Chapter 157 Section 6

The original eruption point of the blood droplets at the bottom of the stairs is very close to the ground, and many of them follow a parabolic trajectory, shaped like a water column or water line from a fountain. By the time the adopted daughter of the Petersons, Margaret Ratley, had traveled all the way back to Durham from New Orleans, Louisiana, 1810 Side Street was already locked.Mike Peterson was thoughtful enough to leave Ted at the neighbor Mrs. Bailey's house at 1819 Side Street, which is diagonally across. Ted first took Margaret to check in at the nearby Washington Duke Hotel, and then took her to Mrs. Corrie Sutton's house.Mike Peterson had been there since he was sent out of the "crime scene" by the police after daybreak, and it appeared he would have to remain at Mrs Sutton's until the police lifted the alert.

Keli Sutton is a capable and sociable female lawyer. When Mike Peterson ran for mayor two years ago, Mrs. Sutton served as the director of his campaign committee.Although Peterson's family lawyer, Bill, had come from Nevada, he was considered a "outsider" after all, and he was doing civil law, so Mike Peterson still asked Mrs. Shatton to help him deal with the police. That night, Margaret called her aunt in Rhode Island and sister to her biological mother, Liz Mok Ratley.My aunt was named Blair, the same name as Margaret.The Ratley sisters are very close to Aunt Margaret, and they just visited her aunt's house for Thanksgiving two weeks ago.

When the aunt heard it was Margaret's voice, she exclaimed happily: "Happy birthday, baby!..." The next day, December 10, was Margaret's 20th birthday. However, Margaret was not in the mood to accept birthday wishes at this time, she hurriedly interrupted her aunt: "Aunt Margaret, Catherine is dead." Obviously shocked, Margaret Blair was silent for a while before asking, "How did she die?" "Ted said she drank a lot and fell down the stairs. It was her father who found her." There was another silence.When Margaret Blair spoke again, her voice sounded a little out of breath: "Son, do you know what you're talking about?  …"

Just then, Mike Peterson called Margaret in the background. "Aunt Margaret, I must go. They're expecting me to dine out." On Monday, December 10th, at 6:00 a.m., the investigators returned to the Peterson family mansion on time to sign in.This time, Officer Trent Hall was ordered to bring his "partner" - the police dog Busko.Lieutenant Art Holland said that the first task today was to find the murder weapon. When everything was ready, Officer Hall issued a one-word order to Basco: "Go!" Busco went back and forth to sniff every room and every corner of the house, sniffing all four of the Petersons' cars: Mike Peterson's Jaguar limousine, Catherine's Volkswagen convertible, Ted's Mitsubishi Montero sports jeep and a Mitsubishi 3000GT family van smelled the well-trimmed grass in the garden, the undulating hills, the sparse woods and the dense bamboo forests, and smelled everything A place with or without a road. After 1 hour and 45 minutes, Basco found nothing.

Lieutenant Art Holland brought in more people from the police station and divided them into five teams to search the ground in a square way. The group of people waited until sunset, except for a walking stick and a "rod-shaped or The "stick weapon" was relatively close, and almost nothing was found. There were no signs of outsider entry either. The last thing investigators did before handing over the Peterson mansion was to spray the darkened building with luminol solution, a fluorescent reagent that makes occult blood stains invisible to the naked eye. Dan George was holding a hard plastic solution bottle with a nozzle in his hand. Every time he sprayed a piece, the person next to him would quickly turn off the flashlight. If he found anything, the other two would mark the place where the fluorescence appeared.Luminol solution can instantly react with iron in a trace amount of blood and produce blue-purple fluorescence, but this chemical reaction is very fast, and the fluorescence only lasts for 10 to 20 seconds and then disappears by itself.

On the floor of the hallway between the back stairs and the kitchen, they saw a series of blue footprints.The feet are not wearing shoes, and the soles, heels and five toes are clearly visible.Footprints walked around the kitchen and into the laundry room next to it, stopping in front of the sink before turning to the washing machine.Then the footprints went all the way to the sink in the kitchen, turned to the counter on the other side of the kitchen, and back to the sink.It was on the table drawers and cupboards that the first-arriving police found blood.Finally, the bare footprints disappeared on the way back to the stairwell.

Of course, the footprints don't tell investigators how long they've been in various places, or what the owners of the footprints were doing at those stops. At 8:30 p.m., officers pulled out of 1810 Side Street. It took several days for police experts to learn that, late that night, someone at the house had deleted a large number of files stored on the Peterson home computer, including emails, pictures and web pages. Also on Monday, Durham newspapers carried news about 1810 Side Street.In fact, from Sunday, a few hours after the incident, the vans of the media have been parked on both sides of Side Street and Kent Street.Messy reporters searched out some news photos taken by Mike Peterson when he ran for mayor and put them on the front page of the newspaper together with the story about the case to awaken readers' memories.Some media even stated in their reports that although no formal official announcement has been made, according to "reliable internal information", the deceased's husband, Mike Peterson, has been listed by the police as the number one "suspect" in this case, because He was the only person present at the time of the incident.

These reports obviously put a lot of pressure on the parties involved. Mike Peterson immediately increased his bargaining chips. Defense attorney David Rudolph.This move shows that Mike Peterson expected that he might be arrested.