Free Bringing Adam Home by Les Standiford Page A

news only underscored the importance of their appearance on the show. There were terrible things that were going on all the time, and no one was hearing about them. It was vitally important to get the word out quickly, everywhere, when a child went missing.
    By the time the segment was over, Revé seemed to have put aside the disturbing news Hartman had divulged, and John was relieved that his sister Jane and a few others were there to help. “I have to run up to the room to make a couple of calls,” he told them, as the car delivered them back to the St. Moritz. He promised to meet them just down the street at the Plaza for something to eat in just a few minutes.
    Back in his room, John checked for messages and was relieved to find there were none. Still, he could not shake the ominous feeling that the 6:00 a.m. call had instilled in him. A child’s head found severed and floating in a canal. Unthinkable. Surely such a thing could not have happened to his Adam. Besides, the voice on the other end of the telephone line had told him not to worry. But how long could he live with such uncertainty? One moment he was composed, the next he found himself fighting to draw a breath.
    He glanced at his watch—11:35 a.m.—and that was when the phone rang again. “Give it to me straight,” he told the caller. And that is what he got. Hollywood Sun-Tattler reporter Charlie Brennan, who’d accompanied John and Revé on their trip to New York, was in the room and later described Walsh as he hung up the phone: “A man with a large part of his heart now stolen.”
    R evé Walsh was sitting with her sister-in-law at the bar of the Plaza Hotel when a young man with a carefully masked expression came to whisper something in Jane’s ear. Jane’s expression did not waver, but in Revé’s mind, all the pieces fell immediately into place.
    All Jane would say was that John was waiting for her back at the hotel. But Revé knew. No one had to tell her. She was Adam’s mother.
    On the way back to the St. Moritz, it was Revé who squeezed Jane’s hand and told her it would be all right. And when John opened the door to their room and said simply, “Our baby’s dead,” Revé could only reach out for his waiting arms and hold on and tell him that yes, she knew.
    S hortly after noon on Tuesday, and at the urging of Hollywood authorities, medical examiner Cox phoned Dr. Ron Wright, his counterpart in Ft. Lauderdale, to pass along the results of his preliminary examination. As chief medical examiner in the county where the investigation of Adam’s disappearance was centered, Wright was the natural choice to complete the autopsy. Accordingly, Cox had the remains packed in ice and handed them over to Ronald Young, one of the Hollywood detectives present at Cox’s exam, who quickly boarded a helicopter for Broward County.
    By 4:00 p.m., Dr. Wright had begun his own examination, quickly determining that the brain matter inside the skull had liquefied, which suggested that death had occurred at least ten days or more prior to discovery. Among other findings, Wright reported that the victim had received repeated blows to the face and had suffered a fractured nose. Given the presence of burst blood vessels in the eyes, Wright theorized that the victim had been strangled and, at the time of the decapitation, was likely dead. He noted the likely cause of death as “asphyxiation,” which put a slightly finer point on medical examiner Cox’s preliminary notation of “homicide.”
    As to the decapitation itself, Wright said that it had taken place with the victim lying facedown, that the assailant had been right-handed, that the person had employed a machete or cleaver with a blade five inches or more in length, and would necessarily have needed two hands on the weapon’s handle in order to exert the required force.
    Meanwhile, search and dive teams had been dispatched to the canal where Adam’s head had been discovered, but the failure to find