Blood Games (44 page)

Questioned by Young, Neal recalled that James was wearing blue jeans with holes in the knees, a dark, button-up shirt over a white T-shirt, and the moccasin boots that he wore so often. He had brought along a black sweater, a ski mask, dark trousers, and black tennis shoes to wear when he went into the house. Over his shoulder, said Neal, James had slung an army knapsack that he usually used for carrying Dungeons and Dragons materials. Now it held a knife, a flashlight, and other items. The handle of the baseball bat protruded from it, throwing it out of kilter.

Months after telling the officers about this night, Neal would recall that James was excited and hyperactive as they left for Washington.

“He was grinning a lot,” Neal said. “He didn’t seem at all concerned at what he was going to be doing. He seemed fairly happy about the whole world. I was happy just to be driving him down there.”

On the night that Young and Taylor questioned him, Neal said that he never dreamed anybody actually would be killed, despite all the planning. He thought that James simply would go into the house, steal the jewelry, and slip away. About that, he said later, he had no qualms.

“On one level I knew that breaking into that place, stealing from those people was wrong. I was contrasting that with these are my friends and they would really respect me if I went through with this kind of daring thing. I told myself that these people are rich. They aren’t really going to miss this kind of piddly stuff. Besides, they were going to disinherit Chris.

“What I was doing, I didn’t really see it as hurting anybody. Hurt somebody? That was too crazy. It didn’t fit. Killing people was so far outside of anything that I knew James to be like that I didn’t dream it was possible.

“I thought, we’re going to go down there, somebody else is going to go in and steal something, so I wasn’t even doing that myself, and when it was over, we would just drive off. We would be laughing and joking about how killing somebody could never happen.

“I didn’t expect to be paid anything. I was just driving down for the fun of it. And it
was
fun, I don’t care what anybody says. Driving off in the middle of the night. It was exciting.”

On the way, he said, they didn’t talk about what lay ahead. They talked about Dungeons and Dragons. They talked about music. After passing a store dealing in baseball cards, they talked for a long time about collecting cards and comics.

Somewhere near the town of Wilson, they stopped on the side of the road to take a leak. As they neared Washington, James began changing clothes as they drove, putting on the dark trousers, black sweater, black tennis shoes.

They followed Chris’s map to Smallwood but drove past it and had to turn around and go back. They located the house, the wooded lot where James was to get out, the utility substation where Chris suggested that Neal park to wait. They cased the neighborhood, including the darker and more isolated nearby roads to the fairgrounds and airport. They rejected Chris’s suggested waiting spot because a new house was under construction there and they were afraid that the car might arouse suspicion if anybody saw it. Instead, Neal would wait in the darkness of the dead-end road to the fairgrounds.

James smeared black shoe polish around his mouth and eyes and pulled a purple ski mask over his head as Neal coasted slowly down Marsh Street and came to a stop at the wooded lot. Neal paused only long enough for James to hop out of the car, slinging his army knapsack across his shoulder. Later, Neal wouldn’t remember either of them saying anything. He didn’t look back as James slipped into the trees as quickly and silently as a ninja warrior.

Neal grew increasingly anxious and fearful as he waited in darkness for James to return. As the minutes ticked agonizingly on amidst the loud and eerie insect sounds of a coastal summer night, he began first to worry that something had gone wrong, then to worry, as he later put it, that “something was going right,” exactly according to the plan.

When he could stand the anxiety no longer, he started the car, pulled up to Market Street Extension, turned left toward town, and drove slowly past Smallwood, looking for James. Seeing no sign of him, he turned around and drove past again, this time going on to the airport road, where he pulled in and stopped a short distance from the main road. Another fifteen minutes passed before he heard the sound of running feet slapping against the pavement and turned to see a tall, dark figure loping toward him out of the blackness.

He’d never seen James as excited as he was when he opened the passenger door and climbed quickly into the car, he told the officers.

“I actually did it!” he said James exclaimed. “I don’t ever want to see anything like that again. I never saw so much blood in my life.”

Neal told the officers that he saw blood on James’s hands and clothing, but later he claimed that he really hadn’t seen any blood, that if he had he might have panicked more than he did.

“My first thought when James said, ‘I did it,’ was one long scream,” he said later. “I kept thinking, they were serious. They really were serious. He really meant to go in and kill people. My God, what has he done? What have
I
done?”

Instinctively, he started the car.

“James said, ‘Go, go.’ I went. I just pointed the car and kept it in the road.”

He turned north on Market, away from town, going back by the same route they had come. He didn’t ask questions, he said later. He couldn’t even speak.

“What do you say to a man who’s just killed someone? I was afraid to be in the same car with him. He tried to tell me what happened, but he didn’t tell a coherent story. He said something about how he had broken something he shouldn’t have broken, left something unlocked that should have been locked. I remember him mentioning someone made a lot of noise and he didn’t understand why the whole neighborhood wasn’t awakened.”

For Taylor and Young, Neal recalled James telling him that he had to keep beating Chris’s stepfather with the bat, had to use the knife on him, too, several times. He also had beaten Chris’s mother.

“Part of me was saying, ‘No, no, this can’t be happening,’” Neal recalled later “I just didn’t treat it as reality.”

Was James carrying the bat when he got back to the car? Neal didn’t remember.

He wanted only to get away from Washington, back to Raleigh. He missed his turn but was unaware of it. He took the next road to the left, which led back to U.S. 17, just as did the road he had missed. Soon after making the turn, he told the officers, James instructed him to turn into a rutted lane by a farm field, stop, and cut the lights. James got out, changed clothes, and asked Neal to open the trunk. There James placed the clothes he had been wearing.

The lane turned out to be muddy from the earlier thunderstorm, and the sides of the car were covered with mud when they got back on the road. In his eagerness to get away from the area, Neal kept speeding and James kept reminding him to slow down.

Somewhere west of Washington, James told him to turn onto a side road to the right so that he could dispose of the clothing and knife. But too many houses, too many outdoor lights lined this road, prompting Neal to turn around and drive back to the highway.

Another road soon loomed, this one to the left. About a quarter of a mile along the road, they came to a patch of woods on a curve, and James said that this would do. Once again, Neal opened the trunk. James piled the clothing on the road’s shoulder, tossing in the shoes, the knife, the wadded maps. He doused it all with gasoline from a two-gallon can in the trunk.

Neal was urinating, his back to James, when he heard a whoosh, he said later, and saw the night light up behind him.

“Come on, quick, let’s go,” James yelled, and Neal hurried toward the car, zipping his pants as he went.

When they came into a town (Neal wasn’t sure of the town, but the officers figured it had to be Greenville), James told him to stop for gas at an all-night convenience store, an Amoco Mart, he remembered. James pumped. Neal went in to pay. While he was buying a soft drink and candy bar, James came in and got a bottle of Gatorade and a stick of beef jerky.

Had James wiped the shoe polish from his face? How and when did he do that? Neal couldn’t remember.

James decided that they had to run the car through an automatic car wash adjacent to the convenience store. They couldn’t take it back with all that mud on it. That might cause questions to be raised.

At the store, Neal later said, James handed him three folded twenty-dollar bills, loot from the raid, and said, “Here, keep this.” (Neal had told the officers that James had given him the money soon after he got in the car.) He put it into his pocket and later gave what was left of it after paying for the gas to Kenyatta.

Daylight was breaking, Neal remembered, when they arrived back in Raleigh. Neither had said anything more about the night’s activities after leaving the car wash. They had ridden mostly in silence.

“I was trying to pretend it didn’t happen,” Neal said later. “Maybe if I didn’t talk about it, it didn’t happen. Talking about it made it seem more real.”

Neal drove back to the parking lot where he had picked up Chris’s car and left it in the same area. James told him to take the keys to Chris’s suite and leave them on a high shelf in the utility closet in the bathroom that was shared by the occupants of the four rooms in the suite. Neal protested.

“Why do I have to do this? I want to go home.”

James, he pointed out, would be going right past Chris’s floor on his way to his room. Why couldn’t he take the keys?

“I can’t risk being seen anywhere near Chris,” James said, and Neal reluctantly trudged to the dorm and left the keys. Chris’s room door was closed, he said, and he heard no sounds coming from within.

Exhausted, frightened, and emotionally drained, Neal walked the quarter-mile to his apartment and pecked on the window to awaken Kenyatta.

The following day, Monday, July 25, Neal recalled later, James came to the apartment and told Butch, Kenyatta, and himself about the attack on Chris’s parents. A burglary of some sort, he said. That was when Neal learned that Chris’s mother had survived. A 50 percent success for their mission was a total failure for their goal. Chris wouldn’t be inheriting anything. He and James never would be paid for their efforts.

Did James consider going back to finish the job?

Neal didn’t think so.

A day later, Neal went by James’s dorm room. James was alone, he said, and they talked about the murder. James kept assuring him that he needn’t worry. He was certain that he had succeeded in making it look like a burglary.

“The police don’t have anything to go on,” Neal recalled James telling him. “If they did, they would have already been up here. Chris is going to keep me posted. Don’t worry. Forget it ever happened.”

Neal told the officers that he never talked with Chris about the murder after it happened and only saw him a couple of times briefly in the company of others after Chris returned to college that fall. He talked with James about it only a couple of times. James told him about Chris leaving school that fall and reassured him that nobody was going to talk.

“You’re in no danger,” he recalled James telling him. “Even if Chris should decide to say something, it would be his word against yours and they’d never take his word. Don’t worry about it. Forget it.”

But Neal couldn’t forget. The memory kept gnawing at him, pushing him back into a depression from which he couldn’t escape. He thought about telling somebody, anybody, even going to the police, he said, but the longer he waited, the more difficult it became. He was terrified at the prospect of prison, scared of retribution from James or Chris, worried about what people would think about him.

“I tried throwing myself into my work,” he recalled later, “just trying to forget about it. If I don’t think about it, it will go away. But I couldn’t work twenty-four hours a day. There were inevitably quiet periods and my thoughts would bring it back. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I never thought it would happen. But no matter what I told myself, I knew that if I had acted differently, I could have saved a man’s life.”

He realized that he had to atone for that, and the only way he could do it was by coining forth with what he knew. Still fear held him back.

He did not see James from the fall of 1988 until the spring of 1989. He was concerned and wary, he said, when James came to him asking for a place to stay. Was James worried that the police might come to him and he might break? Did he want to be close at hand to stop it if he saw it coming? Still, he thought it would be better to have James where he could keep an eye on him, and he agreed to let him stay.

James didn’t talk about the murder investigation until after he got out of jail, Neal told the officers. Then he told him about Taylor and Young questioning him at the jail. He and Chris were under a lot of pressure, James said, but there was no need for concern because he had given the investigators a lot of false leads that would take them in the wrong direction. “You really didn’t do anything,” James told him. “Don’t worry about it.” But James himself had become worried, Neal said, after the officers started bringing the knapsack around, fearful that somebody would associate him with it.

Neal had recognized the bag immediately. Until then he hadn’t realized that James had left the bag at the scene. Soon after the detectives brought the bag by, Neal said, James began talking about leaving town. Then he cut his band and disappeared.