Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [48]
Mistler switched off his television and lay back down to stare quietly up at his ceiling. And finally, he fell asleep.
The following Sunday morning, lead detective Hoffman was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that his men had not yet verified that Toole was in the area the day that Adam Walsh had been abducted, but that nonetheless the suspect knew details of the murder that only the killer could have known. Hoffman was not at liberty to discuss the evidence that the department had shared with the state attorney’s office, but he was confident that they had plenty to base a case on.
And, moreover, if Bill Mistler did not come forward to place Ottis Toole in South Florida at the time of the kidnapping, there was at least one other person who did. Arlene Mayer, the woman who had taken her daughter Heidi to Kmart for some household supplies less than forty-eight hours before Adam Walsh went missing, was having coffee at her kitchen table on Sunday morning after Chief Martin’s announcement, the newspaper trumpeting the news laid out beside her. She was about to take a sip when Heidi walked into the room and stopped dead.
“Mom—” She pointed at the picture on the front page. “That’s him.”
Arlene stared up at her daughter, who was already beginning to cry. “That’s the man who tried to get me that night in the Kmart.”
Arlene looked down at the photograph of Ottis Toole emblazoned there, then shook her head, fighting the chill that began to envelop her. “Now, Heidi, are you sure . . . ?”
“I wouldn’t say it if I wasn’t sure,” Heidi said, her voice rising to a near shriek. “That’s the man who tried to get me!”
Arlene Mayer rose to comfort her daughter, and when she finally had Heidi calmed down, she picked up the phone and dialed the Hollywood police.
Shortly after 5:00 p.m. on Monday, Detectives Hoffman and Hickman conducted a formal interview with Heidi, who recounted her memory of the visit to Kmart the night she was accosted. Following the completion of her statement, the detectives presented her with a photo lineup to see if she recognized anyone.
“That’s him,” Heidi said, pointing without hesitation at a photograph of Toole. “There’s that big gap between his two front teeth.”
Following their interview with Heidi, Hoffman and Hickman then interviewed Arlene, who independently selected Toole’s photo out of the array they presented her. She told the detectives that following the confrontation between Toole and her daughter, she’d found a Kmart security guard to walk them to her car, and that the big white car that both she and her daughter had seen the man get out of was still sitting in the lot at the time. Furthermore, she told Hoffman, she had driven straight home and called Hollywood PD to report the incident, though the detective couldn’t locate any record of that call.
Meanwhile, an intensive search for the rest of Adam’s remains was under way at the spot near mile marker 126 on Florida’s Turnpike, where Toole told detectives he’d left the body. Detectives from Hollywood PD had discovered from the lessee of the property, Sergeant James Carter of the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office, that the guardrail fence that had stopped their progress on the service road the day they’d first visited the area with Toole had been in place for only ten months.
Carter took them down the faint trail on the other side of the fence to show them that there was indeed a fork in the road, one branch that ran about a mile east to a grazing pasture, the other heading south to a shallow valley where Carter maintained a trailer park. At least that much seemed promising. The day he’d been out here with Toole, the man seemed incapable of any reliable memory.
Meantime, Hollywood PD had called in the Florida Department