“You’re going to get an incredible tip this week,” he said as he pulled her down to him.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Sunday, April 13
The songbirds were chirping with purpose and the eastern sky was beginning to show signs of pink between the trunks of the pine trees as Doggett awoke. The air was crisp; Doggett could see his breath as he rolled onto his back to look up at the sky, but the lack of cloud cover promised a quickly warming morning.
He had used leaves and branches to cover himself on his bed of pine needles. The exposed surfaces of his pants and windbreaker were covered with a light film of dew. He had slept with no fear of being discovered; when darkness had fallen, he’d walked deep into the center of the 55-acre nature preserve, far from the service roads that bisected the forest of pines, hardwoods, and bushes at the eastern edge of the club’s property. Now that the first light of dawn was beginning to penetrate the canopy above him, he would be able to find the spot where he’d buried his supplies.
Somehow he’d always known it would come to this. Two murders on the golf club grounds—and several more easily tied to the same killer—might have stopped any other tournament, but the stubborn old men of Augusta National simply wouldn’t yield to reality. Doggett knew these men too well. He’d taken orders from them. He’d been discarded and imprisoned by them. He’d lost everything to them—and meanwhile they continued with their single-minded obsession to let nothing get in the way of their annual orgy of self-congratulation. That’s why he’d prepared for this day even before he’d been released from prison.
It had begun with his conversations with Bernard Pettibone, and solidified with his trial run at the football field in Statesboro.
After he killed Ashby and dumped his body in the pond at Amen Corner, Doggett had gone back to the open-sided maintenance shed east of the 11th hole and hoisted two sacks of high-nitrogen-content fertilizer over his shoulder. He carried them deep into the woods and buried them under a trio of pine trees that stood taller than any of the other trees around them. He expected the entire course, its fences, and all its facilities to be in lockdown after the body was found floating in the pond, but that wouldn’t matter. He could find his way back to those trees again, if and when he needed to.
Along with the fertilizer, he’d buried the farmer’s revolver. He knew he’d be back, and he’d never be able to get a gun through the metal detectors at the spectator entrances.
Now he had to find that hole.
Doggett stood up, brushed the debris off his pants and windbreaker, and looked up at the tops of the nearby pines. He didn’t see the trees he was looking for, which meant he had to go still farther east. The sun would be spreading beams of light through the woods in a matter of minutes, and he could already hear the sound of motorized vehicles moving around the grounds. The golf bag he carried made it slow going through the underbrush, but it was the density of the forest that made his hiding place so effective. The only living things back here were the squirrels, chipmunks, foxes, birds, and insects.
He came to the top of a steep hillside and again peered toward the east. The maintenance shed was probably a quarter-mile to the north; he’d crossed the service road that led from the 11th fairway to the shed the night before as he went deeper into the trees. The three pines ought to be visible if he went a little farther south, toward Amen Corner. After another five minutes of struggling through the underbrush, he looked up and saw the tops of the three pine trees towering ahead of him, just as he remembered them. His buried treasure was no more than 200 feet away.
He found the raised mound he’d left in the earth at the base of the center tree, undisturbed over the past week. He laid the golf bag down and found a flat rock, which he used as a trowel to scrape away the dirt. When he got down to the fertilizer sacks, he lifted each one carefully out of the hole, brushed the dirt off, and set it aside. Then he took the handgun from the hole and tucked it inside his pants.
He would have to wait until spectators lined the gallery ropes along the 10th and 11th holes. That would be at least another three or four hours. But he might as well get ready now.
He leaned the golf bag upright against the center pine tree, cut open the first sack of fertilizer, and began pouring the contents into the golf bag.
*
Sam awoke to the sound of footsteps coming up the creaky stairway to the Crow’s Nest. He glanced at the clock next to his bed: 8:45 a.m. He hadn’t meant to sleep that late. His knees were stiff from walking the grounds all day Saturday, looking for Doggett. Then he glanced at Caroline, whose naked body was pressed up against his back, her right arm outside the blanket and draped across his waist. Her caddie jumpsuit was on the floor, with the skarda name patch facing the ceiling.
He looked back toward the stairs and saw Mark Boyce enter the common room.
“Well, this might be a first,” Boyce said, looking through the open entryway into Sam’s cubicle. “I can see it in the Masters record book: First participant to sleep with his caddie in the Crow’s Nest.”
“I’m sure somebody like Dow Finsterwald has already done it,” Sam said sleepily. “What are you doing here?”
“I told you I always wanted to see the Crow’s Nest, and you said come up any time.”
“That’s right, I did,” Sam said, lying back on his pillow and covering his face with his arm. Caroline opened her eyes, saw Boyce in the outer room, and gave him a wave.
“There’s news,” Boyce said, suddenly turning serious. “We’ve been interviewing the prisoners who knew Doggett in Reidsville. There’s a guy named Pettibone who’s in for blowing up a judge. He said Doggett made him explain how to make a fertilizer bomb.”
“The same kind as Oklahoma City?”
“Basically. Doggett isn’t going to get a van full of explosives in here. But even 25 pounds of that stuff could kill dozens of people in a tightly packed crowd.”
“And he doesn’t have to bring it in,” Sam said, now grasping the scope of the problem. “It’s already here.”
“They’ve got tons of it,” Boyce said. “There’s something else. A Richmond County deputy reported an abandoned handicap scooter outside the men’s bathroom by the 18th tee. He doesn’t remember who rode it there, but it was sometime yesterday afternoon. Whoever was on it went into the bathroom and never came back for it.”
“Doggett?”
“Yeah. The scooter came from a rental place out on Berckmans Road. We talked to the woman who runs the place. She remembered the guy who rented it. Said he looked sick, like he had cancer. Totally bald head—but kind of tall. She called the club at about 7 last night when the guy didn’t bring the scooter back.”
“Did he leave an I.D.? Some kind of deposit?” Sam asked.
“No. The lady said he didn’t have his license with him. She felt sorry for him and let him have the scooter anyway. We showed her Doggett’s picture, and she said she thought it could be the same guy.”
“So Doggett might have been here overnight?”
“Yeah. We were going to bring a couple of K-9 units in this morning to start sniffing for him, but Porter said no. He’s still worried about a panic.”
“He’d rather let a killer run loose?” Caroline said, raising her head to look over Sam’s shoulder.
“I called the Atlanta office,” Boyce said, averting his eyes. “They told me to let Porter call the shots, unless I’ve got a definite sighting.”
“I guess Porter has a little pull with the state,” Sam said.
“You think? Hell, the governor plays here more than most of the members.”
“Maybe Porter’s got a point,” Sam said. “The gates are already open. You get a bunch of cops and dogs running around here with 40,000 people on the grounds, and you’re going to have chaos. It could make it that much easier for Doggett.”
Boyce
said the cops and security guards were being given a new description of Doggett: a gaunt man with a shaved head, about 6-foot-3, wearing a bucket hat and sunglasses, dark blue windbreaker, black pants. They were also being told that Doggett might be looking to plant a bomb somewhere. Anyone even remotely matching that description carrying something heavier than an umbrella should be stopped and searched.
“Meeting’s in Porter’s office in a few minutes,” Boyce said as he turned toward the stairway. “Caroline, I think Tony Petrakis has coffee and croissants waiting for you over at the CBS trailer.”
Sam and Caroline got out of bed and dressed quickly. Sam put the shoulder holster on under his jacket. At some point in the afternoon it would be too warm for the jacket; hopefully they’d have caught Doggett by then.
Caroline dressed in shorts and a pullover jersey. Sam watched her brush her thick black hair in the bathroom that he’d shared with Wheeling and Compton. He much preferred the current company.
They went down the Crow’s Nest stairs together and saw Clive Cartwright on his way into the Champions’ locker room. He glanced at them and raised his eyebrows.
“The club is getting rather broadminded these days,” Cartwright said.
On their way down the main stairway to the lobby, they passed one of the club’s oldest members, Henry Lockwood, arduously lifting his legs one step after the other up to the second floor. Sam expected a disdainful glare from the real-estate billionaire, but Lockwood merely glanced downward at Caroline’s legs, then back up at Sam, and gave him an approving nod.
In the parking lot outside the main entrance, Sam kissed Caroline. He wasn’t sure what kind of reception he’d receive, but she kissed him back with feeling.
“Come by the trailer when you can,” Caroline said.
“I’ll have my earpiece in all day,” Sam said. “If you spot him, I’ll know right away. Besides, Harwell can protect you from Tony.”
“It’s not that,” she said seriously. “I just want to know you’re all right.”
They kissed again and then went in separate directions, Sam toward the administration building and Caroline toward thepar 3 course and the television compound beyond.
The gun under Sam’s arm reminded him that last night was already a long time ago.
*
“David, if a man were going to hide overnight on your grounds, where would he do it?” Sam asked.
Leonard Garver and Dennis Harwell sat on one side of David Porter’s office with a sober-faced man wearing a neatly trimmed moustache who had identified himself as Curtis T. Dunn, head of the regional office of Securitas. On the other side of the room, Sam sat with Boyce and Robert Brisbane. They’d gone over the information about the bomb-making instructions, the scooter and the new description of Doggett.
Porter swiveled in his chair to face Sam.
“There are wooded areas along Berckmans Road south of the maintenance building, and south of the 16th and 13th holes,” he said, as though going over a topographical map in his head. “Then there are the woods around the par 3 course and back by the TV production area. There’s 55 acres of forest beside the 10th and 11th holes.”
“What’s back there?”
“Lots and lots of trees,” Porter said.
“Anything else?”
Porter told him about the auxiliary maintenance facility in the woods between the TV compound and the 11th fairway, where the club stored some vehicles, tools and supplies.
“Did anyone look around that area after Ashby and Scanlon were murdered?” Sam asked.
Harwell said the cops had done a walk-through in the woods from the 12th green up to the 10th tee after Ashby’s body was found and hadn’t seen anything. There were cops at the shed and greenhouse now, making sure the fertilizer didn’t go anywhere.
“There’s a lot of cover around here,” Boyce said. “Doggett could have stayed on the grounds last night, and we’d never know.”
“Our people are trained to keep patrons out of the woods,” Dunn said.
“Unless you’ve got agents every 10 feet, somebody could slip in there without being seen,” Sam said. “He could detonate a bomb within 50 feet of the gallery and no one would see him.”
“Should we send some people into the woods to look for him?” Dunn said.
“Your guys aren’t trained for that,” Boyce said. “We need all the cops and guards we have watching the spectator areas.”
*
The first sack of fertilizer filled three-quarters of the golf bag. Doggett cut open the second sack and poured in more fertilizer until there was about five inches of space left unfilled.
He opened the nylon chair sack he’d stolen from the women by the 18th green. Your container, he said to himself, remembering Pettibone’s tutorial. He poured the remaining fertilizer into the sack. Your fuel. Then he took the Masters towel he’d bought at the gift shop and tore it into two pieces, placing the bigger piece on top of the fertilizer in the golf bag, and the smaller piece inside the chair bag. He broke open the plastic shells of the cigarette lighters and poured the fluid onto the pieces of towel in the bags. Your accelerant.
He estimated that he was about a third of a mile from the point where he’d entered the woods the afternoon before. Given the rough, overgrown terrain—and the possibility of cops looking for him—it would take him about an hour to carefully return to the golf course. He started walking in the direction of the 11th fairway.
*
Sam left Porter’s office and walked out to the parking lot behind the clubhouse. The players on the range were banging out their warm-up shots on the other side of the grandstand. Heads protruded above the railing along the entire length of the top row of the practice range grandstand. Full house today, as usual.
Porter was right—a man trying to avoid being seen overnight had almost limitless hiding places to choose from inside the fences of Augusta National. But Sam would have chosen the 55 acres east of the 10th and 11th holes. If you were looking for cover, why not choose the biggest forest on the property?
Sam began walking east, toward the woods.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Sam walked past the short-game practice area, where several players with early tee times were lofting wedges over a white-sand bunker to the chipping green. He saw Dwight Wilson talking to his cousin Chipmunk, who was cleaning Al Barber’s clubs with a towel as the former champion hit lob shots. Dwight spotted Sam and gave him the thumbs-up sign, which Sam returned.
He decided to go back into the woods through the television compound, which would give him a chance to stop and see Caroline.
He showed his I.D. badge to the two security guards at the entrance to the TV production parking lot. It was still early; CBS wouldn’t be on the air for another four hours. A few technicians were walking around with clipboards, spools of TV cable, and Styrofoam cups of coffee. Harwell was already there; his unmarked squad car was parked where it had been on Saturday, near the cart shed. Inside the CBS trailer, he heard Petrakis’ piercing voice putting his announcers and camera operators through their rehearsal. He called out each hole number and listened to the responses through the console speakers as he watched his main monitor.
“Collins, 11 and 12—you’re up,” Petrakis said.
“Maybe…Yes, sir!” said the voice of CBS hole announcer Ted Collins, a former PGA Tour player. The call was the one made famous by Verne Lundquist two decades earlier, when Jack Nicklaus birdied the 17th hole en route to winning his final Masters at age 46.
“Good,” Petrakis said. “Timmerman, 13—go.”
“Maybe…Yes, sir!” the voice of teaching pro Buddy Timmerman repeated from the tower that overlooked the 13th hole.
Each announcer repeated the same phrase as Petrakis switched to shots from each of the closing holes. Though the grandstands had not ye
t filled on the back nine, Caroline studied the camera shots as they appeared on the monitors. Harwell was where he had been Saturday, standing behind Caroline with a cup of coffee in his hand, looking restless.
“How’s it going?” Sam asked.
Caroline turned and smiled.
“Nothing yet—but I’m starting to get the hang of this,” she said. “If Tony needs a break, I think I could fill in.”
“In your dreams, sweetheart,” Petrakis said.
Sam told Caroline he was going out into the woods to look around.
“What do you mean, look around?” she said. “You’re going try to find Doggett, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
Caroline got up from her chair and took Sam to a corner of the trailer.
“You can’t control this one,” she said, staring into his eyes. “You understand that, don’t you? There’s a thousand cops looking for Doggett. You don’t have to be the guy that finds him. You don’t have to get killed over this.”
“It’s my job.”
“Don’t be so goddamn stubborn. You’ve done your job. You found out who the killer was. Let the cops do the rest.”
“I am a cop,” Sam said.
Caroline had a grip on Sam’s arm, but the grip loosened. She realized who she was talking to—not Sam Skarda, the golfer, but Detective Skarda of the Minneapolis Police Department. It was like trying to talk to Shane. When his mind was made up, nothing could change it. No alternative points of view could penetrate. Why waste her breath?
“You can’t go in there alone.”
“She’s right,” Harwell said. “I’ll go with you.”
Sam preferred to have backup, but Harwell wouldn’t have been his first choice. Harwell had yet to impress him.
“Somebody’s got to get the word out if Caroline spots Doggett,” he said to the Richmond County detective.
“I’ll get a deputy over here,” Harwell said. “I was bored out of my mind yesterday. I need to get out of this trailer.”
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