The End of the Dream (36 page)

Every one seemed calm enough, wanting to be cooperative but with nothing solid to contribute. It was an odd dichotomy, they were walking down stormy streets where a desperate fugitive was probably hiding and yet, when the doors opened, smells of pumpkin and mince pies drifted out. The driver who had bailed out on his two wounded partners had been swallowed up in the night. The rain continued to fall and high winds were gusting.
 
In dark clothing, he would be almost invisible. There were a thousand places to hide, the streets in the containment area had only pale overhead lights. No one searching for him had the slightest idea where he was, or, for that matter, who he really was. * * * Scott had always warned his accomplices that helicopters would be major impediments to their escape from bank robberies. They had heard one overhead as they drove away from Lake City, but it wasn’t Guardian One from the King County Sheriffs Office or any official law-enforcement agency, the whirlybird was from a local television station. The police helicopter hadn’t been able to get airborne in time. But “The Hollywood Bank Robber” was headline stuff, and a television crew was circling above the action. Two of the bank robbers were shot up, and the entire plan had turned sour. No one will ever know what the third man was thinking on that Thanksgiving Eve, 1996.

But he must have been shocked that something planned out with such meticulous care could have gone so badly. When he leapt from the van, had he believed that his friends were dying or already dead?

Or was he running away to fight another day? Scott had once told a confidante that he would come back to kill Mark if he was ever wounded so he wouldn’t talk. Mark was the weak link, Scott believed, who would spill his guts if he was captured. Although the investigators didn’t know about that statement, they had already placed several armed guards next to both prisoners as they were being treated at Harbor view Medical Center. I Mike Magan stayed behind to wait with the homicide detectives, and to help set up further containment of the area. For all he knew, the third man might be wounded too. If he was, they would probably find him soon. But it was a scary situation, there were thousands of families in the area, many of them with company arriving for the Thanksgiving holiday. Hopefully, the police sirens and lights, and the steady thrub-thrub-thrub of helicopters overhead had warned them that something was going on. And if they turned to the news channels, they would be alerted not to open their doors to strangers. Four or five blocks from the crash site, a resident who kept an art studio in a small cottage on the back of her lot was startled to see a man run through her property.
 
He was white, dark-haired, and of average build. Their eyes met for an instant and then he was gone. She had been so busy painting that she hadn’t been listening to the radio or television, and she didn’t know about the huge police dragnet that had dropped over the streets around her home.

Only later did she suspect who it was that she had encountered.

Hillary Lenox saw no reason to call the police about what she had seen.

There were so many police cars around when the bullets started sailing by that she figured there couldn’t be anything she could add to what they had seen with their own eyes. K-9 dogs located a green, hooded jacket in the alley where the third man had disappeared. They also found a white shirt that might or might not be connected with the fugitive.
 
Where could anyone hide within such a heavily manned containment area?

In the past, Hollywood and his friends had either raced away from the area where they had just robbed a bank, or, as they had done in more recent robberies, they had stayed close by, playing pool or eating dinner, expecting that police would check out any cars that tried to leave. Scott had even enjoyed the sensation of driving past the clusters of squad cars, knowing that they had no idea who he was. But then, he had been in his car and had the capability of easing onto a freeway.
 
Scott was in magnificent physical shape and he could jog twenty miles without collapsing. Still, a running man in a crime-besieged neighborhood would stand out as if he were lit by neon.

However, he could make his way through the heavily treed backyards to the edge of the containment area, and with some of his clothing jettisoned, walk south, toward home. He could call friends, perhaps, to come and pick him up. The police were sure the “third man” probably had a gun with which to commandeer a driver. In the end, cops figured that the most prudent thing for him to do was to go to ground and hide until they dispersed. An open cellar door or a garage, or even a parked car that wasn’t locked might hide him from the officers and the dogs who trailed him. He had only to risk the telltale rattle of a door knob or an unsuspected car alarm. The fact was, that, as the hours passed, there was no sign of the man who had bailed out of the white van. Wherever he had chosen to hide, it had worked. Because Mike Magan had been able to get word to Lisa that he was all right, he was comfortable staying at the command post where he walked Seattle homicide detective Kevin O’Keefe through the intersections and streets where the shootouts had occurred. “There wasn’t an inch of ground that we didn’t cover, “ he remembered. And he was able to account for all of his rounds. The casings were exactly where they should have been.

Mike pointed out where Basley and Casey and Beethoven had been, and where he had been. It was late and stormy, he hadn’t eaten since lunch, but he barely noticed, he was running on nervous energy and the shock that follows a close encounter with death.

Later, he said, “If that automatic weapon hadn’t jammed, there would have been several officers’ funerals.” He did not say that, in all likelihood, his own would have been one of them.

On First Hill, above downtown Seattle, Shawn Johnson sat next to Steve Meyers’ bed, trying to get a fix on him. Although Steve had given his real name, he was very reluctant to say who his partners were. He explained that he was a sculptor whose pieces sold for anywhere from $500 to $15,000, and that he had never before been involved in a bank robbery. He seemed inordinately loyal to the men who had been with him a few hours earlier. Gradually, Shawn got Steve to see that, whoever had leapt from the van, he was no friend. He had left Steve and the other man to die, either in a shootout or when the van crashed. At length, Steve admitted that the man who had run from the scene was named Scott Scurlock.

“Where does he live? “ Shawn asked. “He lives in the biggest treehouse in the world.”
 
Shawn stared at Steve, wondering if he was disoriented by painkillers. But Steve insisted he was telling the truth. He said the treehouse was in Olympia. “You’ll see. It’s the biggest treehouse in the world.” The FBI agent left the room to have someone check the name Scott Scurlock through the Department of Licensing, and an address came back for a William Scott Scurlock on Overhulse Road in Olympia. He asked Steve Meyers if that was the correct address. “That’s it, “ he said. “He has twenty-some acres down there. I helped him remodel his house.” Steve said that he himself had been in the Northwest for only a few weeks, and that he had tried to talk Scott out of the Lake City robbery, but that Scott was “getting greedy.”

“He told us that if there was a shootout and anything happened, “ Steve said, illustrating how persuasive Scott had been, “he would come to the hospital and break us out. Or if we ended up in custody, he’d get us out of jail.”

“Who was driving the van? “ Shawn asked. “I was. Mark was in the right front seat. Scott was in the back looking through the money for dye packs or something just before the shooting started.” Once Steve began to talk, he was voluble. In the end, he would talk to Shawn Johnson for dozens of hours, detailing all of the bank robberies, the preparations, the escapes. But not on this first night, he was doing his best to portray himself as a neophyte bank robber, recruited only to drive.
 
Shortly before midnight, Seattle Police homicide detectives Greg Mixsell and Walt Maning joined Shawn Johnson in Steve Meyers’ hospital room.
 
Once more, he listened as his rights were read, but he said, “I don’t have a problem answering questions. The chess game is over.” At least it was half over.

Steve recalled the way he had met Scott through his younger brother, and that he had come to Washington to help remodel Scott’s house. But he said he had no idea what Scott’s “business” was until six months earlier. Even then, Steve said, he knew no details. Scott had always told him it was better if he didn’t know too much. “Where have you been living before you came here a few weeks ago? “ Mixsell asked.

“In New Orleans, on Constance Street. I had a girlfriend living with me there at one time, but she’s gone. I live there alone.”

“What was your involvement in tonight’s bank robbery? “

“I was to be the driver of one of the vehiclesi was offered twenty percent of the take for that and to scan police frequencies. I was supposed to say, You’re out’ if I heard police dispatched to the bank.” He told the three investigators that he was to pick Scott and Mark up after the robbery.

He said Scott bought all the cars they used, and all the guns. He stressed again that this was the very first bank robbery he had ever participated in. Scott had chosen it because he wanted a large bank, and because he knew that banks loaded up on money before a long holiday weekend. “What does this Scott do with his money? “

“He gives a lot of it away to environmental causes.

And some of the money he gambles with in Reno and Las Vegas. I think he belongs to Green Peace.” Shawn Johnson, Greg Mixsell, and Walt Maning would have no idea at this point that Steve Meyers was giving them only about forty percent of the truth. This had not been his first bank robbery, it was closer to his tenth. As it was, they were puzzled, he was making this Scurlock guy sound like a combination of Robin Hood and Mother Teresa. They pressed him, asking him to explain again how the vehicles had been obtained. Shawn had sat in two or three of the cars and he wanted to hear more about them. Meyers sighed. Yes, he admitted, he had purchased cars and vans for Scott to use in bank robberies in the past. He remembered a little yellow Renault. So did Shawn Johnson. “When was that? “

“Several years ago, “ Meyers said.

“He gave me a thousand dollars to buy it and we never changed the registration.”

“And you never participated in any prior robberies? “

“This was the first.” Of course, it wasn’t, nor did the three men studying him believe him. They changed their line of questioning to his personal life. He said he had been married once, and had a daughter, fifteen, from that marriage.

Sadness washed over his features when he mentioned his daughter, but he didn’t go into detail about her. “Any other cars down on that Olympia property? “ Walt Maning asked. “There’s an old red Ford pickup and a blue Dodge van.” They asked him to tell them about the hours leading up to the bank robbery in Lake City. For Shawn Johnson, particularly, this was like opening a box full of treasuresit was, finally, a chance to learn how the bank robbers thought. Mike Magan would always be frustrated that he was not been in the room, listening, but he was needed more out where they were searching for the third man.

Steve Meyers said that Scott, Mark Biggins, and he had left Olympia midafternoon.

“Scott and Mark were in the Chrysler, and I was following them in the white van” He stopped for a moment, and said nothing.

Finally, he admitted, “You’ll find out soon enough what the other vehicle was. There wasn’t any Chrysler Scott and Mark were driving the blue Dodge Caravan. It has California plates. It’s not down in Olympia.”

“Why would you lie to us about that? “ Shawn asked. “I was the one who bought it about six months ago in California. I didn’t want to say I’d bought one of the rigs we used in the robbery.”

“Where is it now?

“

“It’s about three or four blocks north of the bank by a big lot full of school buses.

“ (Shawn Johnson left the room and relayed the information about the Dodge Caravan to FBI agents and officers at the scene. It had already been located, reported to 911 by a citizen. Officer T. J. Havenar found the blue van parked on the east shoulder of 135
^th
and 32
^nd
NE. Its sliding door was wide open. The key was still in the ignition. He reached in the window and turned it and the engine purred. He called for a tow and it was taken to the police garage to be processed later. ) The three investigators urged Steve Meyers to continue his narrative. He said that, because of the heavy traffic on the freeway, they hadn’t arrived at the Lake City bank until about 5:30. By the time they got there, Scott and Mark already had their makeup on. “Scott put his own face on, and I’d helped Mark with his.

We all wore gloves whenever we were in the vehicles, and we always wiped the cars down three times afterward, anyway.” Steve said that he’d known Mark for about a year and a half, and that he thought he had been brought in because they were hitting a large bank with a lot of customers inside. “How much did Scott think he’d get from that branch?

“ Shawn Johnson asked. “He told me to expect three, four maybe five hundred thousand dollars, “ Steve recalled. “But once we saw the money when we were looking through it, we thought it could be seven or eight hundred thousand.” Steve Meyers stressed that he had never been in real trouble with the law, nothing more than kid stuff where the police gave him a ride home. “What do you have down at the Olympia place? “

“I have a bag there with some cash in it.”

“Any firearms there? “ Shawn asked. “An old shotgun.

Maybe some small arms.” . “Tell us a little more about Scott, “ Shawn asked. “He’s a scientist, “ Steve said. “He’s always reading scientific journals.” Mixsell, Maning, and Johnson exchanged a look.

What was a scientist doing robbing banks? For that matter, what was a nature lover doing robbing banks? “What did you plan to do, Steve, “ Greg Mixsell asked, “after this robbery if things hadn’t ended this way?