Blood Games (41 page)

“She keeps me from doing bad things,” he said.

Butch said that he knew Chris and Moog, although he knew Moog better. He’d played Dungeons and Dragons with both. Neal, his former roommate, also played with them, along with others now and then. He and Neal didn’t get along so well anymore, he said, adding that Neal had “a mind control problem with power.”

“Neal is great with strategy,” he said, “but he wants money and power and there lies his problem.”

Had he heard about the murder of Chris’s stepfather?

He had. He’d also heard that Chris was going to get some money because of his death. Moog, he believed, had told him that.

Did he have any idea who could have been involved in the murder?

No.

How about Quincy?

“Quincy couldn’t do it,” he said. “Quincy doesn’t have the guts.” Besides, Quincy was not in the least prone to violence.

Did Butch remember any of the D&D players carrying an army knapsack?

Yes. One guy carried his D&D books in an old army bag. Butch described it as worn and faded. But he didn’t know the name of the player. White boy. Had long straight hair. Parted it down the middle.

Did any of the players have a knife?

Not that Butch knew about. He wouldn’t have stayed around if anybody had brandished a knife. He didn’t like knives. Or guns either.

Crone wanted to know about D&D. How did Butch see the game?

“The object of D&D is to look out for number one,” Butch said. “If somebody is in your way, you get them out of your way by whatever means necessary.”

Did he remember being involved in any specific D&D games with Chris and Moog about the time of the murder back in July? Butch did. He was a cleric. Moog was dungeon master, as usual. Neal, as always, was a magic user. Chris was a thief, his favorite role, with a hireling fighter as a bodyguard. Another player, a resident adviser in the dorm, whose name Butch did not know, played a barbarian.

Butch said he was told that he was the lord of a castle with a great treasure that had been taken over by raiders. He was to reclaim his castle and his treasure, but the castle was well guarded and he could not take it alone. He had to hire the other players’ characters to help him, promising to pay each a thousand-dollar gold piece if they were successful in their quest.

As dungeon master, Moog drew a map to the castle and sent them on their way. They went on horseback and stopped in a woods near the castle, where they found a small building covering a secret underground passage into the bedroom of the evil overlord who had seized the place. They had to pass through a trap door into the bedroom, and once there, they found the overlord asleep in bed.

Butch posted the barbarian at one side of the bed, and Chris’s thief and fighter companion on the other side and gave them instructions to kill the overlord, beating and stabbing him until there could be no doubt about his death.

Crone and Taylor sat listening with growing excitement. In effect, Butch was describing the murder of Lieth Von Stein. They hardly could believe this was happening. Was this Butch’s way of confessing?

With the evil overlord dead, the dungeon master told Butch that he had to cleanse the castle of all evil before he could reclaim his treasure. But in the next room, Butch and his hirelings encountered a skilled fighter of such great powers that no matter what Butch threw on the die, he and the other players could not subdue this character. They had to retreat and returned to town, where they split up the loot they had seized: only a few dollars each.

Crone and Taylor were well aware that only a small amount of money, no more than eighty dollars, had been taken from the Von Stein house.

Butch had grown more vocal and agitated as he told the story. He had been angry at Moog, he said, for creating a character of such brilliance that he couldn’t be overwhelmed. And he had hated his character in the first place. He didn’t believe a cleric was suited to his personality. He’d have been much better as a fighter.

Crone began questioning Butch closely about this game, getting him to go through it again, then once again. The apartment was stiflingly hot, with no air conditioner, no fan, little air stirring, the temperature well into the nineties. Butch grew more agitated as he went through the story again. His voice rose. He got up, paced the floor, gestured dramatically.

Essentially, he told the story the same each time, but on a couple of occasions he mentioned “the folks” in the bed at the castle.

“How many were in the bed?” Crone asked on the second mention.

“Just one.”

“Just the evil overlord?”

“That’s it.”

At another point, telling how they had left the castle after their retreat, Butch said, “We just got in the car … uh … on the horses … and came on back to town.”

As Crone led Butch through the story a fourth time, Taylor quit taking notes. “I felt we were playing to his ego, and he would keep telling us stuff he thought we wanted to hear,” Taylor said later.

As the chief kept Butch talking, Taylor grew more and more impatient. He was thirsty. He was sweating heavily. He was concerned that sweat might be staining the armpits of his good suit. He wanted out of that miserable apartment. He wanted away from Butch Mitchell and his eerie story.

Sensing Taylor’s discomfort, Crone didn’t take Butch through the story another time. He simply thanked him and said that they might have to come back and talk with him more later.

But when Crone and Taylor got back to the car, Crone couldn’t contain his excitement “He told us exactly what happened,” he said.

If Butch were telling the truth about the D&D game, one of three things seemed evident: either Butch was at the Von Stein house on the night of the murder, or Moog had taken his dungeon members through a rehearsal of the crime, or the game was an amazing coincidence.

The chief thought that Butch must have taken part in the murder. Taylor thought it possible, but he had doubts. Chris didn’t know Butch very well, and Taylor couldn’t see Chris putting his trust in somebody as unstable as Butch appeared to be. Yet, he acknowledged, it was also possible that Moog had engaged Butch for the mission without Chris’s knowledge.

After they had gotten cold drinks and had a chance to cool down, Crone and Taylor went back to Neal’s apartment to question Moog about the D&D game Butch just had told them about.

Bart was alone at the apartment this time, and he didn’t appear surprised to see them again.

Asked about Butch, Bart described him as “pigheaded and quick-tempered,” violent when he was drinking, but he had stopped drinking now. Of those who had played D&D in his groups, Bart said, Butch and Chris were most fanatical about it.

He recalled the game Butch had told the officers about. It was one adventure in a high-level campaign, he said. Butch was playing a “chaotic good” character, and Chris’s and Neal’s characters were neutral. He liked for the characters to be on the good side, he said, because it made for a more interesting game.

He didn’t remember anybody being stabbed or beaten in this particular adventure, he said. And the evil overlord wasn’t in bed either. He had heard the invaders coming and had gotten up and assembled his fighters to repel them.

Having nailed down Bart’s version of the game, Crone asked if any of the players carried their D&D materials in a book bag. The only one Moog recalled was Neal. He described his bag as cream-colored and old.

Did he know any acquaintances of Chris’s, other than Butch, who might have weapons or violent tendencies? Bart told about one friend who kept a club in his car and boasted of beating people in high school. He remembered a friend of Butch’s who, he said, was crazy and liked to dress up in ninja outfits. This guy had rappelled off one of the top floors of Lee dorm and had climbed through the ductwork to get into a girl’s dorm room. He also once had his girlfriend do a striptease for Bart in a dorm room, then threatened to kill him if he ever told anybody about it. Bart also gave the officers the name of a student who he claimed had sold cocaine to Chris. This student, Bart said, kept an AK-47 assault rifle, a compound crossbow, and a crossbow pistol in his dorm room.

Crone and Taylor left wondering if many parents had any idea of what their children were doing when they sent them off to college these days.

They had one more stop that they wanted to make before they called it quits this Friday night and had to face the long drive back to Washington. They wanted to have another chat with Brew Simpson. But this proved to be a bust. He couldn’t recall anybody having a green army book bag, didn’t remember anything about Butch’s adventure in the D&D game, although he did recall Butch’s character being killed at some point. And he didn’t think he’d ever discussed with anybody the possibility of Chris being involved in his stepfather’s murder.

Crone and Taylor discussed the day’s events as they drove home that night. Both thought they had made a lot of progress. Because of the D&D adventure he had told them about, Butch had to be considered a suspect. Moog’s confirmation made them certain that such an adventure had taken place, and they figured that Butch was more apt to be telling the truth about it than Moog, who made a point of denying that a beating and stabbing in a bed had taken place Crone was more convinced than ever that his original theory was sound. The murder of Lieth Von Stein was a Dungeons and Dragons adventure come true.

36

The green army knapsack that had been found on the enclosed back porch of the Von Stein house on the morning of the murder was John Taylor’s next thread of hope for a solution to his perplexing case.

On Friday, June 2, he and David Sparrow, the newly appointed detective, drove to Raleigh with the bag, hoping to find somebody who recognized it. Their plan was to confront every person who knew Chris and Moog, tell them where the bag was found and when, let them know that whoever owned it likely was a murderer. Maybe somebody would remember it and connect it to the owner.

Butch Mitchell, the first person to be shown the bag, was pretty sure that he recognized it. It belonged either to Chris or to the white guy with straight blond hair he had mentioned earlier. Whichever had it kept D&D books in it. He recalled the bag because he remembered asking where he could get one like it.

Bart and Neal claimed they’d never seen the bag, as did Brew, who was concerned about the tone of Chief John Crone’s questions to him the night before. He thought the questions implied the chief’s belief that he was a drug user. He was willing to take a urine test to prove otherwise, he said. Not necessary, Taylor told him. Don’t worry about it. By the way, did he have a picture of himself that Taylor might borrow? Brew gave him an expired driver’s license.

Sandra Goodman and Sybil Cook didn’t remember the bag. Neither did Quincy Blackwell, who said that he just couldn’t believe that James or Neal could have had anything to do with a murder. While talking with Quincy, Taylor showed his roommate, Butch, the expired license Brew had given him earlier. Was he the person who might have owned the bag? No, said Butch, not him.

Before leaving Raleigh, Taylor and Sparrow dropped by Neal’s apartment to question Neal and Moog again about the bag. Were they certain they’d never seen it? Both were. When Taylor told them that Butch remembered the bag, Neal said that Butch was not to be trusted.

“He’s a psychotic son-of-a-bitch,” Neal said.

Taylor wanted to make sure that he had impressed the importance of the bag on Moog. If Moog was involved in the murder, he would have to be concerned that somebody might recognize the bag and tie it either to Chris or himself. As he drove home that night, however, Taylor found it strange that the only person who claimed to recognize the bag was Butch, who had made himself one of the suspects with his strange tale of the D&D game. Surely if Butch had been involved, he wouldn’t have wanted the police to know that he knew anybody connected with the bag.

When he arrived at home late that night, Taylor found a message on his answering machine from Sandra Goodman, asking that he call. Because it was late, he waited until the next day to call. She and Sybil had talked after he’d shown them the knapsack, she said, and their memories had been jogged. Both were fairly certain that they had seen the bag in Chris and Chuck’s room, filled with D&D books.

Taylor returned to Raleigh alone with the bag on Monday to show it to any student he could find who had been in Lee dorm during the previous summer sessions. A couple thought they might have seen it before but didn’t know to whom it belonged.

When Taylor took Brew’s driver’s license back to him, Brew now said that he, too, had been thinking about the bag and it did seem familiar, but he just couldn’t recall who might have had a bag like that.

Sandra Goodman took Taylor to the isolated lot where Chris had parked his car when he, Sandra, Sybil, and Chuck returned from buying beer on the night of the murder. She had thought it strange that he had parked so far from the dorm that night, and Chris wouldn’t tell them why.

Taylor thought he knew why Chris had parked in this spot: so it would be easier for whoever was to drive his car to Washington that night to get to it without being seen. He knew from all of his interviews with Chris’s friends that Chris was highly particular about his car and that it took an unusual circumstance for him to let anybody else drive it. But murder, he knew, was among the most unusual of circumstances.