Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [50]
Toole blinked, apparently trying to rack his thoughts into something resembling logical order. “So the only thing, if I really didn’t kill Adam Walsh, I would have to have been working the Monday, on the twenty-seventh?” he said to Hoffman.
Hoffman leaned back in his chair. “That’s the long and short of it,” he said. “We’ll check the company’s records. If you were working on July twenty-seventh, then everything you’ve told us about the murder is a load of BS.”
At this point, Buddy Terry could hold himself back no longer. Without asking Hoffman, he leaned across the table toward Toole.
“Ottis,” Terry interjected, “are you lying today? Are you sure you didn’t kill Adam Walsh? Now, come on now, let’s don’t do it this way. Look at me. Look at me, Ottis.”
But Toole wouldn’t look at Terry. “My mind ain’t gonna take much more of this shit,” he mumbled; then he began to cry.
“Just tell me the truth,” Terry said quietly, “that’s all I want to know.”
Through his sobs, Toole shook his head. “No, I didn’t kill Adam Walsh.”
Terry ventured a glance at Hoffman, who wore his characteristic scowl of disgust, then turned back to Toole. “Are you sure, or are you not sure?”
Toole was still staring down at the interview table. “I’m sure I didn’t,” he said.
“How are you sure?” Terry persisted. “What makes you sure you didn’t kill Adam Walsh?”
Toole finally looked up at Terry, his voice plaintive. “Because if I was really sure, I could come up with his body,” he said.
Hoffman broke in then, demanding to know where Toole had come up with all the details he’d been giving them about the crime.
“I made it all up,” Toole said in an anguished voice, and then he began to cry again.
It was enough for Hoffman. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was 10:30 in the evening. They’d been listening to Toole ramble on for forty-five minutes, and they were just going in circles. He snapped his notebook shut and stood to leave the interview room. Terry, however, stayed behind with Toole.
For the next ten minutes, while Toole wailed in misery, Terry sat patiently, making the occasional reassuring sound, gradually calming the prisoner down. Finally, Toole stopped sobbing and appeared to pull himself together.
“You okay now?” Terry asked. He glanced at his watch. It had been exactly twelve minutes since Hoffman left the room.
Toole nodded. “I need to talk to that guy again,” Toole said. Terry glanced toward the door through which Hoffman had departed.
“Detective Hoffman?”
Toole nodded again.
“And why do you need to talk to him?” Terry inquired, carefully.
“Because I wasn’t telling the truth just now,” Toole said. “About not killing Adam Walsh.”
Terry nodded. “I’ll just go get him, then.”
In his fifth interview regarding the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh, recorded shortly after Terry brought Hoffman back to the interview room that night, Toole spoke calmly and in an assured tone of voice, adding details to his account that he had not included in any of his previous statements. He told of walking directly from the Jacksonville Greyhound station to the yard of the roofing company where he knew the Cadillac he’d given back to Faye McNett was stored. He used the keys he’d kept to get inside the fence and took the car, driving to the burned-out site of his mother’s home. From under what was left of the front porch, he dug up the can he’d used as a bank and pocketed the $300 or so that was there, then went down to the gas station on the corner, filled the tank, and got on I-95, headed south toward Miami.
“I had everything right in the car,” he told Hoffman. “I had all kinds of tools, a shovel, a machete underneath the seat.”
As to his encounter with the child outside the store, Toole was even more forthcoming. “He told me his name was Adam, that his mom was in the store shopping. He told me he liked baseball, that he was playing on some kind of Little League team,” Toole recalled. He liked talking to the boy, and it was then that he decided