Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [17]
“Some guy named Campbell,” was the secretary’s answer.
Matthews couldn’t believe it. He hurried down to the interrogation room—where the “Interview in Progress” sign had been left unlighted, he noted—and yanked open the door. Some “interview,” he was thinking. He had heard Hoffman screaming, “You lying piece of shit,” all the way down the hall. Sure enough, inside the room, he found an ashen Jimmy Campbell on the other side of a table from a livid Hoffman and Hickman.
“What the fuck are you guys doing?” Matthews asked.
“We’re interviewing a suspect,” Hoffman managed. His bravado seemed to have faltered. Even Hickman was avoiding Matthews’s gaze.
“The hell you are,” Matthews replied. “He’s supposed to be with me right now. I can’t fucking believe it,” and with that he pulled Campbell from the room and back to his own desk. There wasn’t even a murmur of protest from Hoffman and Hickman.
“Why are they treating me so rough?” Campbell asked when they were finally settled. “They seem to think I’m responsible for Adam being missing. They’re making all kinds of accusations.” Matthews did his best to get Campbell calmed down so that he could be productively examined, all the while thinking that it was just one more screwup on the part of Hoffman. No way on earth could you accuse a suspect of a crime minutes before administering a polygraph exam and expect to get anything usable out of it. Hoffman simply seemed oblivious to standard police procedures.
After a bit of time in Matthews’s presence, Campbell finally began to breathe again. “I know I’ve got to calm down,” he told Matthews. “I’ve got to calm down and convince myself not to let the barbarians get to me.” Still, as he confided to Matthews, it was more than difficult to be accused of doing harm to a child whom he loved. “I do take it personally. It’s very upsetting.”
To get Campbell relaxed, Matthews took him out to lunch, then brought him back to the station, where they went back over the events they’d discussed two nights earlier. Finally, early that evening, Matthews deemed Campbell ready, and he began the testing once again.
They were nearing the conclusion of this second exam when the door to the room flew open and Matthews saw an obviously agitated assistant chief of police Leroy Hessler beckoning him outside. Matthews told Campbell to hold on for a moment and went to join Hessler in the hallway.
“We just got a call,” Hessler told Matthews, grimly. “They found a severed head in a drainage ditch beside the turnpike up in Indian River County. They think it’s the boy’s.”
He pointed at the door to the interview room where Campbell sat, oblivious. “We know he did it,” Hessler said to Matthews. “And I want a confession.”
Matthews paid little attention to Hessler’s demands, but at the same time he was numbed by the information that Hessler had delivered. Statistics might dictate that fewer than one hundred children are kidnapped and murdered in a year, but reassuring statistics are little comfort when you’re one of the exceptions. As for Hessler’s cockeyed demands that he extract a confession from Jimmy Campbell come hell or high water, Matthews considered any number of outraged responses, most of which would have accomplished little good.
“I’m in the middle of an examination,” he told Hessler finally, turning away. “I’ll bring my report down as soon as we’re finished in there.”
Back inside the room, Matthews apologized to Campbell for the interruption and managed to complete his examination, which indicated once again that his subject—despite everything he had been subjected to—clearly and positively had no idea of what might have happened to Adam Walsh. Matthews thanked Campbell for his cooperation and told him to go on home. He sat alone then for a moment, wondering if it was true—that the water had claimed Adam Walsh after all, if scarcely in a way that anyone might have imagined. Tragedy didn’t come any grimmer than that, he thought. Then he went to track down Hoffman.
He