Читать книгу Every Move You Make - M. William Phelps - Страница 15

Horton and Sully figured there was only one reason Tim had been hanging around with Evans: burglary. There was no other purpose. Evans was a loner. He lived by himself. Traveled alone. And unless he needed a partner in crime, he never socialized with people.

From their brief conversation with Caroline, Horton and Sully knew she was either playing stupid, or was scared of aligning herself with stolen property, or she was in denial about her husband’s criminal activity.

When Horton explained to Caroline shortly before he and Sully left that there was a good chance Tim had been involved in some illegal activity with Evans, the relationship between him and Caroline “turned very sour,” Horton said later.

“No way would my Timmy do this!” Caroline had lashed out. “He’s a good father. He’s not a thief. He works his ass off.”

“Well,” Horton had replied, “if Tim has been hanging around with Gary Evans, he’s up to no good. Gary has never worked an honest job in his life. He’s a career thief. I don’t see Gary and ‘Timmy’ hanging out together, ma’am, if they’re not doing something illegal.”

As Horton and Sully approached Horton’s cruiser outside Caroline’s apartment, Horton, shaking his head in disgust, said, “Holy shit…here we go again with Gary.”

“What do you think?” Sully asked, opening the passenger-side door.

“We’ve got big problems. Gary’s gone, that’s for sure. He’s definitely left the area.”

Horton opened his door, sat down in the car and began to think.

There was a warrant out for Michael Falco’s arrest that had passed through several Bureau investigators’ hands over the years. Whenever Horton felt Evans was in the mood to talk about his crimes, he would ask him about Falco especially, seeing that they had grown up together in South Troy and were well-known partners in crime. Evans, though, had always denied any knowledge of Falco’s disappearance. In fact, he said, he was in prison when Falco disappeared. But a careful check of Evans’s record of incarcerations proved different. He had been incarcerated at Sing Sing prison, serving a two-to four-year bid for third-degree burglary, back on July 3, 1985. Falco had been reported missing about five months earlier.

But whenever Horton had questioned Evans about Falco, Evans would simply say, “Come on, Guy. I’m a thief, not a murderer.”

For years, Horton had no reason not to believe him, nor had he any evidence to prove otherwise.

“I can’t believe this motherfucker is back in my life, Sully,” Horton said as he started the car. “Tim Rysedorph is dead. Where the hell do we begin?”

“What makes you so sure he’s dead? He could just be off with Evans doing jobs.”

“Tim doesn’t have a record to speak of. Remember, we did a rap sheet on him. Gary always told me about liabilities. He doesn’t like them. He also told me one of the last times I spoke to him that he wasn’t going back to prison. Rysedorph—believe me when I say it, Sully—is dead.”

It was no secret that Horton had used Evans as confidential informant (CI) and kept in contact with him for the better part of the past thirteen years. Evans had even written Horton several letters throughout the years and Horton had, at times, written back. In those early letters, which Horton began to think about now more seriously as he and Sully batted around the possibility that Evans had murdered Tim Rysedorph, Evans had always made one thing perfectly clear: he hated prison.

Being a person who adored the outdoors, often sleeping in the woods and traveling on bicycle, being confined was the worst possible environment Evans could be placed in. He couldn’t take the discipline and conveyor-belt routineness of daily life behind bars. He needed to be out in the world, roaming, doing what he wanted.

Cops weren’t the only people Evans had to worry about. There were scores of local drug dealers and thieves who had it out for him because they knew he was a CI.

So with crooks and cops chasing Evans, Horton knew that finding him was going to be the biggest challenge. When Evans wanted to disappear, he did it with the ease of a snake in a cornfield. If he had indeed murdered Tim, there was a good chance he had left the country, or at least the Northeast. Disguises and obtaining false identification were two of Evans’s greatest skills while on the run. If Horton wanted to find him, he knew it was going to take some sort of mistake on Evans’s part.