Chapter 158 Section 7

Lieutenant Art Holland led Duane DeVille and others to the evidence room of the police station, where the clothes worn by the Petersons at the time of the crime were laid out on a long table covered with white paper. On Catherine's gray fleece jacket and fleece trousers, Duane DeVille found more than one transfer mark or smear of blood, "which means," Duane said to Lieutenant Holland, "someone had The blood from other places was transferred to Catherine through intermediaries such as hands. It is certain that some of them were left when Mike Peterson fell on his wife's body and cried bitterly. But there are also a few places that cannot be explained," Duane pointed The back of the fleece pants, "You said that the corpses you saw were lying on their backs, but these transfer bloodstains are in places that are impossible to touch with human hands."

"You mean, someone moved Catherine after she died, or fell?" Duane DeVille nodded: "Very likely." But what puzzled Duane even more was that there was a very clear half-shoe print with blood on the front thigh of the fleece pants: "It seems that when Catherine was lying there, someone stepped on her." Duane DeVille picked up the men's sneakers that investigators had found next to the body.Mike Peterson has admitted that the shoe is his.Both shoes were stained with blood, and the pattern of the soles matched the prints on the fleece pants exactly. Duane pointed to a large drop of blood that was about the size of a nickel on the upper of his right shoe and was almost a perfect circle: "We call this pattern a 90-degree drop, or a vertical drop. That is to say, when the blood drips , this shoe is directly below the blood drop. And here, "there is a distorted blood drop on the outer upper." This blood drop pattern shows a very clear 'directionality', indicating that when the blood drop The person's feet were moving when they reached the shoe."

Mike Peterson's T-shirt and shorts were similarly blood-stained, with water-washed marks on the front and abdomen.But what particularly caught Duane DeVille's attention was the blood on the crotch of the kaki shorts and the inside of the right leg.No one had tipped or suggested anything to Duane, but experience had taught him that there was only one situation to produce this angled bottom-up splatter pattern, and one that was familiar to Duane: when the victim After falling to the ground, the murderer put his legs on both sides of the victim's body and hit the victim condescendingly.

"If this kind of situation really happened in this case," Duane DeVille reasoned, "combined with other bloodstain patterns on the scene, its spatial location should be at the last few steps of the stairs. And the time sequence, It may be the perpetrator's final blow to the victim." Catherine has an older sister, Candice Zamblini, who can also host the scene.On Monday, after Catherine's daughter and family members arrived in Durham one after another, Candace was invited by Mike Peterson to take over all the internal affairs related to Catherine's funeral, and led the The female relatives are running around, choosing a cemetery, building a stele, ordering flowers, inviting friends, planning a funeral, buying Catherine's clothes, and so on.Mike Peterson claims to be wallowing in excessive grief and has become incapable of caring for others.In fact, even without these reasons, Candace Zamblini was still willing to arrange her sister's funeral herself.Ever since she first arrived in Durham and saw the yellow police lines surrounding Peterson's house, for some reason, Candace felt an unspeakable awkwardness in her heart.In fact, she was worried about leaving Catherine's matter to others, especially the Peterson family.

On the morning of Tuesday, December 11, Candice Zamblini was in the Petersons' stairwell, cleaning up blood for the second time. The 81-year-old mother will fly to Durhan this afternoon, and Candice does not want the old man to see the blood, so as not to be emotional. After receiving the news of her daughter's death, Mrs. Veronica Hunter had been on a drip all day in the infirmary of the nursing home. Today, she was able to pull herself together and reluctantly set off.It's not that the old man has recovered physically, it's just that he has to struggle to see his daughter for the last time.In order to cooperate with her mother's flight schedule, Candace Zamblini arranged the farewell ceremony for Catherine's body from 5 o'clock to 8 o'clock in the evening.

Candice Zamblini cleaned the stairwell for the first time after the police pulled out on Monday night.Beforehand, she heard a female policeman talk about the blood at the scene, so she agreed that there was no problem, and she was responsible for cleaning it up.She remembered the policeman giving her a strange look.Later, when I was on the scene, I understood the look in the policewoman's eyes. That night, Candace wiped and wept.An hour passed and less than a fifth of it had just been wiped off.Candace had to stop.Not only because of the heavy workload, but also because of the ubiquitous bloodstains around her, the bloodstains that she could not avoid no matter which direction she looked at, but also the bloodstains of her relatives, oppressing her, making her feel dizzy, dazzled, and suffocated .This may be the so-called "blood relative reaction" without much scientific basis.In addition, the narrow stairwell looks like a deep well, which made her feel uneasy and helpless in a prison.In fact, in English, this kind of semi-enclosed stairwell is originally called "stairwell (stairwell)". "Stairwell" - "death trap", this sudden association made Candace startled and shuddered all over her body.

This time, with experience and mental preparation, Candace was much calmer.She had already thought about it, starting from the heights first.With her left hand, she sprayed the cleanser in the bottle onto the wall and the glass frame of the "Black Cat Picture", and then wiped it with a sponge cloth in her right hand.The blood mixed with cleaning agent slowly flowed down her right arm, and then dripped from her elbow to the floor under her feet... A man who looked like a photographer walked into the Peterson family's mansion and asked Candace to get out of the stairwell immediately.Candace watched as he set up various lights and camera equipment around the stairwell.

"What are you doing here?" Candace asked, "Did the police send you here?" The man said that he was not sent by the police, and he was not going to answer Candace's further questions. The photographer was busy for an hour and a half, took many photos from different angles, and left.