Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [44]
“Take the right fucking turn, will you?” Hoffman growled.
At the northbound turnpike entrance Hoisington brought down the van window to take a toll ticket; Toole said that he remembered doing the same thing the day he had Adam in his car. As they passed through the second toll plaza on the route north, Toole told the detectives it was where he’d pulled over to “quiet the kid down.” Adam had been crying for his mother, Toole explained, and he had to beat him until he was unconscious to get him to stop.
By 3:30 p.m., as they clicked past mile marker 126 on the turnpike, well over an hour north of Hollywood, the van whisked beneath an overpass, and Toole pointed out the window toward the side of the road. “Hey, this is where I got off at,” he called.
Hoisington pulled the van to the shoulder of the turnpike and, just as Toole had when he overshot the nearly hidden exit, backed cautiously to the service road leading to a desolate construction staging area. “You can pull off into there,” Toole said, pointing. “This is where I stopped and killed the kid.”
Hoffman told Toole to direct them to the place where he’d left Adam’s body, and a shackled, handcuffed Toole gave it his best, even though he told them his memory was a little hazy—he’d been pretty intoxicated at the time, he said. He thought there was a fork in the road, to be quite honest, but there were no turnoffs to be found. Just a straight shot down the service road through the pine barrens to a spot where the road petered out at a guardrail blocking the road. “It was over in there someplace,” Toole said, and a dubious Hoffman led his men, along with Detective Terry, out for an inspection of the area.
While Hoffman and the others tramped about the desolate woods, Hoisington and Toole sat alone inside the van. Hoisington had been ordered by Hoffman not to speak with Toole—“You’re here for one reason, to drive the goddamned van, okay?”—and he was not about to start trouble. But Toole seemed agitated now, and the longer they sat together, the more restless he became.
“I killed a lot of people,” he blurted to Hoisington suddenly. “But of all I did, I wisht I hadn’t killed that little kid.”
Toole indicated the area where the others were walking with a nod of his head. Hoisington followed Toole’s gesture, but said nothing.
“It was right here,” Toole said, tears welling in his eyes. “I took him out of the car and carried him yonder in the woods, and I cut off his head with a machete I always carried.” He went on to explain how he’d dragged the body into the brush and covered it with leaves. He came back to the spot where he’d left Adam’s head and took it back to the car and tossed it on the floor behind the driver’s seat.
Hoisington knew that Toole was a suspect in the murder of Adam Walsh, of course, but he had no idea of the details of Toole’s confessions. Everything that Toole was recounting to him sounded like the stuff of a nightmare.
“Why did you keep the head?” Hoisington heard himself asking.
Toole glanced at him as if he were explaining why you’d duck under cover when it started to rain. He’d already sodomized Adam’s body, he told Hoisington. “I was going to have sex with the head later on.”
As a cop, Hoisington had heard his fair share, but Toole’s offhand declaration was enough to make his stomach heave. With great relief he saw an obviously irritated Hoffman leading his group back toward the van.
“We can’t see anything over there,” Hoffman grumbled as he climbed in, waving vaguely toward the tangle of vines and underbrush on the far side of the guardrail. He slapped at a mosquito on his neck, one of a cloud that followed him through the opened door. It had been more than two years, the hot and frustrated detectives reasoned, as they piled back into the van. A jungle could spring up around here in that amount of time. Heavy equipment would have to be brought in.
Meantime, Hoffman declared, Toole could show them where he’d disposed of the head. Sure, Toole assured them. It wasn’t far,