Free Every Move You Make by M. William Phelps Page A

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