The End of the Dream (38 page)

The interior walls were expensive cedar, carefully dove-tailed.

As in the gray house, there were bookshelves everywhere, novels from Tom Clang to Louis L’Amournumerous books on nutrition and biology, the Bible, Liar’s Poker, Sahara, Of Wolves and Man, Warrior, Stress and Tension, Circle of Fear. There was a Whitley Streiber book about alien beings. Scott Scurlock was obviously an eclectic reader and something of a scholar. Shawn saw that he had saved one newspaper clipping, it was the Seattle Times article that featured his treehouse, entitled, “A Treehouse with a Guest Bedroom.” The man in the photograph was clearly the same person whose image was tacked on the wall or in picture frames around the treehouse but much younger. In 1986, he had looked like a very handsome kid. Later pictures showed a still handsome, masculine man who might have been a model or movie star.

The FBI team soon discovered a cache of private photographs. Scott had saved dozens of photographs of naked girls, most taken with the treehouse as a backdrop. Some might have been taken surreptitiously , some were posed, and some were of Scott and several different woman engaged in sexual acts. There were Tiffany lamps, huge expanses of window, sculptures, and paintings. Scott’s oak desk was in the corner next to a Chinese hooked rug, and nearby a dolphin statue rested on a slab of wood suspended from the ceiling by four ropes. The kitchen was as nice as the one in the gray house, with high-end Calphalon pots and pans hung from a beam over the stove. Spoons and cooking utensils were stuck in white pitchers with cobalt blue trim, and the canister set was cobalt blue. There was a small refrigerator, a microwave oven, a sink.

But the stove was cold, there were no preparations for Thanksgiving dinner. Most of the FBI agents searching had forgotten it was a holiday, themselves. Few of them had eaten, nor did they even think about eating.
 
The treehouse had every eventuality covered, there was even a bathroom up there, albeit an open air bathroom out on one of the decks. It had a toilet, sink, and shower (a garden hose snaked up one of the cedars). A toothbrush rested next to the sink. Up a ladder, they found the bedroom where Sabrina had slept, waiting for her lover to come home. It was a small room, and the bed took up most of the floor space. A telephone sat on the bed itself.

She probably had kept it close so she could grab it when Scott called.

There were books there too, someone had recently been reading The Call of the Wild by Jack London. Above the bed, a poster of N. C. Wyeth’s classic illustration of Robin Hood and his Merry Band was tacked to the cedar wall. There was a third floor, although it was still in the construction stage. When the wind blew, the searchers could feel the whole “house” move. It was almost like an eagle’s nest built at the top of an evergreen. Maybe Scott Scurlock had felt that too, there were a number of photographs of eagles in flight on the cedar walls. The treehouse was heated, in a somewhat cannibalistic manner, by a wood stove. This treehouse reflected the soul of a romantic, someone who craved adventure. It could have been the realization of a lot of dreams, but now it seemed to be only part of a nightmare for the young woman who waited below, huddled in despair.

What had Shawn Johnson expected to find? He wasn’t sure but not this, certainly.

He had long since learned that bank robbers were usually hooked on drugs and lived in low-rent apartments or cheap motels. This place and the gray house showed taste and planning. It was an odd sensation to be walking through the rooms where the man the task force had sought for so long had moved and breathe less than twenty-four hours before.

The treehouse was not all whimsy and good taste, they found more gunsa handgun and a rifle and ammunition. Had Scott Scurlock been waiting for lawmen to come after him here, he would have had a perfect eagle’s eye view from the treehouse, sighting down the path as someone approached.
 
The agents recovered a 30/30 caliber lever action carbine rifle, loaded with silver tipped bullets, with boxes of dozens of rounds of extra ammunition, and, in the sleeping area in the second-story loft level of the treehouse, a . 38 Special Colt Cobra six-shot revolver. 38 Shawn walked out on one of the long ramps that led out into the woods, ending in space. “I wondered how far he intended to go with them, “ he said.
 
“They swayed in the wind and creaked.” But in spite of the almost palpable sense of him they got in the treehouse, Scott Scurlock was not there.

The FBI teams had searched all the nooks and crannies and there were dozens of them. They had explored high above the ground in the treehouse and deep under the floors in the hidden room beneath the barn. Wherever Scott was, they were convinced he was nowhere on the twenty acres he owned in Olympia. Shawn interviewed Sabrina Adams.

She bit her lips to keep them from trembling as she denied any knowledge of Scott’s connection to bank robberies. She seemed to be in shock. If she wasn’t, she was an excellent actress, but Shawn Johnson felt that she really had not known what Scott was doing. She did not tell him that she had recently loaned Scott more than $30,000 with advances from her credit cards. Her mind must have been racing. Would she not have wondered why Scott needed her money if what the FBI agents were telling her was true? Shawn wondered if the guns had been out in the open when Sabrina was around. Hadn’t she ever noticed them?

She seemed pole-axed by the events he laid out for her. Maybe she really was in the dark about all of this, maybe she had simply trusted her lover too much to ask questions. The search was over shortly after 1:00 P. M. Thanksgiving afternoon. Since Shawn Johnson was the case agent assigned to the Hollywood bank robberies, they loaded everything of evidentiary value into the trunk of his car and he headed for FBI headquarters in Seattle. He called Greg Mixsell in the Seattle Police homicide offices and told him that he was on his way back from the treehouse. He told Mixsell that they had found a number of weapons, a room devoted to makeup and disguise, and $30,000 in cash. There was little question in either of their minds that they had found, at last, Hollywood’s lair. Mixsell said that Walt Maning and Sergeant Cynthia Tall man had gone back to the scene of last night’s shooting to look for more evidence in the daylight. As Shawn Johnson drove north, he realized he was hungry. He thought he might get to stop at home after he delivered the evidence and get something to eat not a whole turkey dinner but maybe a turkey sandwich. He might even get to take a nap.

He pulled into the basement of the FBI building around 3,00 P. M. and was just about to call for a cart to get the stacks of evidence upstairs when his radio crackled. He heard a Seattle Police dispatcher say, “Shots fired.. ..

Unidentified subject in camper at Seventy-fifth and Twentieth NE .

..” He never even turned the engine off, and instead wheeled his car around and headed to the north end of Seattle for the second day in a row. The address given on the radio was only five blocks from where Hollywood had vanished twenty hours earlier.

Thanksgiving Day, 1996, was no holiday for the Seattle FBI office and the Seattle Police Homicide Unit. Steve Meyers had admitted that the other wounded suspect in Harbor view Hospital was named Mark Biggins and that he was from California. The FBI wondered if there might have been a fourth man the man who left the message on Scott’s answering machine during their search of Seven Cedars. He had left a San Jose phone number, and they asked a special agent in California to check that number. It turned out to belong to a latter-day Monterrey hippie commune where no one in residence admitted to knowing anyone named Doug. It was a lead that went nowhere. Trent Bergman, a Seattle police patrolman, was assigned to guard Steve Meyers in the hospital.

He sat outside his door, but walked into the room to see what the football score was. “Seven to seven, “ the prisoner said, and winced in pain.

“Where did you get shot? “

“In the arms.”

“You’re lucky to be alive.

“ Steve Meyers shook his head. “No, I’m ready to die, ready to pass on to the next life. I’ve been there already on several occasions and I’m looking forward to it.” Bergman stared at him, wondering if he was under heavy medication. “What do you do for a living? “

“I’m a sculptor, “ Meyers said bitterly. “What did you do before you became a cop? “

“I studied to be a pastor.

“

“Scott’s dad is a Baptist minister.”

“I don’t know who Scott is, “ Bergman said truthfully. “Scott is Hollywood, “ his prisoner explained, stretching out the infamous name.

“He hired me to work at his house and be a sculptori met him through my brother. He had me buy cars for him, and I found out he used them in bank robberies. This time my first time he asked me to be his driver. I was going to get twenty percent somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars.”

“What would you have done with the money? “ Bergman asked, wondering how anyone could risk his entire future for money. “I would have built a studio, and I would have given the rest to my daughter.” Earnestly, Steve explained that he hadn’t even been in it for the money. He and Hollywood had robbed banks, he said, to get back at the political leaders who were dragging America into chaos. His hatred for the government seemed intense, and he said Scott shared his feelings, that Scott had actually given most of the money he stole to environmental causes.
 
“How’d you get caught? “ the young cop asked, more interested in the football game, really, than in the prisoner’s life story. “I should have been the one to get away, “ Steve said. “Scott took over the driving after the robbery when I should have been driving.” Bergman didn’t see how it would have mattered who was driving, and he didn’t comment. The man in the bed was obviously bitter that he was the one who had been captured, and that this Hollywoodtscott was still free. Scott had bailed out on his friends, and now Steve, a brilliantly talented sculptor, had two mutilated arms.

In the repetitive dreams he had told his brother Kevin about, it was his legs that were lost. He wondered now if he could ever again use his arms to create anything beautiful. Mark Biggins miraculously survived surgery, and near midnight on Thanksgiving Eve, he had spoken to the officers guarding himchris Gray and Shane St. John. He admitted to them that his name was not Patrick John O’Malleywhich he had given earlier and said that he’d given the wrong birthdate, too.

“My name’s really Mark Biggins.”

“Where do you live? “ Chris Gray asked. “I won’t tell you that.”

“What’s your phone number? “

“I can’t tell you that either.”

“Are you married? “

“Yes.”

“What’s your wife’s name? “ Mark shook his head weakly. It wasn’t Annie or Traci or himself he was trying to protect. It was Lori, his daughter. But he would not say her name or give any information that might lead them back to her. He was deluding himself, of course.

There was no way now for him to protect Lori.

Now, it seemed very unlikely that either Mark Biggins or Steve Meyers would ever go home to their daughter sat least not until their girls were middleaged women. No one has ever doubted that each of them loved their daughters more than anything in their lives, and yet they had allowed their weaknesses, their bitterness, their excesses, their debts of honor to make them vulnerable to the ultimate manipulator. Scotty Scurlock was yet to be found. He could be in Canada, or east of the Cascade Mountains and headed for Montana. It was easy enough to cross the border into British Columbia without a passport, Washington’s relationship with that province was so friendly and relaxed that it was almost like crossing a state border. Scott didn’t have his passport.

That had been labeled and bagged as evidence down in Olympia and was now in the trunk of Shawn Johnson’s car. Still, by early afternoon on Thanksgiving Day, it appeared that Scott Scurlock might have made it out of the dragnet untouched. There had been remarkably few reports of suspicious characters from the neighborhood around NE Seventy-fifth.

Shawn Johnson had been heading to Seattle from Olympia, of course.

Mike Magan was getting ready to go to his parents’ home for Thanksgiving dinner.

He still had the strange eerie feeling, leftover emotion, maybe, from the power outage that had made his own neighbor hood seem like a ghost town. Maybe it was just because he hadn’t had any sleep. FBI agents were attempting to locate Bill and Mary Jane Scurlock in Sedona, Arizona.
 
They phoned Special Agent “Mac” Mcilwaine in Arizona and asked him to check the elder Scurlock’s home on Eagle Lane. He reported back that he and Sedona police officers had been to their home and found no one there. “The neighbors told us they were out of town for Thanksgiving.” There were a few Scurlocks living in the Seattle area. Sergeant Kevin Aratani, who had been right behind Mike Magan’s car as they raced up the shoulder of I-5 the night before, checked out a Scurlock family who lived in the same general neighborhood of the gun battle. But they had never heard of a Scott Scurlock. A former Bellevue, Washington, police department employee was named Scurlock, but she knew no Scott. Even now that they knew his name, Scott remained a phantom. Seattle detectives Walt Maning and Cynthia Tall man were in the 220block of NE Seventy-seventh, looking for the casings ejected by Officers Basley’s and Casey’s weapons as they fired at the fleeing van. As they worked, a woman who had witnessed the shootout approached them. She made arrangements to give a formal statement.

Then they walked to Seventy-fifth and Twentieth NE to take a statement from another female witness who had been taking out her garbage the night before when she heard a short siren blast, followed by shots.

It was now ten minutes to three on Thanksgiving Day. A passerby stopped the two detectives as they moved along the sidewalk, still searching for casings or other evidence. “My son found a twenty-dollar bill and a casing last night, “ a resident told them.

“But one of your patrolmen has already picked them up.” Cynthia Tall man and Walt Maning were standing in the 7700 block of Twentieth NE. They had seen two patrol cars with sirens screaming earlier, but thought nothing of it, the neighborhood had been riddled with Seattle police cars since the evening before.