Smears and droplets of blood formed a trail past the west door of the kitchen, along the north wall of the store to the corner of the showroom.  The trail continued as a series of faint blood swipes on the terrazzo, ending at the body of Perry Edwards.  Frye surmised that this trail marked a fierce battle between Perry Edwards and his attacker.  He decided that the swipe marks on the terrazzo had been transferred from bloody clothing during a struggle that ended when Edwards was shot through the head.  Some of the blood droplets from Mays’s beating had splashed on top of these swipes, and when Frye examined them closely he saw that the swipe had already been dry when the droplets fell.

This was startling.  It meant that at least fifteen minutes—the minimum time required for the swipes to dry—had elapsed between the murders of Perry Edwards and Mays.

There was more.  The shoulder holster was spotless, although it was found within the scatter of blood from Mays’s beating.  When Frye lifted the holster he found blood on the floor beneath it.  However, none of that blood had spotted the bottom of the holster.  So the holster had been placed there, on dry blood, sometime after Mays was killed.

And more.  The kitchen door at Eunice Zeigler’s feet was closed.  Yet when Frye opened the door he found, along the door frame, the minute blood spray that can only be produced by a high-velocity impact.  It was located almost exactly at the height of the wound behind Eunice’s left ear, the single shot to the brain that killed her.  Frye, noting that her left hand was still in her pocket, believed that she had been surprised while standing in the open doorway.  The door must have been closed later.

Frye realized that what had happened in the store had not been a single, frenetic event. Rather, Charlie Mays had been shot and beaten a quarter hour or more after the first three murders. Someone, presumably the killer, had walked around the scene after the murders: the bloody shoe prints and the holster on top of dry blood seemed to demonstrate that.  To Frye, all of this cast doubt on Tommy Zeigler’s statement that he had shot Mays in a robbery attempt.

Yet Tommy Zeigler was in West Orange Memorial with a gunshot wound in the abdomen.

A few feet east of the service counter, seventy or eighty feet from the carnage at the back of the showroom, was a large patch of blood that had soaked into the carpet. Some tiny pieces of glass lay in the blood. Frye assumed that they came from the broken lens of a flashlight nearby.  A few feet from that pool of blood, on the facing of the counter, Frye could make out the high-velocity splatter from a gunshot wound.  A bloody trail of drips and smears led from this spot to the front door.