Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [123]
For his part, Wagner seemed glad to hear the news. “I’ll read every page,” he assured Matthews. They were heartening words, and Wagner seemed sincere enough, Matthews thought, but he had heard a lot of promises in his day.
Still, he continued with work on his report, obsessed with checking every fact, tying up every loose end, reducing his findings to their essence. He prepared a meticulous timeline of the case drawn from the myriad agency reports and supplemental memos, for the first time placing the events and discoveries in order from first to last, and providing a context from which patterns of cause and effect might be discerned.
As an investigator, Matthews was most concerned with the assemblage of evidence. But he also understood that unless he was able to convey those facts in a compelling way, all his hard work was likely to go for naught. He had a natural gift for storytelling and was entirely at ease in front of an audience or a camera, but laying a story out on paper, he soon discovered, was another matter altogether.
On the most basic level, he’d never been the greatest at grammar, and when his mother, Margaret, who’d had a long career as a librarian and was still keen and vibrant despite her years, offered to proofread for him as he went, Matthews was glad to have her help. She had always been interested in the stories he brought home from work, and this was the story of them all.
From time to time, she’d glance up from the pages to offer advice that went beyond matters of the comma splice: “Are you sure you’re not being too tough on this fellow here, Joey?” she might ask. And usually, she was right.
One day in March, Matthews arrived at the hospital to find one of his mother’s doctors waiting to speak with him outside her room. His mother had a lot of life left, the doctor agreed, but her heartbeat was acting up. She needed a pacemaker implanted, a relatively minor procedure, if any operation could be called minor when the patient was ninety-four.
“You can blame it on my son,” Matthews’s mother told the doctor when the pair came into the room to discuss the matter with her. “If you were reading what I’ve been reading, your heart would be racing, too.”
That might be, the doctor allowed, but there was no question in his mind that the operation would make her much more comfortable. They talked it over with Matthews’s brother Peter and younger sister Mariann once they arrived, and in the end, the procedure was agreed to.
At first, word from surgery was positive. The operation proceeded without a hitch. Then, suddenly, there were complications. And just as suddenly, on March 18, 2006, his mother was dead, stunning everyone. Michelina Militana “Margaret” Matthews, the daughter of Sicilian immigrants, had led a long and loving life, but if anything, all those years had only suggested to Matthews that somehow she always would be with him.
A few days after the funeral, Matthews forced himself back to his office, where his still-unfinished report lay on his desk. How many people had died in the quarter-century-plus he’d worked on this case? Matthews asked himself. Now even his mother had gone to her grave, with her sticky notes still attached to the pages in front of him.
Another victim of the case, you might call her, he found himself thinking. And when you came right down to it, how much time did he have left? If he croaked, what the hell would happen to all this work then?
With such thoughts in mind, he pinched the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and his thumb, closed his eyes briefly, then took a deep breath and went back to his report.
Hollywood, Florida—April 30, 2008
On a bright spring afternoon late in April 2008, Joe Matthews appeared at the office of Hollywood police chief Chad Wagner with a thick bound sheaf tucked under his arm. He wished with all his heart that his mother could have looked over his