Every Move You Make. M. William Phelps
available investigator find anyone named Louis Murray in the Sacramento, California, area. None of the Louis Murrays that Sacramento police found had any ties whatsoever to Evans. He likely had taken on an identity by random. Still, Horton now had a name to alert every law enforcement agency in the country. If anyone named “Louis Murray” was picked up for so much as spitting on the sidewalk, Horton would know about it.
When Horton showed up at Lisa’s apartment to meet her, he started talking about the past few weeks, briefing her on what was going to happen next. There wasn’t time to place a wiretap on Jessica Stone’s or Maxie’s. To get a judge to sign a warrant would take a day, maybe two or three. So he had to rely solely on the trust he had built with Lisa. He did, however, have Lisa sign a waiver, giving the state police permission to record any conversations she had over the telephone. Thus, Lisa was given a tape recorder she could easily hook up to any phone she would later use to talk to Evans.
As much as he didn’t want to let her go off on her own—particularly on such an important mission—Horton had no choice but to let Lisa drive her own vehicle to Jessica Stone’s, while he and two other investigators, DeLuca and Sully, followed at a safe distance—just in case Evans was in town watching them watch her.
At around 4:55 P.M., Horton, DeLuca and Sully, sitting in their car across the street from Jessica Stone’s, watched Lisa drive into the parking lot and walk into the bar.
For a few minutes, she waited nervously at the bar, nursing a beer and smoking a cigarette. Evans, Horton knew, was, if nothing else, punctual. If he said he would call at 5:00, he wouldn’t make her wait.
At about 5:03, the barmaid, a woman Lisa knew, took a call on the bar phone. A moment later, she said, “Hold on,” handing Lisa the phone.
Just like that, Evans was back at the helm, calling the shots.
“Gary?” Lisa whispered.
“Go to Maxie’s right now…. I’ll call you in ten minutes,” he said quickly before hanging up.
Horton, Sully and DeLuca then watched Lisa run out of the bar in a hurry, get into her car and take off.
Follow me, she mouthed as she drove out of Jessica Stone’s and passed them.
“Go,” Horton ordered DeLuca. “Let’s go!”
As Lisa pulled into Maxie’s, Horton told DeLuca to park the car far enough away so they wouldn’t be made if Evans was there waiting for her.
While they waited, DeLuca and Sully told Horton they felt Lisa was nothing more than a barfly who couldn’t be trusted to walk someone else’s dog, better yet run the entire show, as she was clearly doing.
“Why are we playing this game with her?”
Horton had to depend on his instincts. “She’s all we have right now,” he said. “We have no choice but to trust her.”
Lisa was in Maxie’s fewer than five minutes. When she walked out, Horton motioned for her to come over to the car.
“What is going on?” he wanted to know.
Lisa was frazzled. Shaking. Anxious. Unsure of herself. “I don’t know what…the fuck he’s up to,” she blurted out.
“Start by telling us what he said.”
“Now he wants me to drive over to that Irish Pub in Albany. I don’t know,” she added, brushing her fingers through her hair, looking around the parking lot of the bar, “what the fuck he’s doing.”
“Let’s go,” Horton said. “Now.”
The Irish Pub was a twenty-minute drive across town. Horton told DeLuca, who was driving, to stay back even farther. “If Gary’s waiting for her there…Well, I don’t know…he’s…Just go.”
Lisa drove into the parking lot of the Irish Pub and, wasting little time, hopped out of her car and ran into the bar.
CHAPTER 23
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