Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [95]
Matthews would never be able to answer his questions with certainty, but certain things that happened in the lee of his dismissal from the case for a third time have their implications. Late in the afternoon of the same day he spoke with Chief Witt, Matthews returned to the offices of the homicide unit, intending to pick up where he’d left off the day before on a troubling matter that had nothing to do with the Adam Walsh case.
A female police officer had filed a lawsuit against the police department for allowing a hostile work environment and, as a result of that lawsuit, had been transferred from uniform patrol to the detective bureau. Soon after her arrival, she’d complained that her new fellow officers were playing demeaning pranks and tampering with the personal effects on her desk while she was out of the office, spilling coffee on her favorite pink desk pads, placing her animal statuettes in coital positions, and the like. To Matthews, it seemed pretty trivial stuff on both sides, and he scarcely paid any attention to it.
But then, after being called in to investigate a homicide during the early-morning hours on Sunday, Matthews had returned to his office and was leaning back in his chair, trying to clarify what needed to be done regarding the crime scene he’d just left. It was then that he noticed something odd about one of the ceiling panels next to the air-conditioning vent directly overhead. He asked one of his junior detectives to place a chair on his desk and check it out.
The kid, who’d worked for the CIA out of college, took a look behind the A/C grate, and told Matthews he’d found a video surveillance camera there, trained on the complaining officer’s desk but encompassing the entire room.
Matthews notified his immediate supervisor and called in the department’s crime techs to remove and process the camera. Though he could not be certain, the fact that the camera bore the logo of a private security firm suggested that the transferred female officer had taken it upon herself to try and collect evidence against those moving her statues around and writing derisive notes on her desk blotter.
Whoever was responsible for hiding this camera, though, and whatever the reason, Matthews wanted the matter settled. They were a crimes-against-persons squad, with all sorts of sensitive information being discussed in that room. You couldn’t have someone recording what went on there, willy-nilly, no matter how many times you found your turtle statuettes humping each other.
At least getting to the bottom of who had put that camera up there would take his mind off the fiasco with the aborted Ottis Toole interview, he thought. But such thoughts didn’t last long.
He hadn’t even sat down in his chair that Monday afternoon when he noticed a memo placed prominently on his desk. Something to do with the camera investigation already? he wondered. He picked up the sheet and began to read it, disbelief filling him as he digested the words. It was a notice from Patricia Schneider, the major in charge of the detective bureau. Effective immediately, a few months shy of his retirement date after twenty-nine years with the department, Matthews was being transferred back to uniform patrol duty.
Matthews couldn’t believe his eyes. When he went into the office of his commanding officer for an explanation, she shrugged. It was within her power to transfer at will—she didn’t have to explain anything to him.
But no one got transferred without cause, Matthews protested, the sick feeling in his stomach now an icy cannonball. Only if you screwed up big-time. Or couldn’t get along with your superiors. It was the unwritten rule within any department. What was going on here? Everyone knew Matthews was the go-to investigator in the department, and he was the supervisor of the crimes against persons unit. And he