Free The Dreams of Ada by Robert Mayer Page B

machine was turned off. They all stood up. Ward went outside, to where Mike Roberts was waiting to take him home.
    Smith and Baskin walked to their car. It was late. The roads were almost empty as they made the eighty-mile drive back to Ada. Their headlights splayed the blacktop. There were no streetlights along the roads; the only light in the car was from the dashboard; it illuminated the satisfaction in their faces.
    The detectives were now convinced that Tommy Ward had killed Denice Haraway.
    There was the composite sketch that looked like him—a little wide in the jaw, Smith felt, but otherwise it was him. More than thirty callers had said it looked like him. Now this interview: he had seemed nervous. And the most important thing, the clincher: he had changed his story about what he had been doing the night of the disappearance. There was no reason to do that if he wasn’t guilty.
    They had gotten lucky, Dennis Smith felt. Jeff Miller coming in, Ward still being in Norman. But that’s what it took sometimes.
    They rolled into pools of light, the streetlights of Ada. The search was over, they had found the killer, they believed. All they had to do now was find the evidence; all they had to do now was prove it. Or get Tommy Ward to confess. Ward had agreed to take a polygraph. The detectives were hopeful it would trip him up.
    The test was to be administered at OSBI headquarters in Oklahoma City. Smith and Gary Rogers would go up there to talk to Ward; Baskin would stay behind in Ada.
             
    Mike Roberts is a brown-haired, wiry young man with a wisp of a beard. As he drove Tommy Ward home from the police station in Norman, Tommy told how the questioning had gone. When he was through, Mike asked if he’d had anything to do with Denice Haraway’s disappearance, if he had killed her.
    Tommy assured him he’d had nothing to do with it, that he enjoyed life too much to kill anyone.
    Mike Roberts was relieved. He told Tommy he hadn’t believed he’d done anything wrong; it was just that with the police suspecting him, he had gotten worried.
    At home, Tommy told Jannette about the questioning; he’d agreed to take a polygraph, he said, to prove he was innocent. He was in high spirits. Soon the police would stop hassling him.
    But his mood didn’t last. In the next few days he told Jannette he was having dreams about the case, because of all those people who had told him the drawing looked like him; because of Dennis Smith questioning him. He began to get worried about the lie-detector test.
    Tommy didn’t much like the police; he felt they didn’t like him. He’d spent a few nights in jail, arrested on minor charges, but was always bailed out by his mother or a sister or a brother. One time about a year earlier he had been involved in a traffic accident. The police at the scene accused him of driving while stoned; Tommy told them he wasn’t the driver. The officers, uniformed ones, told him they would get him one day.
    The recollection made him nervous. On Monday night, October 15, he telephoned his mother. He told her what was going on, that he was going to take a lie-detector test to prove he was innocent.
    “I’m scared to death,” he said. “I’m afraid they’ll try to make me say something I’m not supposed to say.”
    His mother tried to calm him. “Just tell the truth,” she said, “and everything will be all right.”
    The polygraph was scheduled for Thursday morning. Tommy told his boss about it, explaining he would need the time off.
    Mike Roberts took Tommy aside. He told him that he still had $3,000 from their last siding job. If Tommy was afraid, Mike told him, he could have the money. He could use it to leave Norman, to leave Oklahoma, so the police would stop hassling him. Tommy declined the offer. If he ran, he told Mike and Jannette, then the cops would be convinced he was guilty,
    On Thursday morning, Mike drove Tommy to Oklahoma City, fifteen miles north of Norman, to the