Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [6]
Mason tried to scare up some detectives to assist Detective Arndt, but the crew on duty the morning after Christmas was already spread thin on other assignments related to the case. For two hours and twenty-seven minutes, Arndt was the only officer in the Ramsey house.
At first Mason couldn’t understand why the officers on the scene hadn’t secured the house earlier, separated the Ramseys, and questioned them individually. Then he learned that Commander Eller had ordered that the Ramseys be treated as victims, not suspects.
The Ramseys were an “influential family,” Eller told Mason, who realized that this message must have affected the behavior of all the officers at the scene.
Very early Thursday morning, Gary Merriman, vice president of human resources at Ramsey’s firm, Access Graphics, was already at his desk trying to finish some work in the postholiday lull.
“Hello, it’s John,” the voice said when Merriman answered his phone.
“Good morning. Merry Christmas,” Gary said to his boss. There was a moment of silence. “What’s wrong?” Merriman asked.
“My daughter’s been kidnapped,” Ramsey said.
“Oh my God. Which one?”
“JonBenét.”
Less than an hour later, Detectives Jim Byfield and Michael Everett were in Merriman’s office asking if anyone had ever made threats against the company. Did John Ramsey have enemies? Disgruntled employees? Merriman mentioned Jeff Merrick, an old friend of John Ramsey’s who had been laid off, and Sandra Henderson, who owed Access Graphics a large sum of money.
As Merriman answered questions, he clung to the hope that JonBenét had just trotted over to a neighbor’s house in her PJs and would be trotting home any minute to a scolding. His own son, only three, had once done exactly that—wandered over to a neighbor’s house without telling anyone.
When the police left, they told Merriman not to talk to anyone, especially not the other employees.
In Denver, Tom Haney, chief of the patrol division of the Denver police, was discussing a case with several special agents from the FBI. The agents were obviously distracted. They kept listening to their hand-held radios as he tried to talk to them.
“Hey, what’s the deal?” Haney finally asked.
“There’s been a kidnapping in Boulder,” one agent said. “It’s kind of hinky, crazy. There’s something wrong with this one. The amount of the ransom is a really weird number.”
Just before noon, at Boulder police headquarters, Larry Mason suggested to John Eller that they get tracking dogs. If this was an abduction, the kidnapper might still be close by—in a canyon or in the Chautauqua Park area. Perhaps the Ramsey girl had been molested but was still alive.
Mason wanted to use Yogi, a tracking dog from the city of Aurora. Eller wanted to use Boulder’s German shepherds. But the Boulder dogs worked from ground scent, Mason protested, and they were easily distracted. The dog Mason wanted was a bloodhound that in 1993 had backtracked nine miles to the base of Deer Creek Canyon and helped find the body of a kidnapped five-year-old girl. That child had been driven part of the way, and it was the kind of trail that might stymie a ground-tracking dog. The likelihood was that JonBenét Ramsey had been abducted in some kind of vehicle, and Yogi, Mason reminded Eller, was an air-scent dog and could handle the situation better.
“Did you learn that at the Academy?” Eller snapped. He was always baiting Mason for having attended the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia.
Later in the morning the Ramseys’ friends were still in the rear of the house consoling Patsy, who clutched a crucifix in her hands. Arndt, who didn’t know that John Ramsey had gone down into the basement before 10:00 A.M., was still the only officer in the house. She was concerned