“Zero and none,” she said.
“Then let’s get it over with.”
“You read my story. Were there any mistakes you’d like me to correct?”
“The tone was wrong.”
She stiffened. “How so?”
“You didn’t capture the pain my family went through. It was a different time back then. We were all a lot more innocent.”
“I’m sorry.”
“How old are you, anyway?”
“I’ll be twenty-eight next month.”
He watched the carbonated bubbles rise to the top of his drink. The things Gamble had written about had happened before she’d been born, and it probably wasn’t fair of him to criticize her writing style, or lack of understanding. If he told her his side of things, maybe she’d do a rewrite, and capture what had really happened.
“Back in high school, my English teacher had us read a poem by Dylan Thomas about a girl dying in a fire in London,” he said. “The last line has always stayed with me. ‘After the first death, there is no other.’”
“The loss of innocence,” Gamble said.
“That’s right. The first time you experience death is a life-altering experience. It happened young for me. I was five. The world was different then. We left our doors unlocked, and kids played outside without supervision. There were no AMBER Alerts, or kids on milk boxes, or national databases of missing children. None of that existed. There was no need.
“That changed in the summer of 1981. My family had finished dinner, and we were in the den watching TV when the program got interrupted by a news alert. A kid named Adam Walsh was missing, and his parents were offering a reward.
“I remember how scared my mom and dad got after that. They started locking up the house, and forbade my brother and I to play anywhere but in the backyard, which was fenced in. We became prisoners in our own home, and so did our friends.
“Reward posters started appearing on phone poles and billboards. We went to the airport to pick up a relative, and volunteers were handing out flyers. At church, the pastor said a prayer for Adam’s safety. Everyone had an emotional stake in his return.”
“I had no idea it was that intense,” Gamble said.
“It was the only thing on people’s minds,” he said. “Two weeks later, my mom was in the kitchen, when I heard her crying. I ran in, and my dad was holding her. She had the radio on, and it was saying that a fisherman had found a kid’s head floating in a canal in Vero Beach. The medical examiner had used dental records to confirm that it was Adam Walsh.”
His throat had gone dry, and he took a swallow of his drink before continuing. “I ran into my brother’s room, and told him. Logan had a portable radio, and we sat on his bed, and listened to a local station. It was all they talked about. One of the newscasters said that Adam had been abducted from the Sears in Hollywood, and that freaked us out. A few weeks before, we’d been at the Macy’s in Pembroke Pines, which was a few miles away. A weirdo had tried to lure me into his car, and my brother kicked him in the balls, and I got away. We hadn’t told anyone about it, but decided we’d better tell our parents, considering what had happened.”
“Wait. The newspaper article said you had told your parents.”
“The article was wrong. We were afraid of being punished, so we didn’t tell them. Please change that in your piece.”
“I will.”
“Thank you.” He finished his drink and took a deep breath.
“What made you think he was a weirdo?” Gamble asked.
“While he was trying to get me into his car, my brother kicked him in the groin, and his shirt came out of his pants. He was wearing a purple dress underneath.”
“So he was a cross-dresser.”
“Among other things.”
“How did he lure you out of the store?”
“With candy. Let me finish my story, okay?”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“We went into the kitchen and told my parents,” he said. “My mother cried her eyes out, she got so upset. Then we drove to the police station, and my brother and I told the detectives what had happened. The next day, a police sketch artist came to the house, and drew a composite based upon our description. That should have been the end of it, only somehow it got leaked to the newspaper. A reporter called the house, and wanted to know why we hadn’t come forward earlier. My mother told him that we’d been traumatized, and she didn’t want us hurt any more.”
“So your mother covered for you.”
“That’s right, she covered for her boys. It wasn’t pretty.”
“How so?”
“We got harassing phone calls. People wanted someone to blame, so they took their anger out on my mom. It got so bad that we had our number changed.”
His glass was empty, and he went to the bar to get a refill and more pretzels. When he came back, he saw Gamble fumbling with her cell phone, and he guessed that she was recording their conversation. He’d dealt with reporters enough to know that this was part of their job, and he took no offense.
“Have some pretzels,” he said.
“No, thank you,” she said. “When did your family learn that it was Ottis Toole who’d tried to abduct you?”
“That happened two years later. A drifter named Henry Lee Lucas had gotten arrested in Texas for murder and was facing the electric chair. The police cut a deal with him, and Lucas confessed to killing over two hundred women, which made him the worst serial killer in history. Lucas also said he had a partner.”
“Ottis Toole.”
“The one and only. Toole was in prison in Florida for setting fires, so the police had a chat with him. Toole admitted to killing women with Lucas. Then, he got really emotional, and he confessed to killing Adam Walsh.”
“Why do you think he got emotional?”
“It must have bothered him. I guess even monsters have souls. Soon after that, the police came to our house, and showed us Toole’s photograph. Logan made a positive identification. All I did was cry.”
“Toole was horrible looking, wasn’t he?”
“His eyes weren’t normal. He looked like he was sleepwalking.”
“How did it make you feel, knowing it was him?”
“Horrible. I knew that it could have been me, and not poor Adam. Let’s wrap this up.”
“Just one more question.”
He braced himself. He knew what her question was, and wanted to answer her in such a manner that there would be no doubt in her mind that he was telling the truth about the course that his life had taken as an adult, and the decisions he’d made.
“You became a member of Team Adam after retiring from the police department,” Gamble said. “Did you know at the time that it had been named after Adam Walsh, and that his parents were responsible for it being started?”
“Believe it or not, I didn’t,” he said.
“How is that possible?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I didn’t say that. It just seems unlikely that you wouldn’t know.”
“I knew who John Walsh was through America’s Most Wanted. But I wasn’t aware of the other things he and his wife had done, like establishing the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and helping start the AMBER Alert program.”
“But you did make the connection.”
“Not right away. When I was asked to join Team Adam, I assumed the name had a biblical connotation. At my first orientation, I was given a handbook with the Team Adam guidelines. Adam’s photo was on the cover. That’s when I knew.”
“Did it give you goose bumps?”
Certain things in life were meant to be, and when they happened, their occurrence almost felt preordained. At that moment, he’d known what he was going to do with the rest of his life, and it had made him feel whole.