Free Blood Games by Jerry Bledsoe

views in such a way that nobody took offense. They described Von Stein as an easy person to be around, a person who liked to joke and kid.
    Both knew that Von Stein had been looking for a mobile home. When he got calls about it, they said, he would close his office door. But neither could believe that Von Stein had a girlfriend. They just didn’t see him as that type.
    Once when they were teasing him, they said, Von Stein had said, “I’m more interested in beer than sex.”
    By the time the Washington Daily News began hitting the streets shortly after noon on Monday, July 25, news of the murder in Smallwood had already spread through the town by word of mouth, and people were hungry for details. The paper offered little.
WASHINGTON MAN KILLED,
WIFE HURT
    From the headline, a reader who hadn’t already known about the murder might have been led to think it had been no more than an accident. Only a photograph of the Von Stein house with a close-up of the crime-scene tape hinted to the casual reader that something far more sinister had occurred in the town’s wealthiest neighborhood.
    The news story was brief, quoting only Sergeant Joe Stringer, the police department spokesman. It said that the Von Steins apparently had been attacked by burglars, leaving Lieth dead and Bonnie in guarded condition in the hospital. Stringer was quoted as saying that their teenage daughter, Angela, was not injured and apparently slept through the attack. The house was not ransacked, the story noted, and it was unclear whether anything was missing.
    As the newspapers were first hitting the streets, Detective John Taylor was setting up a video camera in the autopsy room at the medical school at East Carolina University in Greenville. At twelve-thirty, he began taping the autopsy of Lieth Von Stein. The operation was being performed by one of the country’s leading pathologists, Dr. Page Hudson. Until a year and a half earlier, Dr. Hudson had been North Carolina’s chief medical examiner, a job he’d held for eighteen years. He had stepped down to teach, write, research, and garden, but he still liked to take up the scalpel, the bone saw, and the other tools of his trade now and then, especially in intriguing cases. Although he had been an effective administrator creating the state’s system of medical examiners and establishing databases to help law enforcement agencies investigate homicides, suicides, and different types of accidents, he relished the role of medical sleuth above all others. He had conducted more than four thousand autopsies, many of murder victims, and he was a noted authority on arsenic poisonings. He even had discovered a new technique for detecting arsenic in the body. Despite all that he had seen, he never ceased to marvel at the horrible things that humans do to themselves and to one another, and the body of Lieth Von Stein was a prime example.
    Von Stein, Dr. Hudson discovered, had died from a stab wound to the heart. He had bled to death within minutes of receiving it. He likely was unconscious when he was stabbed. His skull had been fractured under the biggest laceration on the back of his head, and his brain had suffered a contusion and hemorrhaged. That blow to the head alone might have killed him if he hadn’t been stabbed.
    In addition to Von Stein’s major wounds, his right wrist was broken, and he had numerous scrapes and bruises on his hands and arms, typical defensive wounds. But he also had fresh scrapes on his shins, particularly on the right leg and ankle. These wounds were more common in cases where the person attacked had been standing rather than lying in bed.
    Other than having a mildly fatty liver, the result of drinking too much alcohol, Von Stein had been in good health and could have expected to live a long life.
    Dr. Hudson found no alcohol in his blood, but he did find one thing that was curious indeed. When he cut into Von Stein’s stomach, he found it full, as if he had just consumed a