Читать книгу Every Move You Make - M. William Phelps - Страница 11

Minutes before Caroline left her apartment to make her sister’s wedding on time, she phoned the Saratoga Springs Police Department (SSPD). Hysterical, she asked the officer who picked up if he could find out if Tim had been involved in an auto accident, or if he had been arrested.

“No, ma’am, I don’t see anything,” the cop said a few moments later.

At 1:42 P.M., Caroline sent Tim a message.

It’s almost time to leave for the wedding, call now.

Two hours later, about twenty minutes before the wedding, she sent Tim one last message: Emergency with wife, call home right away.

Tim never called.

The wedding obviously turned out to be an uncomfortable affair for Caroline, but she had to attend, nonetheless. Her sister counted on her.

Minutes after the wedding, she called the state police, the sheriff’s department and the Colonie Police Department, a nearby town Tim occasionally frequented. She asked the same set of questions she had posed to the SSPD earlier.

At the urging of the Colonie Police Department, the SSPD sent a uniformed officer to interview Caroline and write up an official missing person report. The SSPD’s initial thought was that the case would not amount to anything. So far, all they had was a husband missing fewer than twenty-four hours who had not shown up for his sister-in-law’s wedding.

It was hardly enough to panic.

Ed Moore had been a detective with the SSPD for the past twenty years. Promoted to chief later in his career, Moore knew his business as a cop perhaps better than a lot of his colleagues, and relied, like most cops, on his instincts.

When Caroline got home from her sister’s wedding early in the evening on October 4 and telephoned the SSPD, demanding it do something about what she insisted was her “missing husband,” Moore heard what he later said was genuine pain and anguish in her voice.

Moore spoke to Caroline briefly, trying to reassure her that he was going to do everything he could to find her husband.

After hanging up, weighing what she had told him, taking the sincerity she had displayed into account, Moore told himself something wasn’t right.

Tim Rysedorph had a good job, apparently loved his wife and son, had made specific plans to go to his sister-in-law’s wedding and rarely ever failed to come home from work—at least that’s what Caroline had claimed. To top it off, he had missed the wedding.

Something wasn’t adding up.

By Sunday morning, October 5, Caroline had called several of Tim’s friends to see if any of them had heard from him. She even had a friend page Tim and leave his phone number as a callback—just in case Tim had been screening his calls and, for whatever reason, didn’t want to talk to her.

Nothing.

At about noon, Lou called back. After hitting the streets and asking a few people about Tim’s whereabouts, he said he couldn’t offer much.

But Caroline, as worried as she appeared, began to float her own theory.

“Tim’s still not back, Lou,” she said in a rush. “I’m getting really scared…and, well, he’s probably dead because I haven’t heard from him yet.” Caroline was, she later told police, rambling on and on, just blurting out words as they passed through her mind, not thinking too much about what she was saying.

“What are you talking about?” Lou asked.

“They’re probably going to find him dead,” Caroline said, “in the trunk of my car at the bottom of the Hudson River.”

“Don’t say that,” Lou said. “That’s not going to happen. Or else, he’ll never be found—just like what happened to his friend Mike.”

Lou was referring to Michael Falco, who had been missing for about twelve years. Shortly after Falco introduced Caroline and Tim, he went out one night and never returned. It had been rumored that Tim and Michael Falco’s old friend Gary Evans, who had lived with them at the time, was responsible for Falco’s disappearance. Evans, who had been partners with Falco on a number of profitable jewelry heists, denied the stories, telling people Falco had gone “west.”

Caroline didn’t know what to say after Lou compared Tim’s situation to Falco’s.

“Like I said, maybe he’s in a place where he can’t call,” Lou told her.

“I called the police like you suggested and reported Tim missing.”

“Maybe you should call the police back and tell them you’ve heard from him?”

Caroline screamed, “No! I can’t do that! They will stop looking for him.”

“Calm down. Keep your chin up. Everything will be okay.” But Caroline could do nothing more than cry. “I’ll call you back at dinnertime,” Lou added, and hung up.

After that, Caroline began phoning the SSPD almost hourly, wondering what it was doing to find her missing husband. Tim had been gone for three days now.

Something’s wrong!

Although the SSPD is a full-service police department, fully capable of any type of investigation, Detective Ed Moore decided to call the New York State Police (NYSP)—if only to quell Caroline’s constant phone calls and inquiries. She was becoming quite the pain in the ass.

Established in 1917, the NYSP is one of the ten largest law enforcement agencies in the country, and the only police department in New York with statewide jurisdiction. The breakdown of troops within the structure of the department is rather extensive simply because New York encompasses some fifty thousand square miles of land. The division headquarters of the NYSP is located in Albany, with eleven separate troop barracks spread throughout the state. Since Tim Rysedorph lived in Saratoga Springs, Troop G, in Loudonville, had authority over the missing person report Caroline had filed.

NYSP troops, like in most states, provide “primary police and investigative services across the state.” Any cases requiring “extensive investigation or involving felonies” are referred to the NYSP’s principal investigative arm—the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI). In house, investigators call it “the Bureau.” The Major Crimes Unit (MCU), a separate division of the Bureau, is used for homicides and high-profile cases.

As far as Tim Rysedorph’s disappearance, the Bureau from Troop G in Loudonville, despite its reluctance of getting involved in a case of a married adult missing only three days, was brought in to assist the SSPD. Following up on a missing person report wasn’t what Bureau investigators liked to spend their time doing. But most investigators agreed it was part of the job. People went missing, for any number of reasons, all the time. Generally, the Bureau could come into a case and—with its manpower and carefree access to the latest, top-notch technology—solve it quickly.

Although missing person cases came in on a regular basis, the Bureau dealt mostly with narcotics cases, violent and serial crimes, child abuse and sexual exploitation matters, computer and technology-related offenses, bias-related crimes, auto theft, consumer product tampering and organized crime. Murder cases, Bureau investigators have said, are one of its foremost priorities, taking precedence over just about any other cases that don’t involve missing or exploited children.

Little did anyone involved in Tim Rysedorph’s disappearance know then that within twenty-four hours of Ed Moore’s call to the Bureau, every available Major Crimes Unit investigator from Troop G in Loudonville would be working on the case.