Blood Games by Jerry Bledsoe

Author:Jerry Bledsoe [Bledsoe, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRUE CRIME/Murder/General
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-04-09T23:00:00+00:00

“No, I guess not.”

“He’s going to talk to us,” Crone said when he went back out to the others, “but right now he only wants to talk with me and John.”

As eager as he was to hear what Neal had to say, Crone was still anxious about his wife. He was supposed to meet her in Raleigh hours earlier. She hadn’t called recently, and he had no idea where she was now. He needed to call his in-laws to find out if they had heard from her, but first he had to hear Neal out.

After waiving his rights, Neal told Crone that Chris and James had come to him a few days before the murder with a plan for Chris to get his inheritance early by killing his parents. He thought the idea was incredible, but he went along with it because his only role was to drive James to Washington to commit the murders. Chris drew a map directing them to his house. Neal said that he drove James there, let him out near the house, and waited nearby until James reappeared, saying he’d done it. James was supposed to steal jewelry to make it look like a robbery, but he only had taken a little money. They drove back to Raleigh, stopping along a deserted road on the way so that James could pile up the clothes he’d been wearing and bum them.

The story fit the evidence. It was highly unlikely that Neal could have learned about the fire and the map without being part of the plot. Crone had no doubt that he was telling the truth, but he felt a strange sort of letdown.

“Is that it?” he asked, a little incredulously, when Neal had finished.

“That’s it,” Neal said with a shrug.

“It didn’t have anything to do with Dungeons and Dragons?”

Nothing, said Neal.

After their long investigation, all the plodding hours of searching and questioning, all their elaborate theorizing, it all was so simple. Motive and method were as ancient as murder. The motive: greed. The method: a key, a club, a blade.

Crone wanted to hear more, but his wife came first. He had to go find her. Would Neal mind if Lewis Young, who’d worked the case from the beginning, came in to get the details? Fine, said Neal, and for the next five hours he told Young and Taylor everything that he could remember about the murder.

A week or so before the murder, Neal said, Chris and James had gone to Washington together to kill Chris’s parents. He’d heard them talking about it, but he knew no details. They had talked of putting Chris’s family to sleep with sleeping pills before killing them, but they had chickened out because Chris decided it would be better for him not to be at home when the murders occurred.

At some point before the weekend of the actual murder—Neal couldn’t remember the date—Chris and James had come by the apartment on Ligon Street that he shared with Butch Mitchell. They came about noon.

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