daughter.  But this new evidence showed that Mr. Edwards had been shot and knocked down near the front of the store.

(Frye now believes that Perry and Virginia Edwards left 75 Temple Grove several minutes behind Tommy and Eunice, and that Tommy had killed his wife by the time his in-laws arrived at the store.  This would explain how Mr. Edwards came to be killed at the front of the store—he never heard the "surprise shot"; however, the contention is otherwise unsupported by any evidence.)

The missing slug.  Property receipts showed that technicians had found a .22 Long Rifle cartridge hull in the back of the store.  Of the eight pistols connected to the case, this shell could only have been fired from the .22 automatic that Zeigler carried at this side on Christmas Eve: the jammed gun which Zeigler said he had tried to defend himself with at the back of the showroom.

So the pistol had been fired once.  Where was the slug?

In their two-week examination of the store.  Vernon Davids and Gene Annan had found a .38 caliber slug and a .38 caliber exit hole in the north wall, which deputies had missed.  They believed that this accounted for all of the .38 caliber shots that were fired in the store.

But there was no sign of the .22 slug.  Neither Zeigler nor the four murder victims had been shot by a .22.  If the slug did not exit through the walls, it could only have left the store one way: in one of the perpetrators, as he walked out or was carried out.

Vernon Davids thought of Nathaniel Brown, the informant who approached the Zeiglers in January and told of weapons wiped clean, of a plot engineered by a white man, and of a wounded robber hiding out after being shot in the furniture store.  In the weeks since then, the defense had learned that all but one of the weapons had been wiped clean.  Zeigler in his narcotherapy session had remembered hearing a white man's voice in the back of the store.  A .22 is a small slug. Still, the fact that it had not been found after nearly a month of close searching suggested that a sixth person had been shot in the store.

Davids and the investigators went looking for Nathaniel Brown. But Brown could not be found.1

Mays's bloody sneakers.  Crime scene photographs showed some heavy smears of blood on the sneakers of Charlie Mays.  But the quantity of blood on Mays's shoes and the bottoms of his pants was even greater than the photos suggested.  The left cuff of his pants was caked with blood, as if it had been wicked up from a pool.  Blood almost completely covered the bottoms of Mays's shoes, so thick in places that it nearly filled depressions in the sneaker soles. 

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1     Defense investigators learned that he had left Orange County. Years later, Vernon Davids was told that Brown had been murdered in New York City.