DURHAM, N.C. — An extensive search of novelist Michael Peterson's home and grounds failed to yield a murder weapon, and there were no telltale trails of blood leading out of the house, a police officer testified Tuesday.

Prosecutors theorize that Kathleen Peterson, the 59-year-old author's wife of nearly five years, was killed with a fireplace tool known as a "blow poke." They suspect that Michael Peterson killed the 48-year-old victim with the poker, then wrapped the bloody murder weapon in towels and disposed of it before calling 911 to report that his wife had "an accident" and had fallen down stairs.

The problem with all that, the defense contended Tuesday, is that there is no evidence.

Prosecutor Jim Hardin displays a fireplace poker like one he believes was used to kill Kathleen Peterson.

For one thing, defense lawyer David Rudolf protested, prosecutors have presented no evidence that the Petersons even used fireplace tools. Secondly, prosecutors keep waving a fireplace poker around the courtroom as if it came from the Peterson home. The courtroom prop, Rudolf said, is merely akin to a poker Kathleen Peterson's sister told police she gave the victim as a gift more than 15 years ago.

The speculation about a murder weapon, and the lack thereof, came during the testimony of the prosecution's 17th witness, Durham police Sgt. Emanuel Paschall. He is in internal affairs now, but on Dec. 9, 2001, Paschall was in charge of the homicide detectives who were called to 1810 Cedar Street to investigate a death they soon deemed suspicious.

Paschall testified that after obtaining a search warrant, police searched the house and grounds for a possible weapon and came up empty. To conduct the search, five teams of six officers each were assigned to do a grid search of sections of the Petersons' property in the affluent Durham neighborhood of Forest Hills.

The search extended only to the property line but could have been extended into neighbors' yards if police either obtained a search warrant or sought consent, Rudolf noted on his cross-examination of the witness.

"The bottom line is that you didn't search off the property because there were no indications that anyone had gone off the property with a murder weapon, isn't that right?" Rudolf asked.

"That would be a fair statement," Paschall said. "We didn't locate a murder weapon or evidence ... We didn't find anything we considered a weapon."

Using police photographs of a fireplace that he showed the witness, Rudolf pointed out that there were no fireplace tools evident on the day after the killing. He got the witness to concede that if there is evidence that no tools were present in the days and weeks before the Kathleen Peterson's death, it would not matter if no tools were present after she died.

Michael Peterson during testimony Tuesday

Rudolf then cited a police statement by Kathleen Peterson's daughter, Caitlin Atwater, who said she doesn't remember any fireplace pokers there while she lived in the house. Atwater is now estranged from Michael Peterson and his other children; she believes her stepfather killed her mother.

Prosecutor Freda Black got Paschall to agree that investigators typically do not find murder weapons when killers have had the time or opportunity to dispose of them.

The only other witness on the stand Tuesday, the 10th day of Peterson's first-degree murder trial, testified that the defendant was "surfing the Internet and checking e-mail" between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. while police waited for a search warrant. The witness, Officer A.D. McCallup, testified that Peterson was talking to himself in his study and was reading from an e-mail about an appointment Kathleen Peterson had made for later that morning.

Rudolf suggested that McCallup was mistaken and that it was actually Peterson's 27-year-old son, Todd, who was at the computer in his father's office. McCallup said he was sure it was the defendant.

Testimony resumes at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday. The trial is being broadcast by Court TV.