Every Move You Make (11 page)

How did Horton figure out Lisa knew more than she was saying?

“Gary trusted her enough for him to go there in the first place with Tim. Why wouldn’t he trust her with more intimate knowledge? We were beginning to make a circumstantial case against Gary regarding Tim, even though we had no body. Lisa, as far as we could tell, was one of the last locals not only to see and talk to Gary, but she was sleeping with him and living in between Dunkin’ Donuts and the Spare Room Two. Because of what we saw as pillow talk, not to mention the logistics, we felt she had to know more.”

And she certainly did.

After Evans washed himself off and returned to Lisa’s apartment on Saturday, she said, he sat down on her couch with a bag of chocolate-chip cookies and a glass of milk. As he snacked, she asked him how long he was going to be around.

“I have a lot of things to do,” Evans responded.

A moment later, after finishing his cookies, he left.

At about 10:30 that same night, he called.

“I can’t stay at my apartment,” he said in a whisper, as if someone were listening in on the call. “I feel like I am going to be ambushed any moment. Can I come back and stay there?”

Lisa not only said yes, but encouraged it.

When Evans returned, he had a box of Freihofer’s chocolate-chip cookies—his favorite brand—and a gallon of milk.

“He was clean when he came back; he looked like himself,” Lisa explained. “He apologized for having to leave so abruptly earlier that night, and said he was sorry for being in trouble. He wanted to relax. So we watched a movie.
True Romance
.”

The next morning, she got up early, about 4:30, and made coffee. Evans, waking up to the smell of the brewing coffee, ran out of her bedroom and yelled at her for stinking the place up. Then he poured the pot of coffee down the drain and sat down on the couch.

Minutes later, after getting dressed, he ran down to T.J. Maxx. On his way out the door, he said, “I have to make a call.” When he returned ten minutes later, he seemed fine, more relaxed.

But fifteen minutes after that, he got up and went back to T.J. Maxx to make what he said was “a second call.” When he returned this time, however, he was “pale, panicked…and visibly shaken. The conversation had gotten him very upset.”

“They’re already looking for my partner,” Evans said, pacing back and forth in Lisa’s living room. “I’ve got to go do something.” It is almost certain to assume that the calls Evans made were to Caroline Parker.

An hour later, he returned with a duffel bag and a bag of dirty clothes. His shoes and pants were filthy, Lisa said. “There was dirt and mud in his shoes and on his pants.”

Evans then gave Lisa two cell phones and told her to throw them in the Dumpster when he was gone. Then he said he wanted her to drive his truck—“with gloves on”—to a local VFW bar around the corner, leave it and take a cab home.

Before walking out the door, he handed her $300 in twenties. “That’s pocket money for you,” he said. “I love you. I’ll keep in touch with you as much as I can for the next few days. I’m gone for good now.” Hesitating, his voice cracked. “You won’t see me for a few years.”

Taking off down the steps that led up to Lisa’s apartment, walking toward Tim’s blue Pontiac Sunbird, Evans turned and yelled out for Lisa to come to the balcony.

“Throw me some spray cleaner,” he said.

With that, he got into Tim’s Sunbird with the spray cleaner and a roll of paper towels and drove off.

Throughout the month of December 1997 and into January 1998, the Bureau followed up on whichever lead it could regarding all the new information Lisa had provided. To no one’s surprise, much of what Lisa had said turned out to be 100 percent true.

The one thing that bothered Horton most, despite all the information Lisa had given him, was the fact that Evans hadn’t contacted her yet. Evans had said “years,” but Horton thought for sure he would have surfaced by the end of January or February. But thus far, at least according to Lisa, she hadn’t heard from him.

Because Evans was officially running from the law and considered armed and dangerous, Horton began showing up at Lisa’s apartment more frequently and stationed a cruiser nearby whenever the state police could spare one. During some weeks, he’d pop in three, four, even five times, at various intervals throughout the day.

“I knew we had gotten everything we were going to get out of Lisa by that point,” Horton later said. “However, I needed to stay in her face and keep reminding her that I wasn’t going anywhere. I wanted to believe Gary was going to call her sooner or later and emerge from wherever he had been hiding. I could feel it. I knew Gary. He wouldn’t disappear entirely without first rubbing it in my face.”

CHAPTER 20

The brilliant spring weather that had fallen on the Capital District during the first few weeks of May 1998 mattered little to Bureau investigators working day and night to find Gary Evans. To find Tim Rysedorph—who had been missing now for nearly seven months—Horton and his team needed to locate Evans. Every lead compiled during the past half-year had been followed up on, but nothing new turned up. Frustration was mounting.

Sitting at his desk one morning, staring out the window at the Siena College green across the street, Horton’s growing concern told him that if Evans didn’t come forward and contact Lisa soon, they were likely never going to see him (or Tim) again.

“Gary Evans could disappear and, if he wanted to, bleed into the countryside and live off the land forever,” Horton said later. “I was worried he had left the country. If he did, we were finished. Or if Lisa had tipped him off about what I was doing, he was long gone.”

The reality of police work, though, is this: just when a case seems to be running cold, a lucky break pops up—be it something investigators had missed all along, or a new lead.

The break Horton had been waiting for didn’t come in the form of someone spotting Evans and turning him in, or his getting “stopped somewhere by local cops for a bullshit traffic violation.” Instead, it came in an unceremonious phone call to a bar named Maxie’s in Colonie, New York. This would lead to a nondescript, small package delivery a few days later by an unwitting UPS driver to a second bar, Jessica Stone’s, a hole-in-the-wall not too far from Lisa’s apartment in Latham.

On May 12, 1998, Lisa was having a beer at Maxie’s when the barmaid took a call from someone named Louis Murray, who said he wanted to speak to Lisa. Murray, the barmaid said, had been calling the bar asking for Lisa for the past few days.

Lisa would drop by Maxie’s from time to time, usually in the afternoons. Apparently, Louis Murray knew that.

When she picked up the phone and said hello, she recognized Evans’s voice immediately.

First Lisa asked him how he had been traveling without getting caught.

Evans’s name and photo had been plastered all over the newspapers and on television. Missing person posters of Tim had been posted everywhere. The newspapers had made the connection between Evans and Tim only recently and were running stories about the Bureau’s interest in talking to Evans about Tim’s disappearance. Horton had even considered listing Evans on the FBI’s most wanted list and appearing on
America’s Most Wanted,
a nationally syndicated television show, after it called. However, the fallout from such widespread publicity, he decided, might beckon Evans to sink deeper into seclusion.

Evans admitted to Lisa that he had a full set of identification on him, but said he didn’t have a birth certificate.

“How are you traveling?”

“Rental cars. Things are going okay. I’m traveling the country.”

“Gary…”

“Just listen, Lisa,” Evans said at that point. “In a few days, you are going to receive a package at Jessica Stone’s from somebody named Jack Flynn. Make sure you get it.”

“What have you been doing?” Lisa asked, ignoring the package remark.

“The fucking package,” Evans screamed. “Make sure you get it!”

“Okay. Okay.”

Evans then talked about the places he had visited and how he had been financing his trip. But the conversation, at least to Lisa, took a turn for the more serious as he began to discuss a pickup truck he had tried to purchase along the way.

“I had a problem with some guy and a truck I wanted,” Evans said.

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s just say that that
motherfucker
will never give anybody a problem again.”

Lisa was mortified. There were so many thoughts rushing through her mind she didn’t know what to do or say next.

“You there, Lisa?”

“Yes, Gary, I’m here,” she answered in a broken tone, full of confusion, shock and worry.

“How’s that bitch Rysedorph doing?” Evans then asked in a mocking, condescending manner.

“I don’t know what you mean, Gary—”

“Has anyone been around…you know, cops? What about Horton?”

“No. I haven’t seen him for months.”

By that response, Lisa had, maybe without even realizing it, come to terms with the reality that she was totally committed to Horton now—frightened and scared to death of the same man she had slept with and let baby-sit her daughter.

Evans didn’t say much more during that first phone call, but insisted he would contact her again soon.

When Lisa called Horton shortly after speaking to Evans, she said, “Gary just called me at Maxie’s. I happened to be there having a drink.”

It’s about time
, Horton thought.

This was the Gary Evans that Horton had known all those years: a criminal who just couldn’t let things be. “An egomaniac,” Horton said later. “Someone who loved to show you how smart and deceptive he could be if he wanted to. All he had to do was stay away [from the Albany region] and stay out of trouble. We would have never found him. But here he was calling the one person he must have known I would find sooner or later.”

Lisa explained how Evans had told her to “expect a package” delivered to Jessica Stone’s within the next few days.

“That’s good, Lisa. What else? Did he say where he was calling from?”

“Not sure…but he said he had gone to Alaska and found a job on a fishing boat…. He also said he went to South America. He was doing ‘small jobs,’ he said, you know, shoplifting.”

“Nothing else?”

“He said he was returning to Albany soon, and for me to expect the package to be sent by someone named Jack Flynn…from, I believe, Sacramento, California.”

“I need to be there to receive that package, Lisa,” Horton said.

Lisa didn’t fight the suggestion.

After Horton hung up, he called Sully into his office.

“I want you to find someone named Jack Flynn in Sacramento and see if he knows anything about this package. Who knows? Maybe he’s holing up with the guy?”

“Sure, Jim.”

“Send a Teletype to the Alaska State Police and let them know Gary might be there. It’s a long shot, but what the hell.”

When Horton finally had a chance to contain his adrenaline rush, and thought a moment about what Lisa had done, he recognized the fact that she trusted him now completely. If he had ever questioned her loyalty, this one phone call proved she was entirely on his team.

On May 14, the barmaid at Jessica Stone’s, a rather seedy little bar located directly next door to an off-track gambling parlor, called Lisa and told her the package she was waiting for had just arrived. It was a small box, the woman said, sent from someone named Jack Flynn. “I’ll hold it here at the bar for you.”

Jessica Stone’s was Evans’s favorite place in the Albany area to eat French fries, another favorite food in his strict high-carbohydrate diet. He loved the way Stone’s prepared the spuds. It only seemed fitting he would choose it as a place to make initial contact.

Lisa called Horton immediately. “I think that package from Gary is here.”

“Just wait. I’ll be right over.”

A ten-minute ride under normal circumstances, Horton couldn’t drive fast enough to Lisa’s apartment. From there, Jessica Stone’s was five minutes away.

Inside the bar, which smelled of stale beer and cigarette butts, it was dark and dingy. Horton took a look around and knew right away why Lisa liked it, but couldn’t picture Evans rubbing elbows with the barflies who frequented the place. With the exception of the women he dated, Evans hated people who drank alcohol and did drugs.

Observations aside, Horton walked over to the bar with Lisa and asked for the package.

Lisa looked at him as he held it in his hands for a moment and just stared at it. It was a cardboard box, about one foot square.
Jack Flynn, Sacramento, California
was written on the return address, just like Evans had promised.

Placing it on a table, Horton snapped on a pair of latex gloves and grabbed a steak knife from the table next to him to cut the box open.

Inside was a letter Evans had written on May 6, but, for whatever reason, had never sent. There were three small stuffed animals, several brand-new sets of Winnie the Pooh earrings, a few antique vases and a handful of photographs of Evans in various poses and places. In morbid fashion, one photograph showed Evans lying on his back inside a freshly dug grave, the photo of him taken from ground level, directly over him. His fists were clenched, yet both middle fingers were raised and pointed directly at the camera lens.

For everyone who wants me caged or dead
, he wrote on the top of the photo.
The free Gary Evans
was scribbled across the bottom.

It was easy to tell he had visited Seattle, Washington, because there was a photo of a dedication that Bruce Lee, the late martial artist and actor, had written to his wife, Brenda, and son, Brandon—a photo that could have been only taken at Lee’s grave site in Seattle, where the dedication is set in stone at the foot of Brandon and Bruce’s headstones. Evans was consumed by celebrity status and had often talked about his absolute fascination with dead celebrities.

One of the other photos included in the package consisted of Evans sitting in a large tree. He was wearing a tank top T-shirt, his large biceps, triceps and chest muscles easily visible, while his muscular thighs, like ten-pound ham shanks, burst out of the cutoff shorts he was wearing. He was smiling, sporting a full beard and mustache. It was incredible to think he had been on the run for so long but had no trouble maintaining the chiseled physique of a professional bodybuilder.