Every Move You Make

by M. William Phelps

  There was no magic pill or rational answer Evans could give other than to say he had worked out hard, day in and day out, and had always considered the life he led, and the anxiety and fear that shrouded him, a winning weight-loss program. Always looking over his shoulder, expecting to be “put back in a cage,” he felt the burden of that worry helped his metabolism. That, in itself, he later told a friend, was something he believed had everything to do with burning calories at a faster rate than if he were just some worker bee in the cubicle farm, wasting away at a desk, or a factory worker driving around on a forklift all day.

  When Horton and his team arrived at his house in Latham to prepare to drive to Vermont, he explained how they would have to scrape all inspection and registration stickers off the inside of the windshields of their vehicles, exchange license plates with ones from different states DeLuca had taken from the barracks, and remove any radio antennae. There was no room for error. Evans would be looking for any sign indicating cops were in town. He could sniff out the Bureau from anywhere. If he spotted a car in St. Johnsbury that even remotely resembled an unmarked police cruiser, he would abandon his rendezvous with Lisa in an instant.

  “There was one hotel in St. Johnsbury, Vermont,” Horton recalled later, “which worried me. I knew Gary would scope it out for cop cars. Changing those plates and removing those stickers and antennas seemed a bit overly dramatic and obsessive at the time, I admit. But this is what Gary had driven me to: as he was plotting every single move on his part, I was plotting every move on ours.”

  Indeed, each brought out the best in the other, despite being polar opposites.

  While the team assembled in Horton’s driveway and removed radio antennae, registration stickers and changed license plates, Horton retreated upstairs in his house to pack a bag for the trip. Mary Pat, his wife, had been on the receiving end of an often one-sided relationship for the past twenty years. There were times—like tonight, for instance—when Jim would come home unannounced and explain he was taking off on a trip out of state. No warning. No good-byes. Just a peck on the cheek and a promise he’d be home as soon as he could.

  Because of the secrecy surrounding some cases, there were even times when he couldn’t say where he was off to, or why he was going.

  Tonight was different, though. Mary Pat had known Evans on a first-name basis for well over a decade. Evans had called the house for Jim many times during the years and had written him several letters. Mary Pat had read the letters and answered the calls. She had stayed up nights listening to stories about Evans. A petite woman, attractive and motherly, home with two kids for the most part, Mary Pat and Jim met in high school and had been together ever since. A tough woman, thick-skinned, she was devoted to her husband and supported him 100 percent.

  Whenever Jim came home and had that focused look on his face, Mary Pat didn’t need an explanation, or some sort of glossed-over speech to assuage her feelings of concern. Without asking, she could tell how serious a case was by looking at her husband, and she never once stood in the way of his work. Additionally, she was well aware of the ordeal he had been through with Evans for the past eight months, not to mention thirteen years, and how important this particular event was.

  “This is it,” Horton told his wife, looking up from packing his clothes into a duffel bag, his eyes bulging with exhilaration and alarm. “I think we’ve got him.”

  It was a double-edged sword: both enthusiasm and the gravity of the situation were evident on Horton’s face, visible in everything he did. An unwavering sense of determination was obvious in the way he had, over the course of the last twenty-four hours, switched gears into battle mode. Nothing else mattered. For maybe the first time in the nearly eight months since Tim had disappeared, Horton was positive Evans had cold-bloodedly murdered him. That meant Evans was also likely responsible for the disappearances of Michael Falco and Damien Cuomo.

  When it came down to it, Evans was a serial murderer. Not just some thief who had become a CI throughout the years and had bartered prosecutors and cops for “good time,” using information about other thieves and drug dealers as currency. Evans was a vicious killer who would likely kill again if he felt boxed into a corner. Here now was Horton’s chance to sweep Evans up and, with any luck, find out the truth. Evans was considered a habitual offender and was looking at twenty-five years behind bars, at the least. On top of that, his bargaining days were over. The chances of him ever getting out of jail early for turning state’s evidence against another felon were nil. When he was caught this time, he was going to rot in prison for what would amount to the rest of his life—which worried Horton more than anything.

  In effect, Evans had nothing to lose.

  “Jim,” Mary Pat said in nearly a whisper, brushing his back with her hand, “good luck. Stay safe, honey. Okay?”

  Horton didn’t answer. He grabbed his bag and rushed downstairs, throwing it on the kitchen table, and went down another flight of stairs to the basement, where he kept his gun safe.

  It is against policy for a cop to bring a personal weapon on the job with him. Horton, though, had little time to follow rules. Decisions were being made on the spot. He would deal with the fallout later.

  He opened his safe and took out a sawed-off shotgun he’d had for years, grabbed a box of shells, and ran back up the stairs.

  “What are you doing?” one of his investigators asked when he got outside.

  “I need it,” Horton said. “I don’t care….”

  Mary Pat had wandered outside into the driveway to see everyone off. As if she were a mother sending her children off to school on a frigid day, making sure they hadn’t forgotten their scarves and gloves, she asked, “Does everyone have their [bulletproof] vests with them?”

  Jim nodded. “We’re all set, Mary Pat. I’ll call you when it’s over.”

  CHAPTER 25

  St. Johnsbury, Vermont, a Victorian-style village located about forty-five miles south of the Canadian border in the northeastern portion of Vermont, is remarkable for a broad variety of reasons. The land on which St. Johnsbury sits, shaped like an arrowhead, surrounded by the Passumpsic, Moose and Sleeper’s Rivers, appears to be untouched by urban revival and contemporary infrastructure. With only eight thousand residents, St. Johnsbury, at one time a thriving industrial monopoly, is today a quiet historic village that travelers pass through en route to Canada. Easily accessible from Interstates 93 and 91, buildings in downtown are a perfect paradigm of the care and eye for detail that builders had put into their architecture centuries ago. The streets are tightly cropped and laden with pedestrian crossing zones, monuments and cobblestone walkways. Buildings are constructed of red brick and century-old fieldstone. Storefronts are archaic in appearance, weathered and falling apart, yet aesthetically attractive.

  To a master criminal like Evans, St. Johnsbury was a wealth of potential. Antique dealers and artifact shops dotted downtown and its surrounding boroughs. A small village, with hardly any crime rate to speak of, St. Johnsbury antique shops housed some of the most expensive artifacts and antiques the Northeast had to offer. Evans, who would study antique magazines and take note of particular towns and shops, had recently told Lisa he was planning a “big score.” When Horton did a bit of research to find out where the antique trade district was located in town, it didn’t surprise him to find shops on just about every corner. It was not a stretch to think Evans had probably been in town for weeks surveying several different locations, maybe even befriending local antique shop owners, building trust and patronage, learning their vulnerabilities, like he had in the past.

  For Bureau investigators DeLuca, Sully, Horton, and NYSP undercovers John Couch and Mary DeSantis, the ride up north was deep-sea dark, seemingly endless, and “white knuckle” all the way. They had arrived, in two separate vehicles, at about 1:30 A.M. Tired and worn down by the trip, DeLuca, Sully, Couch and DeSantis were not all that sure of what to expect the following day. They were preparing to face off against
a criminal they now understood to be capable of just about anything, banking on the dangers Horton had warned them about during the trip. Still, they didn’t understand completely how devious and desperate Evans truly was.

  Horton, on the other hand, was in his element, at times expressing the excitement of a kid on his way to an amusement park. For those who didn’t really know him, mainly Couch and DeSantis, he gave the impression of a cop much “too excited” for the job, not eating, not talking too much, running on what he later called “contained adrenaline.” Horton was on his way to catch Evans after eight months of dead ends and thirteen years of playing cat and mouse. He felt Evans had fooled him all these years. Burglar? No. Serial murderer. As a former leader of a major drug task force, Horton—like the others—had been involved in his share of undercover operations, surveillances and break-down-the-door-and-barge-in arrests. Yet setting up an operation to trap Evans was, Horton later admitted, a different type of police work altogether. Evans was not your run-of-the-mill criminal, prone to make the same mistakes cops could usually depend on criminals to make. He was in a class by himself—and now, with nothing left to lose, he was likely ready to go down in a blaze of glory.

  “I had been chasing Gary on a full-time basis for eight months by that point,” Horton recalled later. “For the first time in the thirteen years I had known him, I now believed he had murdered several people. The stakes had changed remarkably in eight months’ time. I wasn’t some cop looking for one of my CIs to give up a drug dealer or information about a robbery he might have done—Gary was suddenly this cold-blooded serial murderer we needed to stop before he killed again. I had family members of victims saying some pretty bad things to the press about my relationship with Evans and how they believed I had helped him get out of prison early a number of times—which wasn’t true—because he had given me information about other criminals. Subsequently, many believed I had allowed him to commit murders.”

  Horton, who had an untarnished record as a police officer, not only had to clear his name in a sense, but he had to convince Evans—that is, if they could catch him—to talk to him about Falco, Cuomo and Rysedorph. All this, Horton was quick to point out, without having a shred of solid evidence other than a gut feeling Evans was responsible for their disappearances.

  “I knew he wasn’t going back to prison,” Horton added. “The last time I had seen him, he had just gotten out of prison after doing the longest bid of his life. He was crying like a baby. ‘I can’t do that again…. I won’t do that again,’ he told me. This was an entirely new deal for Gary and me. Whatever friendship we’d had was over. He would have killed me just as he would have killed anyone else—and I knew that going in.”

  When the crew arrived at the only hotel in St. Johnsbury, Horton told Mary DeSantis go in by herself, register all of them and check to see if Evans had slipped up and perhaps checked into the same hotel under his own name, or maybe as Louis Murray.

  I don’t like it, Horton told himself, looking around the parking lot, shaking his head. This isn’t good.

  The hotel was located just outside of town, the only one for miles. If somebody wanted to visit downtown, he would have to pass the hotel to get into town.

  Five minutes later, DeSantis emerged, handed out keys to four different rooms and said, “No luck, Jim. No Evans. No Louis Murray.”

  “I didn’t think it was going to be that easy,” Horton said, speaking in a more serious, businesslike tone than he had used the entire trip. “Everyone check into their rooms and meet me in mine in ten minutes. I need to go over some things about tomorrow morning.”

  Horton hadn’t expected to sleep. But as he sat on the edge of his bed, watching the sun rise the following morning, he didn’t feel the least bit exhausted. He had put all of his resources—not to mention eight months’ worth of coddling Lisa Morris, kissing her ass, overlooking petty crimes she had committed—into this one day, hoping it would pay off, and here it was, just like that, game time.

  I can’t believe this, he thought. McDonald’s…full of people…high noon…the O.K. fucking Corral…. A shoot-out in the middle of the day, in the middle of a little town in Vermont, Evans armed and desperate. Is he going to shoot us? Are we going to shoot him? Will a civilian get hurt?

  They were all possibilities.

  During a meeting that morning in his hotel room with Sully, Couch, DeSantis and DeLuca, Horton warned them of what he thought Evans was capable of if they cornered him in McDonald’s. They weren’t dealing with a two-bit druggie who stole car stereos to support a heroin habit. Evans was a professional thief who had killed people, Horton said with stern assertion. He hated cops. He hated the thought of being locked up. He hated, especially, anyone who stood in the way of his freedom.

  By 7:00 A.M., everyone was heading toward the local VSP barracks, which happened to be in St. Johnsbury. There would be one more debriefing before everyone took their places in town.

  The key to the success of the operation was for each investigator to realize the importance of his or her function in the entire scope of things. Everyone had to work in unison, or it was destined to fail from the start.

  “No fuckups,” Horton said in the car as he, Sully and DeLuca pulled into the Troop B parking lot. Couch and DeSantis were in a separate vehicle.

  As they walked in, Horton first noticed a huge wanted poster with Evans’s photo plastered on the front door. There he was: smiling, gloating, full of himself, staring right into the eyes of the man he had called at times “his only true friend,” his “brother,” someone “I love.”

  Horton stopped briefly before opening the barrack doors, took a look at the poster, shook his head and carried on without saying anything.

  Setting his notebook down on the podium, after everyone exchanged pleasantries, he began by saying how dangerous he believed Evans was at this point in his criminal career.

  “If we can, we need to take him alive,” Horton advised. “We need him to tell us what he did with Tim Rysedorph, Damien Cuomo and Mike Falco.”

  After describing what he assumed Evans might look like now, and some of the disguises he may be using, he said, “He’s armed. Believe me when I say that Gary Evans would crawl through a straw if necessary. He told a source of mine recently he wouldn’t be taken alive.”

  In all, there were going to be five well-trained cops to take down what Horton described to the team as one of the “most daring, intelligent, athletic criminals” he had even encountered. The odds were stacked in their favor.

  “Good, solid police work will prosper.”

  It hurt like hell to say it, but…“I can’t be anywhere near the meet. He knows me too well.”

  Another important decision Horton had made the night before was to not allow Lisa to keep her promise of meeting Evans. There was no way he could take a chance on Lisa’s safety. The only problem was, Lisa had already left Latham.

  “How are we going to stop her?” someone yelled out.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Horton said.

  He then explained exactly how the operation would be handled and where he wanted everyone positioned. One of the VSP troopers got up and sketched out a map of the town near McDonald’s on a chalkboard next to where Horton was standing.

  Horton took out a pointer and began going through where he wanted everyone positioned. A VSP Bureau investigator would be in a car in the parking lot of McDonald’s, sitting, reading the newspaper, eating. “If you spot him when he enters the parking lot,” Horton said, staring at the cop, “and he is, as I think he’ll be, riding a bike, or on foot, I want you to hit him with your car. Break his legs if you can, then mace him. If any of you can take him, I want you to mace him in the eyes.”

  Bruce Lang, a twenty-year law enforcement veteran, the VSP Bureau investigator in charge, was at first startled by Horton’s words. “Break his legs? Hit him with your car?”

  Horton looked at Lang, “Are you all right with that, Lieutenant?”

  Lang
shook his head. Smiled. “Cool.”

  The rest of the team, sitting, listening, began to chuckle.

  “I’m dead serious here,” Horton reaffirmed. “It’s no joke. If one of you can run him down with your car, hit him with the door or drive into him and break his fucking legs, do it. That’ll save any shots being fired or Mace flying around.”

  It was then explained in great detail why Horton wanted everyone in their positions by 10:00 A.M., and why he wanted Evans’s legs broken if possible.

  “He’ll show up early to conduct countersurveillance. He may look different.” Horton paused a moment. “Do not make a move unless you are absolutely sure you can take him.” In as serious a tone as he could manage, he added, “Safety will take place in this order”—he looked down at a note he had written the night before—“Yours first. The public’s next. Evans’s last.” He paused before concluding: “Everyone wears a bulletproof vest.”

  After he finished, Lang walked over.

  “Thanks for your help, Bruce,” Horton said, shaking his hand. “Listen, I need an ambulance crew standing by. Where’s the closest hospital?”

  Lang, surprised by the apparent gravity of the situation, said, “Right near town, Jim. Why? What’s up?”

  “I want a helicopter ready, too. Just in case one of our guys needs it. I want the best care available in the shortest time possible. Someone may get shot.”

  Lang took a step back. Raised his eyebrows. Whoa. And for the first time, having only hours invested in Evans, understood just how dangerous things could get.

  When Horton had a chance to collect his thoughts after the briefing, he sat down and began to worry that, as positive as he had sounded regarding his feelings about capturing Evans, he began to consider the possibility of it not happening. There were too many variables. So many things could go wrong. Evans was too damn smart to walk right into a trap.