Blood Games by Jerry Bledsoe Read Free Book Online

after Chris got into his teens.
    “It’s hell trying to raise teenagers,” Lieth told one friend. “We just don’t know what to do with Chris. He won’t do anything. He’s not interested in anything.”
    “Respect for his parents and the work ethic were so deeply ingrained in Lieth that it was hard for him to relate to someone who didn’t have those values,” Lieth’s friend said. “I think that was what he was struggling with with Chris. He had the feeling that Chris was a total fuckoff and didn’t care about anything.”
    Even to coworkers and casual acquaintances Lieth frequently had remarked that he would be happy when both of Bonnie’s children were grown and gone. And as the summer of 1988 approached, that time seemed imminent.
    By fall, Angela would be in college in Greensboro. And if Chris didn’t flunk out, which seemed highly possible, he would be back at N.C. State for his sophomore year. Lieth and Bonnie would be alone, and Lieth soon would be quitting the job he never had liked.
    Lieth should have been excited by the prospect, but to his old friend Rob Lorber he seemed resigned, as if he sensed that life had passed him by.
    6
    While Bradford Tetterton was calling frantically for the rescue squad, Danny Edwards began trying the other upstairs doors, still uncertain whether an intruder was hiding behind one of them.
    He opened one door, shined his flashlight inside, and saw a form lying in bed. He switched on the light to a scene of teenage disorder. Clothes were strewn. The walls were covered with posters of rock stars, horses, a frosty mug of beer, a string of Budweiser long-necks. Shoes, socks, a hair dryer lay on the floor by a rug that had “Horse Country” on it. A big square fan hummed, blowing directly on a young woman with short light brown hair and freckles, sleeping soundly in a T-shirt.
    “Ma’am … ma’am,” Edwards called.
    The young woman stirred and sat up abruptly, frightened.
    “What is it?”
    Edwards recognized her, although he didn’t remember her name. Before he’d joined the police department, he’d been security chief at the mall, and he remembered seeing her many times with the other teenagers who regularly gathered there.
    “Something has happened,” he said. “You need to get up and get dressed.”
    He stepped out of the room to leave her alone and began checking the other doors: a closet, a bathroom, another bedroom, this one with posters of cars on the walls, Ford Cobras, obviously a boy’s room. Nobody in any of them.
    The young woman emerged from her room as Edwards completed the quick search. She had pulled on shorts and sneakers.
    “Is there any way to get into the attic up here?” Edwards asked her.
    “There’s an opening in my room,” she said. “In the closet.”
    Edwards went into her room and opened the closet, but it was so jammed with stuff that he knew nobody could have gone through it to hide in the attic.
    “I think I heard my daughter talk,” Bonnie Von Stein said over the phone to Michelle Sparrow in communications.
    “C-thirty-two, please advise me if that subject’s daughter is all right so I can calm her down,” Michelle said over the radio.
    “Ten-four,” Edwards responded. “She’s okay.”
    “Okay, Bonnie, your daughter is fine. Okay?”
    Tetterton had reentered the blood-splattered bedroom where Bonnie Von Stein lay on the floor and was checking the body on the bed.
    “My husband must be bad, oh god,” Bonnie said.
    “I think he’s gone,” Tetterton said.
    “I see him,” Bonnie said into the telephone.
    “Okay, don’t look at him, Bonnie,” Michelle told her. “Bonnie, don’t look at him.”
    “He was trying … he was trying to help me.”
    “Okay, do you remember seeing anybody?” Michelle asked, trying to divert her attention.
    “Oh, it was dark, I don’t know.”
    “Okay.”
    “I know he had a big club or a baseball bat…”
    The phone rang and Michelle answered it. Captain Lewis at the fire