Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [110]
She paused, still wiping at her tears, and fixed Matthews with an even gaze. “Joe, will you do this for me?”
At this point, everyone in the room was choked up. John Walsh leaned to comfort his sobbing wife, and Matthews struggled to get his voice under control. He’d spent his whole life trying to bring criminals to justice, and he knew exactly how Revé felt. Her words spoke to the core of his reason for being.
“I’m honored that you’d even ask,” he told Revé quietly. He would start immediately. He would investigate as he would were he a police officer assigned to a cold case, and he would bring to the job all that he had in him. He couldn’t predict the outcome, of course—no one could—but at least this time there’d be no one there to throw him off the case.
Hollywood, Florida—February 21, 2006
The resurrection of the Adam Walsh case had never been a matter high on Hollywood police chief James Scarberry’s priority list. Still, Scarberry knew that Matthews had put in a good word on his behalf with the Hollywood police union while he was being considered for the job, and he was also well aware of the blemish the high-profile matter had left on the record of his new department. Furthermore, Scarberry knew from his time in Miami Beach that Matthews was an accomplished cop—whatever the public thought, you didn’t get to be Officer of the Year by accident. Thus, when Matthews showed up in his office on February 21, 2006, some five and a half years after he’d taken over the reins in Hollywood, Scarberry knew enough to listen.
He was there for important reasons, Matthews told Scarberry, and then got quickly to the point. Almost twenty-five years had passed since Adam Walsh went missing, and were he still alive, he would have been looking forward to celebrating his thirty-second birthday. Nearly ten years had passed since the record of the failed investigation in his abduction and murder had been made public—effectively putting an end to its investigation—and nearly ten years had passed since the only viable suspect ever identified had died while imprisoned for other killings. There’d been any number of lurid stories concerning the disappearances and deaths of children splashed across the pages of the newspapers of the nation and the region—those of Jimmy Ryce and Shannon Melendi, a young South Florida woman kidnapped and slain by a softball umpire, among them.
There might even be a few people who’d forgotten all about Adam Walsh, just one more unfortunate kid in what had become a long line of them. But Adam Walsh was really the first kid in that line, Matthews pointed out. Before Adam, there really wasn’t much attention paid to the problem of missing and endangered children. And now, due in large part to the efforts of Adam’s parents, John and Revé Walsh, the issue had become one of the most important priorities of law enforcement and society as a whole.
Yet for all that John and Revé had accomplished, they had certainly not forgotten about Adam. Furthermore, as every new day dawned, they thought about the son whom they had so tragically lost, and they were reminded that his killer had yet to be brought to justice. Matthews recounted the recent incident in Washington, where John Walsh was confronted by a reporter who wanted to know if it ever “bothered” him that he had been unable to find the killer of his own son.
If that reporter had any idea what John Walsh had gone through, Matthews reminded Chief Scarberry, he would have been running for the doorway before he finished his question. It was true that Walsh had heard such things before, and though he had placed his trust in the Hollywood PD for many years, he felt a certain amount of guilt that he hadn’t done more to move the investigation forward earlier. He’d even felt bad that the baseless innuendo regarding his lifestyle and his ties to organized crime might have somehow affected the conduct of the case. And certainly there was a point to the reporter’s question, offensive