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Meyers hadn't been lying about the biggest treehouse in the world, this
was where Scott had created it. ) This house, Steve had told Shawn,
was the guest house where Scott welcomed family and friends. The
farmhouse had obviously been remodeled, the kitchen and bathroom,
particularly, were works of art with tile work that Steve had described.
Some of Steve's marble sculptures were in the yard among the sword ferns
and fallow vegetation. The FBI searchers found a dozen pairs of Converse
All-Stars black, blue, red, wine, even pink the canvas shoes that
Hollywood had worn into banks so many times, and tan boat shoes exactly
like those in a number of surveillance photos.
There were extra portable radios, a number of books, magazines, and
technical articles about shortwave radios and a frequency directory that
included police channels. Steve's bag was there, as he had said stuffed
with stacks of crisp $20 bills. Many, many stacks of $20 bills. They
found a passport in the inside pocket of a Versace sports jacket, more
passports, baseball caps, maps of far-off places, mineral spirits, a
catalogue for knives and optics, aviator sunglasses, rubber gloves, duct
tape. There was a rifle in a pink Veloro case, and packets of
ammunition. The house looked for all the world as if the occupants had
only stepped away for a few minutes.
The bed covers were thrown back and dirty clothes were piled on the
floor just like in any bachelor's pad. There was a bottle of wine on the
kitchen counter, a tea kettle full of water on the stove, and a bouquet
of fresh flowers. There were any number of banking records for William
Scott Scurlock, 1506 Overhulse Road. He banked, ironically enough, at a
Sea first branch. His credit cards were there, and, in a desk in the
dining room, they found a vial with a white powdery substance that they
field-tested and found to be codeine. Nothing sensational, it could have
been prescribed for a toothache. While they searched, the phone rang and
they listened while a man named Doug* asked the answering machine,
"Where is everybody? " and then left his phone number.
They jotted down the number. Was Scott on his way home? It was hard for
them not to jump when cars approached. A search warrant is an intensely
personal invasion, granted only when there is probable cause to believe
that evidence connected to a crime will be found. Such a search plunges
law-enforcement officers into the middle of someone else's daily life,
the sounds, smells, tastes, and habits of a stranger are there to be
touched and experienced.
Something that they didn't find that Shawn expected were newspaper
clippings about the bank robberies. Since Hollywood was such a showman,
it seemed a given that he would have saved the headline accounts of his
handiwork. "There was no scrapbook of his achievements' at all, " Shawn
said. Of course, they had only searched the gray house, there was still
the treehouse, the barn, and all of the outbuildings. They found books
on a number of unusual subjects. One was called How to Bury Your Goods.
Riffling through the pages, they could see demonstrations of how to
establish landmarks and triangulate measurements so that someone could
go back and pinpoint where he had hidden valuables in the ground.
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Another, along the same lines, was U.
S. Army Special Forces Caching Techniques. Other titles included New I.
D. in America, Credit Secrets, Serious Surveillance, and The Heavy Duty
New Identity Book. Far more troubling was a book titled, Kill Without
Joy, The Complete How to Kill Book. Clearly the games that Scott
Scurlock was playing were becoming more and more intricate. After the
gray house, the FBI search team swept the barn. The entry room was a
jumble of equipment, tools, building materials the kind of storage that
any builder or handyman might have. The room beyond the first room had a
massive safe and more storage-type items. But, here, the team saw what
looked like a plywood trap door in the floor. They pried it up,
wondering nervously if the man they sought was down there with a gun
aimed at them. But there was no one there, only a huge underground room
beneath the barn. It was a concrete, bunkerlike space, with plenty of
room for several men well over six feet to stand without bending. There
was no cash in the safe, but there were weapons.
Indeed, every place they searched on this sylvan property was rife with
guns. They moved around a corner, and past a curtain made of two army
blankets. Now they seemed to have found Scott Scurlock's makeup studio.
It was fully equipped with both makeup and ammunition. There was bright
track lighting over a counter that held mirrors, several shades of
theatrical makeup, fake hair, powder brushes, adhesive, gloves, knives,
guns, and bags and boxes of rounds of high-powered ammunition. Kleenex
apparently used to apply makeup the day before was still wadded up in a
cardboard box beneath the counter. Later, during the many long
conversations he would have with Steve Meyers, Shawn would realize that
this barn room must have been where he and Scott had come to count their
money after a bank job. ) If there was a "war room" in Scott Scurlock's
compound, this had to be it. There was even a huge stereo system in the
barn, perhaps used to blast out the music that would get their juices
going for what lay ahead.
Curious, Shawn reached over and turned on the system. A CD was in place,
and the room was instantly filled with the sound track from the movie,
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