Lisa was in the Irish Pub for only a few minutes when she came rushing back out in a hurry, jumped into her car and sped off.
Horton, parked about one hundred yards down the block, watching closely with DeLuca and Sully, told Sully not to move. “Stay back for a moment. Let her go for right now.”
Heading across town, Lisa didn’t seem to be driving any faster than she normally would.
“Wait until she gets a good lead on us, but don’t lose her,” Horton said.
As she worked her way onto the Interstate 787 on-ramp, heading back toward Latham, Sully followed close enough behind to keep tabs on her without making it appear as though they were tailing her.
“When you get an open stretch of road,” Horton said as they began to catch up, “pull her over.”
Lisa pulled over without incident and Horton rushed to the driver’s-side door and motioned for her to roll the window down.
Sitting, staring down at the steering wheel, she didn’t say anything.
“What the fuck is going on, Lisa?” Horton asked, leaning down, looking into her eyes.
“Gary’s back east!” she said in a panic. “Holy shit. I don’t fucking believe this.” She started banging on the steering wheel with her fist.
“What makes you say that?”
“He just told me!”
“Okay, relax. Talk me through this. What did he say?” Horton couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Evans had not only surfaced, but he was back in the Northeast.
“Gary said he needed my car to do a ‘big job’ in Vermont because he needs the money. He talked about meeting me…having sex…some hotel…I don’t know.” At that point, Lisa started to cry. Frustrated and confused by the events of the past hour, she mumbled something, but Horton had a hard time understanding her.
“Come on, Lisa. Calm down. I need to know where he is now.”
“He told me to meet him at the McDonald’s in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Tomorrow at one. I don’t even know where the fuck that is.”
“That’s it? He said nothing else?”
“He said he wasn’t going back to jail”—Lisa paused for a moment to light a cigarette—“He also said he wasn’t going to be taken alive.” She took a hard pull from her cigarette. “He’s got two guns, he said. I fucking believe him, too. He felt you guys were closing in on him. What the fuck am I supposed to do now, Jim? Huh? Tell me.”
Without a second thought, Horton said, “You’re going to meet him tomorrow. Go home right now. I’ll call you later tonight. If he calls you at home, call me immediately.”
“What am I supposed to do, Jim?” Lisa asked again. “I’m scared to death.”
When it came down to it, Lisa was setting Evans up. If he had ever found out what was going on, there was nothing stopping him from using her as a hostage to negotiate his release. Was he waiting for her at her apartment? Was he in town? Or was he actually in Vermont?
Nobody knew for certain.
Standing there next to her car, all Horton could think about was the photograph of Evans lying in a grave, sticking both of his middle fingers up.
“For everyone who wants me caged or dead…the free Gary Evans.”
When Evans told Lisa he wasn’t going to be taken alive, Horton knew, perhaps now more than ever, he meant it. Evans had never been known to carry guns. Suddenly he was saying he was armed. Any cop knows a criminal can become the antithesis of his prior behavior; he will do whatever he needs to do to survive; his crimes increase in severity if he feels the jaws of law enforcement clamping down on him. Evans, it was clear in his last letter, had been in “survival mode” for several weeks, trekking across country while thinking of what he was going to do when he got back east. There was no reason to second-guess how serious his intentions were. Horton had to believe he was prepared to do anything.
During a phone call with Horton later that night, Lisa talked about how long a drive it was to Vermont, and the fact that she didn’t have any money for gas. Horton promised he would send someone over to her apartment with gas and food money.
“I need to see him, Jim,” she said at some point during the conversation. Horton could tell she had been drinking. “I need to have sex…. It’s been a long time. Let me just meet him and have sex and then you guys can do whatever you want?”
“Lisa,” Horton said, “I can’t let you do that. Come on. Let’s be serious.”
Horton had no idea what he was going to do the following day. Here was Lisa worried about getting laid. Was she out of her fucking mind?
“Just go meet him where he said to meet him, Lisa. I need you to do that for me.”
“What are you guys going to do?”
“Nothing.”
As Horton hung up, he questioned what he was about to do. Was it safe sending Lisa off to meet someone he presumed to be in a desperate frame of mind? Of course not. “It was such a big decision to make,” Horton recalled later, “and there I was, making it in what seemed like seconds. Why did I do it? I went through several scenarios later: should I have told her we were going to send a female trooper in her place instead? I realized after hanging up with her that night, I had to truly think things through. In context, I had just sent a woman to meet up with a man I believed to be a serial killer.”
The next several hours were filled with making plans and securing the proper permissions from the white shirts in Albany. Horton needed to put together a team of cops to head up to Vermont. Slapping together an undercover operation at the last minute was hard enough, under these conditions nearly impossible. In actual fact, Evans was exhausted. Broke. He had been on the run for months. Now he was back in the Northeast looking to hook up with Lisa so he could pull off one more “huge” score. Horton believed Evans was trying to finance the run of his life. One mistake on Horton’s part and people were going to get hurt.
One of the first things Horton did was have Sully secure an order for permission to go out of state. He had to follow procedure by the book. The fallout, after catching Evans, was going to be enormous. There wasn’t room for failure. Everything had to go smoothly or it wouldn’t work. St. Johnsbury, Vermont, was near the Canadian border heading north. Two hundred miles from Albany, it was a solid four-hour drive. Much of the night would be spent driving.
Horton quickly collected a team of investigators he thought would best suit his needs. Evans was considered armed and dangerous. “I have two guns…. I am not going to be taken alive…. I am not going back to prison for twenty-five years.” Horton needed experience—yet he also needed cops Evans had never seen before. Most Bureau investigators had, at one time or another, spoken to Evans, bumped into him, or arrested him. Moreover, it occurred to Horton that Evans would most likely be at McDonald’s in St. Johnsbury by early morning, surveying the layout, conducting countersurveillance. There was also a good chance he would spend the morning traveling around town, looking for recognizable faces.
Horton had DeLuca and Sully already on the team, but he needed two undercover officers who could blend in with the general public in Vermont and walk around town unnoticed, preferably as close to McDonald’s as possible.
Undercover officers John Couch and Mary DeSantis had filled a variety of different positions throughout their careers in the NYSP. The one role, however, they fit into like a pair of custom-made shoes was that of Mr. and Mrs. Harley-Davidson. Couch had waist-long hair, a greasy-looking, unkempt beard and mustache, several large tattoos on his arms, and was tall and skinny; Mary, an average-looking gal, could doll herself up in a minute to look like a “biker chick.” Horton envisioned them trolling up and down the street in front of McDonald’s, holding hands. No one would give them a second look.
A Vermont State Police (VSP) trooper would be the designated walker, pacing up and down the street in front of McDonald’s with his dog, a K-9 German shepherd trained to attack on command. He would be dressed in sweats, sneakers, headphones, sweatband. A few local VSP Bureau investigators would be stationed inside McDonald’s acting as patrons, reading the newspaper and eating. Since Evans might recognize Chuck DeLuca, he would be set up in a local hair salon next door, while Sully, whom Evans also knew, would be stationed in the bank across the street.
Both would have good views of McDonald’s. And both would have shotguns.
Because of his relationship with Evans throughout the years, Horton would have to stay behind—miles away—out on the edge of town near the local VSP barracks. Everyone would be wired with a hidden walkie-talkie device so they could communicate stealthily with one another and Horton. From base camp, Horton would call the shots. No one would move without his order.
Before taking off to Horton’s house in Latham to meet before heading up to Vermont, at about 7:30 P.M., Horton called his team together at Bureau headquarters and gave a short briefing.
This was it. It seemed that the past thirteen years had led up to this one chance to grab Evans, bring him in and get him to talk about, most important, Tim Rysedorph. Once Horton found out where Tim was, he could question Evans about Michael Falco and Damien Cuomo.
It was never clearer to Horton as he sat in his office preparing for the briefing that Tim Rysedorph was dead. Evans, certainly, wouldn’t travel to the other side of the country with a partner and, most definitely, would have mentioned to Lisa if Tim had been with him. But he never did. Instead, he mocked Tim: “How’s that bitch Rysedorph doing?”
“Go home,” Horton told his investigators, “grab a change of clothes, and meet me at my house. We’re leaving in about an hour. Don’t be late. We’ve got a hell of a long drive ahead of us. We need to get up there tonight.”
In the interim, DeLuca and Sully had booked a hotel in downtown St. Johnsbury, and had called the VSP to notify them what was going down. Because it was after business hours, Horton had trouble getting cash to finance the trip, and had an even tougher time finding unmarked cruisers.
“I’ll fix our cars at my house to look as undercover as I can,” Horton said. “I’ll go to the ATM and finance the trip myself.”
Staring down at his notes, Horton paused before releasing everyone. He wanted to be sure he didn’t cause alarm, but he had to make his investigators realize how serious the next twenty-four hours were going to be.
“Everything has to go perfectly,” he concluded, “there can be no mistakes.”