Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [3]
By 1976 Matthews had become the chief polygraph examiner for the Miami Beach Police Department and had started his own state-certified school for polygraph examiners—a sideline that became more and more profitable as word of Matthews’s skills as both an investigator and an instructor spread throughout the South Florida law enforcement community. The burly, avuncular Matthews was regarded as a tough but fair cop by his colleagues, and his meticulous style of interviewing subjects prior to the actual polygraph exam itself had proven to be most effective. As he was fond of reminding his students, “How can you know what kind of questions to ask if you don’t know the person you are asking them of?”
Among those many students he had trained over the years was Steve Davis, who had even gone on to intern under Matthews at his Southern Institute of Polygraph. And while Davis considered himself an able polygraph examiner, along with others who performed the same duties within the Hollywood police department—many of them also trained by Matthews—in this case he wanted the best. Matthews was not only a top polygraph examiner, he was a highly regarded cop and investigator.
“We need you up here,” Davis told Matthews, who needed little convincing. When he had heard the initial news bulletins late on the afternoon that Adam had disappeared, Matthews’s initial reaction was one of sadness, mixed with some resignation. He was an experienced police officer, after all, and the world was a hard place. Maybe the Walsh boy had just wandered away and gotten lost. Hopefully, he hadn’t fallen into one of the many canals that stitched the narrow habitable strip of South Florida land between the Everglades and the Atlantic. Hopefully, he would turn up safe somewhere.
But shortly after Matthews got home that evening, his feelings began to change. Ginny met him just inside the door, the kids’ pj’s tucked under her arm, wondering if he’d heard the news. He had heard, Matthews assured her.
“My God, Joe,” she told him, then. “I was on my way to that same Sears this afternoon. But Joey got sick, and I had to turn around. It could have happened to us, that’s what I keep thinking.”
Matthews stopped, staring back at her, feeling goose bumps prickle even his thick skin. They lived in the unincorporated area known as Southwest Ranches, then a sparsely populated area of Broward County a few miles from the fringes of real civilization and the Hollywood store where Adam had gone missing. The houses there sat on lots of an acre or more, and some neighbors still kept horses. The urban centers of Fort Lauderdale and Miami were nearby, and if you wanted a dose of the city, you could easily get it. But out here you could pretend you were still part of an old-time Florida, where foxes and raccoons and possums roamed, and if you were talking about predators, you meant the eagles and hawks and ospreys that still cut the skies overhead.
Matthews glanced into the family room, where his brood—four kids in five years—were raising their usual clamor in front of the TV set while Scooby-Doo hightailed it from a make-believe monster. His oldest son Joey was almost exactly the same age as Adam Walsh, born one day before him, on November 13, 1974. After Joey, there had come two more sons, Greg and Michael, and in 1979, just two weeks before Joey’s fifth birthday, their daughter Christina was born. The things you take for granted, he found himself thinking, a wave of dread drifting over him.
It was a feeling that only increased over the course of the week, as reporters continued to chronicle the lack of results in the search for Adam Walsh. By the time Davis called to issue his plea, Matthews was more than primed to help. “Anything I can do,” he assured Davis, who immediately put in a call to Emmit Miller, Miami Beach police chief, asking that his former instructor be loaned to HPD to conduct interviews and polygraph examinations.
“We need all