Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [120]
Hoffman: Did you get blood all over you from the child?
Toole: I got it on my shoes. I throwed my shoes away too, and I put another pair of shoes on.
So you did, Matthews murmured to himself, so you damned well did. There in the photograph before him glowed a blood-engendered image of a pair of shoeprints firmly planted on the driver’s floorboards.
Matthews set those images aside, well aware of the significance of the discovery. At long last, here was physical evidence tying Ottis Toole to the crime.
He set aside the images of the bloody footprints, and turned to another set of prints of the machete that Detective Terry had confiscated from Toole’s car-dealer associate in Jacksonville. In one of his confessions, Toole had mentioned wrapping tape around the handle of his machete to keep from getting blisters, and the luminol shot of the machete with its taped-up handle showed nothing.
But in a second image, taken after the tape had been removed from its handle, the wooden grips of the blade glowed from blood as if radioactive. Matthews studied the image, compared the location of the marker in the luminol image with that in the original again, then exhaled deeply and leaned back in his chair. There before him was a photograph of Ottis Toole’s machete, taken from his car, its handle soaked in blood.
Matthews turned back to what was left of the photographs, then, riffling through a set taken from the rear floorboards. At first he saw nothing of interest, just some streaky, vague imagery, nothing to compare with that bold set of footprints or that pulsing machete handle; then he stopped himself and looked closer at the photograph in his hand.
He studied the image for a moment, glanced away, then turned to look closely again, not sure whether to trust his eyes. He double-checked the markers to be certain—but indeed he was looking at a shot of the carpet directly behind the driver’s seat. The image taken in ordinary light revealed nothing. But as to the luminol-enhanced image . . .
In all his years as a cop, Matthews had never seen anything like it—though having been raised as a Catholic, he was more than familiar with similar images preserved by church fathers over the centuries. What he was looking at chilled him—but there was more to the feeling than that. From this image there emanated reassurance, and a strange kind of peace, and the blessed feeling that twenty-six years of effort had not gone in vain.
Unless he was just finding images in clouds, that is.
He tucked the photographs into a folder and hurried out of his office with a distracted wave for Mary. Once in his car, he paused to dial his old friend Pat Franklin, also a former Miami Beach detective and now a private investigator with his own firm. The two of them often met at a cigar bar far north on Biscayne Boulevard for a smoke and a coffee on the way home from their respective offices, but Joe was an hour or more ahead of the usual curve.
“Something wrong?” Franklin asked when he picked up. He’d recognized who it was from the caller ID. Neither one of them bothered with unnecessary pleasantries anymore.
“You gotta meet me right now,” he told Franklin.
“It’s a little early,” Franklin said.
“I’m not kidding,” Matthews said. “I need you to see something.”
There was a pause, and some rustling of papers. “Give me fifteen minutes,” Franklin said.
When he caught sight of his still-trim friend entering the bar, Matthews felt the urgency rising in him again. He hadn’t dared to look at the photograph since he’d left his office.
“Take a look at this,” he said, thrusting the folder at Franklin.
Franklin smiled at him quizzically. “Good to see