Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [187]
Singular was taken aback. The DA was suggesting doing things that Singular himself considered legally tenuous.
“There are highly qualified people that you could involve who wouldn’t have to worry about breaking the law,” Singular told him.
Hunter didn’t answer.
Singular understood that the DA was talking to many journalists and possibly enlisting their help too. He wondered if maybe Alex Hunter was dancing with the devil.
On July 2, Steve Thomas called Jeff Shapiro. “Some of the guys and I are going to sleep in the house tonight,” he said. “We’re trying to get a feel for the place.”
“That’s cool.”
“I thought you might want to know,” Thomas continued. “We’re going to reenact some scenarios. If you want to come by—just by accident, like, walk by—feel free.” Then Thomas added, “I’ll try to help you out little by little. But be cool about it. Be careful.”
“I will, and thanks a lot.”
“Jeff, I know Patsy killed that girl.”
It was the first time Shapiro felt that Thomas trusted him.
Later that evening, Shapiro went to the Ramseys’ house. He climbed a tree on the next-door property at about 8:30 P.M. From there, he could watch the cops through binoculars.
Inside the house, the detectives spent hours running through different scenarios of what might have happened on December 26.* Sometimes with the lights on, sometimes with the lights off, they ran the scenarios, starting in JonBenét’s bedroom, either just before or just after she went to sleep. In each scenario they took it for granted that either the killer or JonBenét, or perhaps both, knew the route from her bedroom to the wine cellar.
From JonBenét’s second-floor bedroom, it was less than four full paces to the top of the carpeted spiral staircase that led down to the ground floor. The thirteen steps of the staircase could have been maneuvered in the dark by someone who knew them. A visitor—or an intruder—would need a light, the detectives reasoned, even if they did not have to control a struggling child. A parent or the child would not need a light. The flashlight found on the kitchen counter on December 26, which was normally kept near the kitchen, could have been used either as a light or as a weapon—in the kitchen or in another room. By now the CBI had determined that both the outside of the flashlight and the batteries inside held no fingerprints. Most likely they had been wiped clean. This was highly unusual. An intruder would probably have taken the flashlight with him when he left. A perpetrator who lived in the house might have removed his prints from the flashlight and the batteries in a moment of panic, though it would have been more natural to leave them.
Continuing with the scenario, the detectives saw that once they were down the staircase, there were several likely directions to the basement—none of them allowing for quickness or ease of movement.
A logical direction for the killer—or for a terrified JonBenét who was running away—would be down another short flight of stairs toward what the Ramseys called the butler’s kitchen. There, a door to the left allowed a quick escape into the narrow side yard on the home’s north side—but no access to the garage or basement.
Or, coming from the spiral staircase, someone might head straight for the door that led directly to the brick patio at the southwest corner of the ground floor and then to freedom down the back alley.
However, to reach the basement from the spiral stairs, where the ransom note was discovered, a perpetrator or a fleeing JonBenét would be forced into a more circuitous route.
Once down the stairs to the butler’s kitchen, the detectives realized, the perpetrator could only reach the basement stairs by crossing that room, climbing yet another short flight of stairs, then turning to the right to reach the door to the basement. The problem was that the door swung out into that narrow hallway. It became an obstacle that would force