Blood Games (37 page)

Everybody had been formal and businesslike. Christy told them that Moog had last been seen at the restaurant where Hank worked, a place he went often. She offered his last address, where he had lived with Brew months earlier, his parents’ addresses and phone numbers, some of his mother’s telephone records showing calls he had charged to her number.

When Taylor first had called Christy, he had told her only that he wanted to talk with Moog because he was a friend of a suspect in a murder case. Now Christy suspected that it was more than that. Her suspicions were confirmed when Young asked, “Do you think he’s capable of murder?”

Without hesitation she answered, “Yes.” It was something she had thought for a long time. After her third meeting with Bart she had gone to her supervisor and told him that she had an eerie feeling about him. “He just looked like the type who could kill somebody and laugh while he was doing it,” she recalled later. “He just had that look in his eye.”

Now she was wondering if he had, indeed, killed somebody. She also was wondering about the two detectives who wanted to talk to him.

Taylor remained silent throughout their meeting, and she couldn’t help but wonder if the silence was a mask to disguise that he was just another less-than-bright country boy cop, feeling squirmish in his Sunday clothes. Young had been smooth and professional, as SBI agents usually were (she was married to an ex-SBI agent), but she could tell that he was the kind of person who would wear a suit to a tractor pull or a pig picking, “He had ‘cop’ written all over him,” she said later. How these two would be able to infiltrate the underground around N.C. State and pluck out a long-haired, acid-dropping, D&D-playing character called Moog, she couldn’t imagine.

“When they left,” she recalled later, “I said to myself, ‘That boy will never be caught.’”

32

On Thursday March 30, John Taylor called the FBI lab in Washington, D.C., to find out how the map that SBI agent Terry Newell had gotten Chris to draw compared to the map found in the fire. The handwriting analyst who had examined both declared them a match. He was certain that both had been drawn by the same person.

Flush with excitement, Taylor took the news to the chief and called Lewis Young to tell him about it. They finally had solid evidence that could be used to put Chris behind bars. All they needed now was to find who had used the map to locate the house at 110 Lawson Road and kill Lieth Von Stein.

And they were all but certain that it was James Bartlett Upchurch III, otherwise known as Moog.

They knew that Moog was among Chris’s closest friends. They also knew that the two were bound by drugs and Dungeons and Dragons, an unholy alliance, and that they influenced one another. Of Chris’s closest friends at college, Moog was the only one with a criminal record, making him, in their eyes, the one to whom Chris most likely would turn for a partner in murder. Moreover, Moog had never been to Chris’s house. Chuck had been there. Brew had been there. But Moog would need a map.

When Crone, Taylor, and Young next sat down for a strategy session, their plan was simple: find Moog and see what he had to say. If he refused to talk, that would at least be an indication that they were on the right track. Even if he lied, they still would have something to work with, a framework that could be used to trap him.

Christy Newsom was seething about Bart. A perfectionist who could not abide things out of order, she took it personally when any of her probationers absconded. But Bart galled her more deeply than any other, because she knew how much he enjoyed outsmarting her. “He was driving me crazy,” she said. She blamed him partly for the ulcers in her stomach. But she was determined to find Bart and keep her promise of sending him to jail. She had spent so much time looking for him that her supervisor had suggested that she needed to back off, but she couldn’t.

“I’ve never done anything in moderation,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

Her chance to go all-out in her hunt came in early April when John Taylor called, officially requesting her assistance in finding Moog.

“John couldn’t believe I was so willing to help,” she said later.

But before she agreed, she put pressure on Taylor to tell her exactly what she was getting into. Taylor and Young had been chary with information, telling her only that they wanted to talk with Moog because he was a friend of Chris’s, their primary suspect.

“Listen,” she said. “Y’all are not after him just because he’s a friend of a possible suspect. What’s going on? Y’all want me to take my time, at least let me know what we’re dealing with here.”

Taylor filled her in on the details of the case, confirming what she already suspected: that the detectives thought that Moog may have been the actual killer. The information gave Christy an even greater sense of mission in her search for him.

Christy oversaw a group of more than 180 probationers, many of whom moved through the underworld of drug dealers, bikers, punk rockers, satanists, street poets, and assorted other characters who congregated in the cafes, fast-food joints, bars, and dives that nestled around the campus of N.C. State. Among them Christy had developed informers, several of whom regularly fed her information about Bart and other miscreant probationers.

Several times her informers’ information about Bart had been correct. She had missed him only by minutes on a couple of occasions. In recent weeks, though, she had been told first that Bart had dyed his hair pink, then that he had dyed it black and wrapped it into a spike on top. She didn’t know what to believe, and she and Taylor had no idea how he might look.

Probably not like the photo that Taylor had had printed up in large quantity.

Two weeks earlier, he had driven to Caswell County to get the mug shot that had been taken of Bart when he had been arrested in high school. Taylor planned to pass the mug shots around to cops and others who might be inclined to help in the search.

Christy was certain that one place that Bart still went regularly was the restaurant where Hank worked, although she never had been able to catch him there. On an earlier trip to Raleigh, Taylor and Lewis Young had staked out the place—two guys in suits in a conspicuous SBI car—but within fifteen minutes, customers had started pointing at them and smiling and they had given up and moved on.

Now the restaurant was the first place that Christy took Taylor. They were still calling one another Detective Taylor and Mrs. Newsom at this point, but by the end of the day they not only would be calling one another John and Christy, they would be arguing, as Christy later put it, “like brother and sister.”

Both were still in their twenties, young enough to pass as college students, and that was what they hoped to do. They were dressed accordingly, in jeans and sweatshirts, but they were riding in a dark blue, ’87 Chevrolet Caprice unmarked Washington police cruiser that had been wrecked four times, John’s favorite car.

“You’ve got to get rid of this police car,” Christy said.

“Yeah, it’s pretty dumb, uh?” John replied with a little grin.

They spent a slow couple of hours parked at the back of the restaurant, chatting, trying to pass themselves off as a couple, keeping a close eye out for Moog. When they had been there long enough for people to begin to get suspicious, they slipped into a nearby building and found a viewing spot at a second-floor window where they could watch all entrances of the restaurant. There they remained until after dark without ever getting a glimpse of Moog.

Christy’s informants had supplied her with the names of several bars where Moog was supposed to hang out. One was on Hillsborough Street, a place that attracted bikers. A sign at the front door proclaimed: “No violence; no weapons; no drugs; no dogs; no bad attitudes.” The bar had a big plate-glass window in front, and John and Christy had driven by several times, but they couldn’t see inside well enough to pick out faces in the crowd.

Christy wanted to go in. John was reluctant. Raleigh police officers had warned him about the place: Don’t go in alone. No matter how he was dressed, he knew he never could be inconspicuous amidst a swarm of grungy guys with long hair, beards, tattoos, leather jackets, and motorcycle gang colors.

“Are you crazy?” he said. “I’ll get my ass stomped.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she replied. “I’ve got the bartender’s husband on probation.”

They pulled up to the back of the place, where a squadron of Harley-Davidsons stood in formation. John parked the cruiser behind a dumpster, hoping to keep it out of sight.

“Now, Christy, I’m going to go in here with you,” John said, “but you’re going to go straight to the bar, and you’re going to find this woman you’re talking about. You’re going to show her the picture and ask her right quick if she knows him. Right?”

“Okay.”

“Now, listen,” John persisted. “I’m not staying in there any half-hour. I ain’t shooting any pool or none of this other shit. We’re going in there and coming right back out, right?”

“Right.”

The sea of black leather jackets at the back door parted as John followed Christy through it. Later, John would recall feeling that he was in a scene from a movie. Wherever he and Christy moved, silence fell, pool balls quit clacking. All eyes turned to the intruders.

A giant loomed ahead of them, nearly seven feet tall, weighing more than 350 pounds. Suddenly, John heard his companion, five-feet-two and 116 pounds, barking, “Hey, I want to talk to you.”

“I’m thinking, shit, I reckon,” John recalled later.

The giant turned and smiled. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, as sweetly as a teddy bear.

In following days, John and Christy made the rounds again and again, driving back and forth on Hillsborough Street, day and night, checking the bars, the fast-food joints, the record stores, the game shop where Dungeons and Dragons materials were sold. They prowled the N.C. State campus, passed out photos of Moog to campus police, as well as to Raleigh police who patrolled in the area. They stopped people on the street and showed them the photo. Time and again, they called on Moog’s friends, just to let them know that they were around and weren’t going to quit until they found him, sometimes separating to make these calls.

John went so many times to see Chuck Jackson that Jackson developed an “Oh, it’s you again” look. Jackson had been cooperative, but his memory had been poor. He couldn’t remember much about the weekend of the murder. Taylor had the feeling that he didn’t want to remember much, probably to keep from getting his friends in trouble.

On one occasion, when Christy climbed the rickety staircase to Hank’s third-floor apartment, a young woman answered the door and let her inside, saying she didn’t know whether Hank was in or not. The door to his room was closed. Christy noted that a mural had been painted on the living room wall, a wizard on a dark blue background with a quarter moon and gold stars. On the door to Hank’s bedroom was a note, on paper ripped from a spiral notebook, stuck to the door with a nail inserted in the narrow crack between the door and the facing.

Hank,

Just stopped for a second. Headed towards the Cellar for a while

The Killer

Little medieval-looking daggers were drawn on the note. Christy had seen drawings of daggers like these before—on the front door of one of Bart’s apartments. Christy took down the note.

“Can I have this?” she asked the young woman who had let her in.

“It’s Hank’s note.”

“Who left it?”

“I don’t know. It was here when I got here.”

Uncertain about taking it, Christy put the note back on the door.

After leaving the apartment, she hurried to a phone to page John. Both rushed to the Cellar, only to find no sign of Moog. When they returned to Hank’s apartment, nobody answered the door.

Had Moog written the note? Did the signature mean that he was indeed the murderer they thought he might be? Did it indicate he had told Hank about his role in the murder?

When they accosted Hank about it later, he didn’t know anything about a note.

Two nights after their first venture into the bikers’ bar, John and Christy were driving past the place again when Christy spotted somebody inside that she thought she recognized, a young man in a punk hairdo.

“Stop,” she said. “I want to talk to him.”

“I’m not going to let you go in there by yourself,” John said.

“What do you mean
let?”
she asked with a smile, hopping from the car.

“Is your insurance paid up?” John called after her. He parked across the street, where he sat fretting and watching through the bar’s front window for signs of trouble.

“What took you so long?” he asked when she finally returned.

“I was winning at pool,” she said, grinning.

John and Christy made the rounds until well after midnight before giving up each day. On some days they were joined by SBI agents. On a couple of nights, Christy recruited her closest friend to help, the two going to bars as if they were two young women on the town, hoping to spot Moog or find an acquaintance who might innocently betray his whereabouts to flirtatious questions. John waited outside in the car.

Nothing seemed to help in the search. Christy had a friend at the Employment Security Commission run a check on his social security card to see if he was working somewhere, but that proved unsuccessful. In searching for a more recent photo to show around, Christy checked on an off-chance with the City-County Bureau of Identification, where mug shots and fingerprints of area felons were kept, and discovered a photo only a few weeks old. On March 11, Bart had been arrested at Triangle Correctional Institute adjacent to Central Prison for passing marijuana to an inmate through a fence and for possession. The nameplate that he was holding in the mug shot did not say James Bartlett Upchurch III, however, but James Alan McIntyre, the name he had given upon his arrest. Before his real identity had been established, he had been released on the promise to show up for trial, a promise he didn’t keep, not to Christy’s surprise.