Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [22]
“Why don’t I give you a ride in that shopping cart?” he asked in a tone that was meant to be enticing.
Heidi had the good sense to scream.
Toole was gone long before store security came looking for him. By the time the girl was able to stop crying and make herself understood to her mother, he had ambled away, into the shadows of the parking lot. As soon as things calmed down, he’d get into his Cadillac and drive away, just another departing Kmart shopper.
He would head on down to Miami now and spend the night as he had intended. And once that was over, he would find a place to park the Caddy, somewhere that he could sleep in peace. And tomorrow or the next day, he could try some shopping again.
That little girl he’d followed into the Kmart was about the same age as his niece Becky Powell, who’d dumped him and ran off with Henry Lee. This one hadn’t seemed too fond of him either, but that was okay. There were lots of young ones to talk to, and he knew that, eventually, he would find one who would listen. In these parts, there seemed no end of promising malls.
Hollywood, Florida—July 27, 1981
Bill Mistler, owner of a local pest control company, is certain of what he saw outside the Sears store in Hollywood on the fateful Monday afternoon that the Walsh boy disappeared. Mistler was on his way to Sears to pick up some supplies for a camping trip he’d planned for his family the next day, and while he was waiting for an old lady to work her way into a parking space at the curb by the store entrance, he noticed a white Cadillac with a black top coming toward him from the opposite direction.
The Cadillac, which seemed to have a bunch of long-handled gardening tools in the backseat, stopped in the driving lane opposite, and Mistler watched as an odd-looking man with reddish brown hair and a wandering eye got out and started toward the store.
As Mistler waited, the man, who was wearing a filthy T-shirt, approached a neatly dressed boy of about five who was standing on the sidewalk by the curb. Nearby were a woman and another young boy and girl. Mistler assumed it was a mother and her three children at first, but when the odd-looking guy from the Cadillac bent down and began talking to the younger boy, the mother seemed to take no notice. After a moment, in fact, the woman gathered her two children and walked away.
Mistler looked again at the shabbily dressed man and the little boy. Though it seemed impossible that the two belonged together, the child did not seem afraid. After a moment, the man stood and took the boy’s arm and the two walked together toward the Cadillac. The man helped the boy into the front seat through the driver’s door, then got in after him.
By this time, another parking space had opened up, and Mistler pulled his truck in. As the Cadillac drove past, Mistler noticed that someone had left quite a dent in the right side of the car’s rear bumper. And, to his everlasting dismay, that is the last that he thought of it all for a very long time. He simply did what anyone might have done: he went into the Sears store, did the shopping for his trip, and forgot all about what he had seen.
“I told the little cocksucker I had some candy and toys,” Toole confided later. The moment the boy was in the car, he locked all the doors and windows. The boy wondered about that, but Toole explained that it would make them safe. They would just have to drive a ways to where the candy was.
He made a quick right out of the parking lot, and inside ten minutes they were headed north on Florida’s Turnpike. He had to stop at a tollbooth to pick up a ticket, and by now the boy was raising all kinds of hell, trying to get the attention of the clerk. Toole gave the clerk a weary smile—“Kids.”
As they rolled on out of the toll chute, Toole gave the boy a healthy backhand across the face, which only seemed to set him off further. The kid was really getting on his nerves now, so Toole landed a few more punches to the boy’s stomach and face. “I’m pretty sure I knocked that kid out,” he remembers.