Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [40]
Hoffman glanced at Terry then, as if he had just spotted someone else to blame for meddling in his investigation. “I’m going to need a written report on this,” he said to Via, skepticism saturating his tone.
“You can read my notes any time you want to,” Via said. “Furthermore, I don’t appreciate your attitude, my friend. I’m trying to do you a favor, and you come in here insinuating I’m leaking information to some douchebag like Ottis Toole? Where the hell would I even get it?”
Apart from another sidelong glance at Terry, there was no response. “Can we have him now?” Hoffman said, waving toward the interview room.
“He’s all yours,” Terry said. “You won’t mind if I sit in, though, will you?”
The look Hoffman gave Terry told him that Hoffman very much minded, but there was little the Hollywood detective could do to keep Terry out. “He’s your prisoner,” Hoffman told Terry tersely, and the three moved inside the interview room with Toole.
Hoffman introduced himself and his partner Hickman and told Toole that they were from the Hollywood, Florida, Police Department. He offered a standard rights form for Toole to sign, but Toole waved it away. He understood his rights, he told Hoffman, and he understood that he was waiving his right to have an attorney present during the questioning that was about to take place. He didn’t read all that well, he told Hoffman, indicating the form on the table before him. He’d only gone through the seventh grade, but he understood the English language well enough and he understood exactly what they were saying about his rights.
With that established, Hoffman asked Toole to give him a statement about what he claimed he’d done down in South Florida, and Toole readily agreed. It was a couple of years ago, he began, when he and his partner Henry Lee Lucas drove down to Fort Lauderdale in a 1973 black-over-white Cadillac that Toole had purchased from a woman in Jacksonville named Faye McNett. Buddy Terry lifted an eyebrow as he heard the mention of Lucas in the matter for the first time, but he said nothing.
Toole explained to Hoffman and Hickman that he had been depressed over the death of his mother that May, and that he and Lucas had been traveling around the country, as far as Texas and California, with his niece and nephew Frieda and Frank Powell. He told Hoffman that he and Lucas had returned to Jacksonville some time in June, and that before they set out on the trip to South Florida, he’d taken a Pennsylvania license tag from a car on the street and switched the plate on the Caddy.
The two of them had snatched a kid from outside a Sears store in a shopping mall, he told Hoffman, who then asked how Toole could be sure it was a Sears. Toole looked at Hoffman as if he were the barely functioning individual in the room. “ ’Cause I know a Sears when I see a Sears,” he said, as if explaining it to an idiot. He didn’t remember actually going inside the Sears, though he may have, he told Hoffman. He was just window shopping and remembered having passed a wig shop when he saw the boy.
As to the time of the abduction, however, Toole responded in a way that was typical of his tenuous grasp of matters that most take for granted. “It would have to have been . . . ah . . . the afternoon, afternoon, afternoon. I call afternoon around noontime and that.”
There’d been trouble with the boy in the car, Toole continued, and he’d had to slap and punch him to get him to quiet down. Eventually, he and Lucas had pulled off the turnpike, and Lucas had killed the boy by decapitating him “with an 18-inch bayonet” while Toole held Adam down on his stomach. He said Lucas had to hit the kid three or four times to get his head cut off. After that, they chopped the boy up and threw his body parts out the window along the turnpike. They’d kept