Free Blood Games by Jerry Bledsoe Page A

large meal. Among the foods that could be identified were chicken and rice. Normally, those foods were easily digested and should have passed from the stomach within an hour or two of being eaten.
    If Von Stein had been attacked shortly before 4:00 A.M., that would have meant that he had eaten a large meal around two or three, which seemed unlikely. If this was his Sunday night supper, then he might have been attacked much earlier than the police believed, although severe stress, Hudson noted, might delay digestion by a few hours.
    Earlier that day, the detectives at the house on Lawson Road had decided that Bonnie could still be in danger. When word got out that she had survived the attack, the killer might return to finish the job. They didn’t have to point out that it would be terribly embarrassing if she were murdered in her hospital room. The merest thought of such a thing was enough to convince the chief that he should immediately assign officers to protect her around the clock.
    By mid-afternoon, the Washington Police Department had already received numerous calls about the murder. Some callers were merely curious and wanted information. Others were provoked by fear. Was a mad killer loose? Had an arrest been made? Would one be made soon? Still others were trying to be helpful. They had information that they thought the police should know. Some of these calls were deemed important enough to check out.
    Lewis Young and Melvin Hope went to talk to a man who was the local sales supervisor for a large bakery. The man had driven down Lawson Road shortly before four o’clock that morning on his way to work. As he was leaving Smallwood, he said, he had seen a car turning into the development. A Japanese car. Not old, not new. Baby blue. Had a luggage rack on top. He was sure of that. And he was almost certain that it was a station wagon. Anyway, there were two “scroungy looking” young white men with long hair inside. The one on the passenger side was slouched in his seat, his knees on the dashboard. The man knew that, because his headlights had shined directly into the car when it turned in front of him. But he couldn’t tell how the young men were dressed. He was suspicious of the car, because he drove through Smallwood every morning on his way to work, and that was the first time in ages that he could remember seeing a car out in the area at that early hour. He just wished he’d gotten a license number.
    The man also told the officers that a coworker who didn’t want to get involved thought that they should check out a fellow who had been living in a tent in some woods near Smallwood. The fellow, who was thought to be feeble-minded or emotionally disturbed, had been spotted early that morning riding a bicycle near Smallwood. And he had a bandage on his arm.
    Hope and Young dutifully added one more item to the scores of things they had to check out.
    Before the detectives could go chasing after half the crackpots in the county, however, they first had to know more about the people most directly involved in the crime: the Von Steins.
    And shortly after four-thirty that afternoon, they returned to the Washington Police Department to meet Angela Pritchard and begin prying into the family’s life.
    The officers began by asking Angela to recount her activities of the day before, and she did, telling everything right up to the time she went to bed. The next thing she knew, she was being awakened by a police officer. She reiterated that she hadn’t even been aware that the attack was going on. She had since seen her mother at the hospital, however, and her mother had told her about it. Her mother was certain that if she hadn’t fallen off the bed, she would have been killed, too, Angela said. Whoever had done it, her mother had told her, had to be young and strong.
    Hope asked if she knew anything about a mobile home that her father might have been thinking of buying. Yes, her parents were looking at house trailers so