Free Cruel Doubt by Joe McGinniss Page A

might mean nothing—in fact, all of his talk about Chris might be way off base, George Bates acknowledged—but it was one more thing he thought he should pass along.
    * * *
    Later that morning, at Washington police headquarters, with the young detective John Taylor standing at his side, Young, having already examined the partly burned hunting knife and partly burned shoe and the scraps of burnt clothing, opened the last plastic bag.
    He removed the crumpled and singed piece of paper and exercising great care, slowly unfolded it.
    He saw lines and squares and drawings of four-legged animals. The word LAWSON was printed above the longest line.
    The lines appeared to denote streets, the blocks looked like symbols for houses, and the animals appeared to be dogs. Unlike the lines and blocks, the dogs were not just stick-figure representations, but had been drawn as if to illustrate a medieval fairy tale.
    â€œThat’s Smallwood!” Young exclaimed.
    Although only the word LAWSON indicated a specific street, Young quickly recognized that the other lines, crisscrossing at various angles, represented roads in and adjacent to the neighborhood. There was the Market Street Extension. And behind the line that had the word LAWSON printed above it was another, which would be Marsh Road, and then the one behind that, which was Northwoods.
    Of the little square blocks drawn along the line that represented Lawson Road, the fifth from the top was surrounded by more detail than the others. Even with a portion of the map burned away, Young and Taylor could see markings that indicated a fence, a drainage ditch, and a small shed in the backyard.
    The drawings of two medieval mastiffs placed them in yards on either side of the fifth house on the block.
    The fifth house, Lewis Young knew, from the time he’d already spent at the scene, was the house in which Lieth Von Stein had been murdered.
    John Taylor photographed the map. Young sent the hunting knife to the pathologist who’d done the autopsy on Lieth Von Stein. The doctor’s findings were what Young had expected: the blade was consistent with the type of instrument used to inflict the stab wounds on Von Stein.
    Why the map hadn’t been consumed by the flames was something neither Young nor Taylor, nor later, the Beaufort County district attorney, Mitchell Norton, nor anyone else who came to be involved in the Von Stein murder investigation, was ever able to explain.
    Had it been just casually tossed at the edge of the pile of bloody clothing, then been blown clear of the flames when the gasoline that was poured on the clothing had ignited?
    Or had it been tossed toward the already burning blaze as an afterthought, as the person who’d set the fire hurried back toward a waiting car?
    Or was the fact that it had survived the fire nearly intact—survived a blaze hot enough to partly melt a hunting knife—no more, no less than an act of God, as the district attorney would eventually argue to a jury?
    For some facts, there are no explanations. But that doesn’t mean there are not consequences. It would be many months before the consequences of the map’s survival would be felt. But when they were, they would be drastic and everlasting.

 
    5
    Welcome, North Carolina, where Bonnie Lou Bates was born, was the sort of small Southern town where the church was the center of all social life; where a mother, over her lifetime, would make dozens of quilts and hundreds, if not thousands, of chicken pies, and where even a shy, plain girl such as Bonnie would grow up knowing everybody for miles around.
    Although it was only about ten miles south of Winston-Salem, one of the leading industrial cities in the state, Welcome was not merely in another county: it seemed to be in another world. Driving those ten miles south from the city, one abruptly left behind all traces of urbanization and entered an almost fairy-tale land of Southern farm-country