Bringing Adam Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

suspicious vehicle.
    The local Crime Stoppers staged a reenactment of an Adam look-alike being snatched through the doors of a blue van by a white male perpetrator, and the footage was aired on every local television station. Tips flooded in from everywhere, and hundreds of vans of every shade of blue were stopped and searched by cops in Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade counties. Florida highway troopers were doing the same across the entire state.
    But by the following Tuesday, eight days after Adam had disappeared, even Lieutenant Hynds was backpedaling. He’d come to have “some misgivings” about the veracity of the Pottenberg tip, he told the press. And, too, he was a bit concerned about inconveniencing innocent citizens, some of whom had been stopped and searched twice.
    S o this was where he had come in, Joe Matthews thought, dropping the last of the case files on his desk. Beyond the “blue van” lead, which seemed about as consequential to him as a sighting of the Loch Ness Monster, precious little had been developed over ten days and thousands of man-hours of police work. Furthermore, during the time that he had spent at Hollywood police headquarters, he’d noticed a few disconcerting things about the way the investigation was being handled in the offices around him.
    While Matthews sat at a vacant desk, poring over the files that were rather grudgingly parceled out to him, the phones at other desks were ringing constantly. While some of the detectives seemed organized, others assigned to the case would answer incoming calls randomly, jot information given by tipsters on scraps of paper or napkins or whatever might be handy, then hurry out on unrelated assignments without bothering to log their calls.
    Desks were shared, files piled and unpiled, scraps of paper sent fluttering, napkins balled and tossed and swept. To Matthews, it seemed impossibly chaotic. It wasn’t that the detectives seemed incompetent or unconcerned—there simply seemed to be no one in charge.
    In his own department, all calls pertaining to a specific investigation went through one central logging station, and each lead, however lunatic or promising on the face of it, was assigned to someone for follow-up. After the leads were checked, reports were filed, and someone with authority over the case regularly reviewed the status of each and every inquiry, no matter how unimportant it might appear. Such organization seemed to Matthews the first principle of effective investigation technique, but when he mentioned the seeming disarray to Hoffman, he got only a raised eyebrow in return. If Hoffman had anything to say about it, Matthews wouldn’t be there to begin with, he was reminded.
    Matthews was hardly surprised at Hoffman’s response, but he couldn’t have stopped himself from making his point. Ten days gone by and not a scrap of worthwhile information turned up, how could he keep his mouth shut? He even walked down the hallway to repeat his concerns to Lieutenant Hynds. Hynds gave him a look obviously meant to remind Matthews who was in charge. “I’ll look into it,” he told Matthews.
    Matthew got the picture. He’d stick to what he could do, he thought, what he’d been authorized to do. And he would begin with the father of the missing boy.
    M atthews had formed no impression as to any involvement that John Walsh might have had in the crime that he’d been called to help investigate. Impressions only got in the way. What Matthews relied upon was his technique.
    Before conducting a polygraph exam, any competent expert performs something of a pre-exam interview with a subject, but in Matthews’s case those interviews were anything but perfunctory. Though he has thought about the matter, he is not exactly certain where his ability to connect with people comes from, though he does recall that as a child growing up in a devout Catholic household, he’d thought he was going to become a priest. “When it got closer to the time to go