Читать книгу Every Move You Make - M. William Phelps - Страница 22

Throughout the years, Evans had juggled scores of women. He liked to brag to Horton about all the women he had slept with. Most of them, he said, were nothing but “whores”—a “piece of ass” he could call every once in a while for some fun. Bedding down with women was a game to Evans, a challenge. There was one time Horton stopped at a hotel room Evans had been renting and Evans handed him a photo of himself and a rather good-looking blonde. They were blasting around the ocean on Jet Skis. “I had that photo taken two days ago,” Evans boasted, “in Florida!” He seemed proud of the fact that he could pick up a woman on a Friday night, fly down to Florida for the weekend, “bang her a few times” and return home the following Monday—an all-expense-paid weekend vacation, courtesy of whichever antique shop owner—who had undoubtedly spent his life building his business—Evans had pillaged.

Other times, Evans would show Horton photos of different women and his demeanor would change entirely. He sometimes became docile, as if he had invested his emotions in the woman and she had let him down. One of those women was Doris Sheehan, a twenty-six-year-old brunette Evans had dated throughout the years. In one of his letters to Horton, Evans talked about Sheehan as though she had been the only woman he had ever loved. A bit on the chunky side at five feet three inches, 140 pounds, Sheehan’s blue eyes accentuated the beauty of her pudgy yet cute face. She had been arrested for a few DWIs, but other than that she was just a young and naive local girl Evans had won over with his charm and his showering of stolen jewelry.

A local Troy woman who knew Sheehan later said she was “all about material things. She never loved Gary, but loved what Gary could provide her with.”

When Horton found Sheehan in late October, after locating her through Evans’s prison visiting list, she was apprehensive and unresponsive to most of his questions. She had obviously been trained by Evans to keep her mouth shut if the cops ever came knocking.

“I haven’t seen Gary,” she said when Horton asked, “since before summer. But,” she added, “I spoke to him a few weeks ago.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much. I told him to pay me the five hundred he owed me for back rent. He said he was leaving. He told me I could have his truck. A day later, it was parked in my driveway.”

Evans had lived with Sheehan in her trailer for a brief period. When Horton found her, she had already hooked up with another man whom she referred to as her “fiancé.” They were preparing to move to Florida.

Sheehan had also rented a unit at the Spare Room II back on September 19, 1996, but when the Bureau checked it out, it was empty.

In the end, Doris Sheehan could offer only one more false glimmer of hope.

There was a name on that same prison visitor’s list that had been bothering Horton ever since he had seen it. A young kid in his twenties with no criminal record had visited Evans a few times during his last stay in prison. When the Bureau tracked the kid down, he said Evans had recently been to his house in upstate New York to pay him and his father a visit. The connection between the kid, his father and Evans, Horton soon found out, was work-related. Evans had done some tree work for the family at one time and the three of them had been friends ever since. They liked Evans, the kid and his father said. “He was pleasant. Nice guy. Never bothered anyone. He worked hard.”

According to the kid, Evans could scale a tree like a squirrel.

“When he came over the last time, what did he say?”

“Well, he just wanted to stop by to say that he had always liked us and that we would probably never see him again.”

“That was it?”

“Yeah. Then he left.”

Horton continued to work on Lisa, stopping by her apartment when he could to see if she would willingly volunteer any new information about Evans’s whereabouts. When he saw her after she had been identified at Spare Room II during the Bureau’s surveillance, he wondered why she had gone there and what her purpose was. Undoubtedly, Evans had put her up to it.

“Were you going to pay Tim Rysedorph’s bill?” Horton asked. “I don’t understand what’s going on here.”

“No. I was going to rent a space.”

“All right, Lisa, tell me what’s going on here. I’m not an asshole.”

Lisa paused. Then, “Gary sent me to pay the bill. But he asked me to do it before he left. It’s not like he called and ordered me to do it.”

“That’s it? Nothing else?” Horton knew she was lying. He sensed Evans was pulling her strings, like maybe he was monitoring the entire situation from afar.

“Well, I did want to rent a space for myself—I’m cramped here in the apartment, as you can see.”

Lisa’s apartment was always neat and clean. She had some junk piled in a spare bedroom, but it was nothing overwhelming. What was more, she could barely scrape together eight dollars to buy a six-pack and a pack of cigarettes, better yet come up with $65 or $70 every month for a storage space.

But Horton didn’t want to press her. Over the next week, he pestered her about it, but she stuck to her story. He left the subject alone because he didn’t want to jeopardize the rapport he had already spent weeks building.

“I wanted her to find Gary for me,” Horton said later. “I was using her for that purpose only. The money I was giving her out of my own pocket, the conversations I had with her, acting sympathetic to her situation, was all part of my strategy.”

Bureau investigators Chuck DeLuca and Bud York had been on pawnshop detail for a few days trying to locate any stolen property in the region that had been sold recently. Pawnshops were one of the most frequent places Evans liked to fence stolen property. Pawnshop detail included a biweekly filtering of the pawnshops in the area to see if any known stolen items had been bought or sold. Pawnshop owners—although many often find ways to get around the system—are mandated by New York state law to fill out a form for each item they buy or sell. Local police stop by periodically to see if any items on the list match any items reported stolen. All of that information is then keyed into a main database.

Under Horton’s direction, DeLuca and York took a ride to the Albany Police Department (APD) to see what they could find out. The APD had a large database of pawnshop information.

With the tap of just a few key strokes, they turned up two names inside the first few minutes of their search: Tim Rysedorph and Gary Evans.

Bingo.

What Horton couldn’t believe—when he found out—was that Evans had used his real name to sell a pair of gold cuff links to a local Albany pawnshop. Throughout the years, Horton knew of no fewer than ten aliases Evans had used, along with four or five different disguises. But here he was now, just months ago, using his own name to sell stolen property in, basically, his hometown?

It didn’t make any sense.

“Later,” Horton said, “when I asked Gary about it, he said, ‘I can’t fucking believe I made that one mistake—I used my own name.’”

Indeed, Evans had never, in about 2½ decades of committing burglaries and selling stolen merchandise to pawnshops, used his real name.

Why now? Horton wondered.

“What I think happened,” Horton added, “was that Gary was losing his mind at that point…. That certainly became clear after we found out what happened to Tim Rysedorph. But those cuff links were what got the ball rolling for us.”

Evans had sold the cuff links, valued at about $1,500, which had been reported stolen from a place called New Scotland Antiques, back on July 18, 1997. He had used his given name when he filled out the paperwork. On top of that, Tim had sold a total of thirty-eight Hummels (extremely expensive statuettes) between April 1997 and August 1997 to the same shop.

The connection between Evans and Tim, it seemed, ran deeper with every stone the Bureau turned. It certainly wasn’t a stretch now to believe Evans had felt at some point that Tim had ripped him off or was going to turn him in.

“And if Gary felt threatened,” Horton said Evans had told him on numerous occasions, “he said he would have to kill that person. He couldn’t risk jail time, he’d say, for what he called ‘scumbag criminals worse than [he] ever was.’”

If nothing else, the Bureau now had enough evidence to issue a second “local” arrest warrant for Evans, which would secure his return back to Albany if he was picked up outside the state or county. Troop K in Cold Spring, New York, had already issued a warrant, but, as Horton put it later, “that was two hours away. We wanted Gary here in Albany because, ultimately, we knew we weren’t going to find Tim without him.”