Blood Games by Jerry Bledsoe Read Free Book Online Page B

physician’s permission to start an IV and wrap the patient in Military Anti-shock Trousers, an inflatable suit used to stabilize injured patients. Not wanting to report the woman’s condition in her presence, Harrell went downstairs to find another telephone. The young woman directed him to one on a kitchen wall, but the receiver was disconnected and missing. He found it on the table. David Sparrow held his flashlight on the phone while Harrell reconnected the receiver and made the call.
    He had two patients, he told Dr. Elizabeth Cook, the young emergency room physician. One was DOA, and a hospital vehicle would have to be sent for the body. The other was conscious, but appeared to be gravely injured and declining rapidly. Dr. Cook approved the IV and the application of M.As.T. trousers, and began to prepare for the patient’s arrival.
    Upstairs, Hall was ripping open a dressing to put on Bonnie’s chest wound.
    “I’m going to have to cut your gown, is that all right?” he asked, and she nodded her approval.
    Harrell returned to help him get her into the stabilizing trousers, then he went to the ambulance, and, with the help of officer Ed Cherry, carried the stretcher into the house.
    At communications, Michelle Sparrow was still busy. She called Captain Danny Boyd, chief investigator for the Washington Police, and he told her to call Melvin Hope and John Taylor, two of the department’s four detectives. She called Captain Zane Osnoe, second-in-command at the police department, and asked him if she should call the chief. No, Osnoe said; he would call him. She returned Captain Lewis’s call at the fire department. When she found a spare moment, she stopped the device that recorded all calls, removed the big tape reel, marked it, and put it in a special place. She knew that investigators would want it for evidence.
    While the technicians worked on the injured woman, Tetterton went downstairs and found her daughter sitting calmly in the den. He needed some basic information for his preliminary report, and he wanted to get it before she found out just how bad things were upstairs and perhaps lost control. He told her that her mother had been stabbed, but that she was conscious and talking and he didn’t know how seriously she was hurt. Her father, he said, also had been beaten and stabbed and was seriously injured. He was surprised that she showed no reaction to what he was telling her and calmly agreed to answer his questions. Her name, she told him, was Angela Pritchard. She was seventeen. Her mother was Bonnie Von Stein. She was forty-four. The man upstairs was her stepfather, Lieth Von Stein, two years younger than her mother. He worked at National Spinning Company, a yarn plant, the biggest employer in Beaufort County, and was an executive there.
    Only then did Tetterton realize that he had met the bloodied man upstairs before. He had seen this young woman before, too. More than a year earlier, while off duty, he had been witness to a minor car wreck in which Angela had been involved near the high school. He had waited at the scene to tell the investigating officer what had happened. Liability for the accident later fell into dispute, and Von Stein complained to Police Chief Harry Stokes about Tetterton’s version of events. Tetterton had been summoned to accompany the chief to Von Stein’s office at National Spinning to talk about the matter. Tetterton felt that Von Stein implied that he had lied and wanted him to change the truth to benefit his stepdaughter, and he had left the meeting in a huff.
    Now the young woman was telling him that she also had a brother, Chris Pritchard, who was away at N.C. State University. Should she call and tell him what had happened? Tetterton told her to go ahead and call, and if she wanted to call somebody to come and be with her, that would be all right, too, but she should stay at the house. Detectives would be wanting to talk with her later.
    7
    The call came at 5:17 a.m.