Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [23]
Toole drove in silence for a while, the Caddy’s big V8 chewing up the miles. He’d intended to take the kid slumped on the seat beside him back up to Jacksonville where they could live together and be friends, but obviously, that wasn’t going to work. The problem was, what to do next?
Toole was no dummy, after all. This kid was very young, but he also seemed pretty smart. Smart enough to identify Toole if he just let him go.
All in all, there didn’t seem to be much choice. He’d driven quite a ways up the turnpike by the time he made his decision, and the busy sprawl of South Florida was far behind him. The brightly lit malls had disappeared, the glittery beachside hotels that loomed like giant, overdecorated Cadillacs were gone, the whole miragelike tropical landscape that seemed to offer up anything a person might want was vanished like a fever dream.
He was alone with an unconscious little boy on the broad seat beside him, and now they were driving through flatlands that seemed to stretch forever, plains dotted here and there by hardwood hammocks or clusters of palmetto scrub, vistas that might have evoked the Serengeti Plains had there been anyone around to know what Africa was.
Prehistoric. Elemental. A man could distinguish crazy dreams from cold, hard reality in a place like this.
Finally, from the corner of his eye, Toole spotted an unmarked service road leading off the turnpike. He’d overshot the unpaved exit, and had to pull to the side of the turnpike and back up to get to it, but that made it perfect for his purposes. It was a rough road, winding through a thick tangle of Australian pines and Brazilian holly, but the jolting did not wake the boy.
Just as well, Toole thought. He didn’t want to have to hurt anyone. When he reached a fork in the road and was sure that they were out of sight of the turnpike, he stopped and switched off the Caddy’s engine. He got out and went around to the passenger’s door, opened it, and lifted up the unconscious little boy. It was so quiet here that the distant traffic was like a gentle surf, the pinging of the cooling Caddy’s hood keeping time. He carried the boy to an open space he had spotted in the forsaken tangle of trees and brush and laid him facedown in the sandy dirt.
Toole walked back to his car and stood surveying his tools, ignoring the cloud of bloodsucking mosquitoes that had already homed in on him. There was a machete in the backseat that he supposed he could use, and a bayonet that he kept hidden under the front seat. That ought to be enough to manage it. He reached for what he needed, and then he went to do his work.
Vero Beach, Florida—August 10, 1981
At 8:45 p.m. on a Monday evening two weeks after Adam Walsh went missing, Indian River County medical examiner Franklin H. Cox received a phone call from the sheriff’s office informing him of a gruesome find in a canal near the turnpike about twenty miles west of his office in the town of Vero Beach. Cox was no stranger to the aftermath of violence, for even a sleepy beachside hamlet like Vero Beach has its share of bloody family disputes and garden-variety shootouts at convenience stores, but it is safe to say that the call he received that evening, informing him that fishermen had found the decapitated head of a young boy floating in the water, was the first of its kind.
The severed head was transported to the autopsy room at Indian River Memorial Hospital in Vero Beach, and at 2:00 a.m., Cox met police there to perform a preliminary examination of the remains. Don Coleman and Sid Dubose, homicide detectives from Indian River County, were present, along with three detectives dispatched from Jack Hoffman’s team at Hollywood PD, 136 miles to the south.
Cox described his findings in the dispassionate language of his profession, noting “extensive cutting and chopping wounds . . . posteriorly from ear to ear” as well as cuts to the ears and occipital bones. One of the cervical vertebra was exposed at the base of the skull, “transversely sectioned,” Cox recorded. There