Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [9]
By the time John Walsh arrived at the mall, it was almost 3:00 p.m., and a cluster of Hollywood police cruisers were nosed up to the curb outside the garden entrance to the Sears store, their flashers whirling. He parked quickly and ran inside to find a distraught Revé speaking intently with a policeman. When she turned, he saw the desperation in her face. As he put it, “For the first time in my life, I understood what real fear was.”
Still, Walsh did his best to calm Revé, and the two of them worked painstakingly to describe their son to the investigating officers, who had already put out word of a child gone missing at the Sears Mall. Local news station WINZ broadcast an announcement of Adam’s disappearance, and Miami television stations interrupted programming to run Adam’s photograph and a plea for any information. Friends and neighbors were standing by at the Walsh house little more than a mile from the store—they’d call if Adam wandered home.
Police were sympathetic, but there was little that they could do except broadcast the alarm. As the day wore on and the shadows lengthened, one cop pointed out the location of the police station, ironically located just a short walk across the mall’s vast parking lot. “We’re right over there,” he told the Walshes, as if the statement meant something.
As the hours passed and the store began to prepare for closing, the reality of Adam’s disappearance heightened for the Walshes. It was almost as if as long as the lights in the aisles burned brightly, Adam might somehow come around the corner of one of the aisles, smiling, with his arms outstretched. He’d just been hiding, nothing bad had happened. But once the store closed, and all was dark, what then?
John rushed home and returned to the lot where Revé waited by the family car. He’d brought blankets and some of Adam’s favorite books and toys. Together they made up a little bed in the big backseat of the family car, a converted Checker taxi. Revé folded Adam’s favorite blue blanket up to make a pillow. They left the doors unlocked and left a note on the dashboard that could be read through the window: “Adam, stay in the car. Mommy and Daddy are looking for you.”
And finally, some time after the lights of Sears had blinked out and the parking lot had emptied except for the hulking shadow of the Checker, the two of them got in John’s car and drove home.
Any thought of rest, however, was impossible. Shortly after they’d pulled into the drive and consulted briefly with the family and friends who had gathered, Revé mounted her bicycle and was pedaling up and down the streets of their suburban neighborhood, calling her son’s name. She returned to circle the shuttered Sears store, peering through the darkened windows for any sign of Adam, and even made her way up a set of fire stairs to the roof, where she called for him down the building’s ventilator shafts.
As Revé searched, John joined with a team of friends and neighbors to form a human chain that swept the nearby Hollywood Golf Course. A group of Crime Watch volunteers organized a walking search of the city, aided by a police helicopter that swept the streets with its spotlight.
At one point late in the night, John Walsh hailed a cruiser driving through his neighborhood. “How’s the hunt going?”
The patrolman behind the wheel was a rookie named Mark Smith, who pointed to a photo of Adam pinned to his visor. “We’re all looking for him,” Smith said. “Don’t worry.”
But still there was nothing. By morning, the news had hit the local papers, with the local Hollywood Sun-Tattler running a front-page banner: “Massive Search