing, they made up the story that Chris later told his parents about going to see Bart’s uncle, the car breaking down, an old lady feeding them goat’s milk and baloney sandwiches that made them deathly sick.

“Don’t worry about it,” Bart assured Chris when they had finished concocting the tale. “They’ll believe it.”

When Chris and Bart arrived back at campus Saturday evening, friends told Chris, “Man, you better call your mama. She’s got the cops and the National Guard out looking for you.”

At ten-twenty-five that night, a campus police sergeant knocked on Chris’s dorm room door. Chris assured him that he was in good health. He had been in Roanoke Rapids, a town near the Virginia border, visiting relatives, he said, and had forgotten to let his parents know that he was going. The officer told him to call his mother and Chris assured him that he would do it immediately.

Chris was apologetic when he called his mother. He had forgotten all about Angela coming, he said. Then he told her the story that he and Bart had dreamed up. Bonnie was so relieved that she was willing to accept any explanation. But when she told Lieth what Chris had said, Lieth said he didn’t believe that story for a minute.

A day after their return from South Carolina, Bart and Chris were ready for another party. This was Sunday, July 3, and the campus was almost dead because of the holiday weekend. Few students were still in the dorm, and Bart set out through the building to see if he could round up some potential merrymakers. On the fifth floor, he encountered two young women and told them to come up to the sixth floor later for a party in Chris’s room.

The young women were Sybil Cook*, and Sandra Goodman*. Sybil, who was from a nearby town, was a sophomore who wanted to work with children. She just had transferred from another university and knew almost nobody at State. Sandra Goodman was the first person she had met. Sandra, a day student who was commuting to summer classes, was visiting in Sybil’s room when Bart came by, introducing himself as Moog. Sybil thought Bart was cute, and she and Sandra decided to go upstairs and see what was going on. Later, neither would recall anything special happening that night, but the party was significant because it allowed them to make the acquaintance of Bart and Chris and several others. They would remember it as the night that they were drawn into the circle of Bart’s and Chris’s friends. In coming weeks, they would see Bart and Chris almost every day.

Two days after meeting Bart and Chris, Sandra and Sybil joined them at California Pizza along with Chris’s roommate, Chuck Jackson, Brew Simpson, and another student who occasionally played D&D with the group. All were sitting at a big round table, eating pizza and drinking beer, when Sandra and Sybil realized that the conversation had taken an unexpected turn. The others were talking about killing somebody. This person had too much power, they said, and they were plotting how they could slip up on him in his sleep and slay him with a sword.

“What in the world are they talking about?” Sandra later remembered asking herself.

“It seemed like something that they were really planning on doing,” she said.

“I was getting real nervous because I didn’t know these guys and I was thinking this was awfully strange,” Sybil recalled of the conversation. “I was looking at Sandra kind of funny.”

It took them a little while to realize that the guys were talking about a game. It was the first they knew that the circle they had fallen into was one betrothed to Dungeons and Dragons, a game that neither of them knew anything about.