Free Cruel Doubt by Joe McGinniss

asked her one more question about the book she’d been reading in bed. She could not remember the title, she said, but she assured him it had not been
A Rose in Winter
.

 
    4
    It was shortly after six P . M . on Tuesday, July 26, the day he’d had his first talk with Bonnie in the hospital, that Lewis Young received a call from the Little Washington police informing him that, in the excitement surrounding the murder of Lieth Von Stein, this had been forgotten, but a hog farmer named Noel Lee had called to report that at four-thirty on the morning of the murder he’d seen a fire burning at the edge of State Road 1565, the Grimesland Bridge Road, just across the Pitt County line.
    Young called Lee, but he was out. At eleven P . M ., Lee returned the call. By eleven-thirty, Lewis Young was standing at his front door.
    It was only a quarter mile from Noel Lee’s house to the site of the fire. Just beyond a curve and a dip in the road, at the edge of a wooded, swampy area. With a flashlight, Lee pointed out where the fire had been. About eight feet off the shoulder of the road was a burned area, not large, no more than three feet in diameter, and shaped more like an oval than a circle.
    Using his own flashlight and crouching at the edge of the oval, Young saw what looked to be ashes. Digging a bit, he detected a faint odor of gasoline. He also found scraps of burnt clothing, a partly burnt shoe, and a burnt hunting knife with a six-inch blade. He placed each of these items into plastic evidence bags.
    Then Young played his light out beyond the edge of the burnt area. He spotted a singed and crumpled piece of paper about two feet past the ring of ashes. This, too, he placed in an evidence bag.
    It was dark and it was late. He thanked Noel Lee for his help. He said yes, by all means, calling had been the right thing to do. He apologized for the fact that it had taken so long for anyone to respond. Lee said no problem, no need for apology, he wasn’t even sure it had been worth bothering anyone about, but then, after seeing on the TV about the murder, he figured, what the heck, might as well call.
    * * *
    Early the next morning, Young received a call from George Bates, who said his fears about Chris’s involvement were growing worse. The day before, he told Young, he had driven Chris back to his dormitory at NC State in Raleigh. Chris’s roommate had apparently found the missing car keys under a chair cushion, and Chris had wanted to get his car.
    All the way up, George Bates said, Chris had continued to act jittery. “Boy, was he nervous. He was shaking.” He had not expressed the slightest sorrow about the death of his stepfather or concern about his mother’s condition, or even curiosity about what might have happened. Instead, he’d rambled on about how deeply involved he’d gotten in the drug scene on campus, and about how he would have to “get off that junk.”
    But the really strange thing, George Bates said—and this was what had prompted the call—was that after retrieving his car keys from the dorm room, Chris hadn’t seemed to know where the car was.
    He had said he thought it was parked in a “fringe lot,” about a quarter mile from the dorm. But as George Bates had driven him to the lot, Chris had kept saying he wasn’t sure he’d be able to find the car right away.
    He’d said, “I was at a party all night and got stoned out of my head.”
    â€œBut you weren’t stoned out of your mind when you parked the car before the party started,” his uncle had told him. “What do you mean, you don’t know where it is?”
    As it turned out, Chris’s white Mustang was just about the only car in the whole lot, and so he had been able to spot it right away. But it had struck him as strange, and it troubled him, George Bates said, that Chris had worried that he wouldn’t be able to find his own car. It