The Bureau knew Tim had phoned Caroline from the Dunkin’ Donuts in Latham at 1:03 A.M. on Saturday, October 4, 1997. The Spare Room II storage facility was, Horton had timed himself, a two-minute drive from Dunkin’ Donuts. In between both places was Lisa Morris’s apartment.
It was all beginning to add up.
Many witnesses had verified Tim’s presence at Dunkin’ Donuts, and Caroline’s phone records reflected the fact that Tim had called from the phone booth outside the front door. At 1:33 A.M., Horton knew, someone had accessed Spare Room II using Evans’s code. About an hour later, at 2:30, that same number was used again to depart the facility.
By 2:45 A.M., Lisa was climbing the walls of her apartment with anxiety, wondering where the hell Evans was and what he was doing. Evans had said he would call, but never did. He told her to keep the phone line open, which she did, but the phone never rang.
Suddenly, at 3:00, Lisa heard a car screech its way into the parking lot outside her window. When she looked out her bedroom window, she spied Tim’s Pontiac Sunbird, which she immediately recognized. Moving swiftly over to the sliding door in her living room, she then watched as Evans got out of the Sunbird in a hurry and looked around to see if anyone was watching him. Then he ran toward her apartment.
Frightened he might catch her watching him, she rushed over to the couch and acted as if she had been there the entire time.
Evans was clean, she recalled to Horton and Sully, when he entered the apartment. He was wearing blue jeans, a plain white T-shirt and black sneakers. Tim, she realized, was not with him.
“I have a lot of important things to do in the morning,” Evans said in a mumble of words. “No matter what you hear this time, it doesn’t mean I did anything to your weasel boyfriend, Damien [Cuomo].”
If Evans had a vice besides carbohydrates and chocolate-chip cookies, it was sex. He liked to have it several times a day, Lisa claimed: once in the morning, once in the afternoon, once at night. Lisa had gotten used to having it all the time and, she said without embarrassment, expected it. When Evans showed up at her apartment in the early-morning hours of October 4, she immediately told him she wanted to “make love.” Evans, though, who hadn’t slept with her for a few days, said he couldn’t because he had an “upset stomach,” adding, “I have a lot on my mind.”
She was shocked.
“Gary never had any problems in the past which would preclude him from having sex with me,” she explained. “Basically, this was the first time Gary had ever said no to me.”
When Evans denied Lisa one of the only true innocent pleasures she had left in life, she began to cry.
“I’m leaving before Wednesday,” he said. “I’ll make sure I fuck you before then. I can’t even begin to tell you how bad things are this time. I can’t go back to prison for twenty-five years. I’m not doing that….”
Later that morning, Evans woke up and, over coffee, told Lisa that “things are really fucked up this time. I am going to be in the newspapers and they are going to say bad things about Falco and Damien. Jim Horton will be knocking on your door. Don’t mention T.J. Maxx parking lot, and don’t say anything about seeing my partner’s car in your lot or T.J. Maxx. Do you fucking understand me?”
Lisa said yes.
After that, they talked about where Lisa was going to spend her morning. Evans suggested she go to a friend’s house while he did “some things.”
“The worst is yet to come,” he added before they parted ways. “But I will tell you before I leave the area for good.”
Leaving, Lisa made a mental note of seeing Tim’s car in the adjacent parking lot. Evans’s truck, she remembered, was parked in front of her apartment.
Tim, of course, was nowhere to be found.
Horton had an admirable capacity for getting people to reveal their innermost secrets. Perhaps it came from his days as one of the NYSP’s top polygraphists, sitting all those hours behind a machine, watching a needle flicker back and forth like a metronome, asking questions of people while it judged truth and lies. Perhaps he acquired the skill as a hostage negotiator. Whatever the case, he had an extraordinary talent for empathizing with just about anyone.
There was one time in 1989 when he was asked to respond to the Twin Bridges on I-87 near Albany. A nineteen-year-old kid had scaled a 180-foot trestle of a bridge and was sitting on the edge with one end of a rope tied around his neck and the other attached to the bridge.
He was threatening to jump.
After about ninety minutes of just talking to the kid about life, the kid looked at Horton and said, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be gay?”
“No,” Horton said. “But I can see how upset you are and feel your anger.”
The kid then admitted he had just told his family and friends he was gay, but they didn’t take it so well.
In the end, Horton talked him down.
The next day, he visited the kid in the psychiatric ward and reinforced the advice he had given him the previous day. For years after, the kid called Horton periodically to thank him. The following year, Horton received the Brummer Award, the highest award for bravery a state cop can get.
Lisa Morris’s eye for detail, Horton acknowledged later, was exceptional. The last twenty-four hours she and Evans spent together had obviously affected her profoundly.
“Do you need something, Lisa?” Horton asked as they sat together and took a break from the interview. He could tell the past few hours had been emotionally taxing for her. Yet, with the amount of information she had already given up, he felt she knew more. Whether she realized it, Lisa was giving the Bureau a timeline to prove later that Evans was the last person to see Tim.
“You ready to continue?” Horton asked.
“I guess…”
At noon, on Saturday, October 4, Lisa said Evans finally called her.
“What did he say?” Sully asked.
“The worst is over. I’ll be up in a while.”
A short time later, she explained, he showed up at her front door wearing different clothes: jeans, a red shirt, white sneakers. But there was something else.
He was covered with mud.
“You’re not coming in here like that,” Lisa screamed at him as he tried to get into her apartment.
“What the fuck? Let me in!”
After washing himself off with a hose in the laundry room downstairs, she said, he returned.
The first thing Evans asked for, she recalled, was “cookies and milk,” as if he were a child who had just completed an enormous chore and wanted a reward.
“I remember,” she added, “his hands looking dirty—not greasy, but dirty.”
Although Evans didn’t believe in wearing cologne or deodorant, he was a fanatic when it came to hygiene. He hated any part of his body to be dirty. It was odd that he’d show up looking as if he’d just taken a swim in a mud puddle and it didn’t seem to bother him.
He was digging, Horton, pacing back and forth in front of Lisa as she told the story, realized. He buried Tim Rysedorph somewhere and then drove over to Lisa’s house and had milk and cookies. Jesus Christ.