Caroline hadn’t been as forthcoming as she should have been about what else she knew.
Horton and his team of Bureau investigators sat around during late October and brainstormed over what they had learned the past week. Thus far, they had a wealth of information regarding Tim and the days before he went missing. They knew he had called Caroline at 1:03 A.M . from the local Dunkin’ Donuts—which was the last time Caroline, or anyone else, had heard from him. They also knew Evans had shown up at Lisa Morris’s apartment later at 9:00 A.M . He was dirty, gaunt, sweaty and scared. From there, they picked through the interviews they had done and pieced together the hours and days in between.
“With Tim not showing up for his sister-in-law’s wedding on that Saturday after he vanished, and Gary Evans,” Horton said later, “showing up disheveled at Lisa’s apartment on Saturday morning, Tim’s car abandoned at Amtrak, I knew for certain that Tim wasn’t being help captive somewhere against his will. He was definitely dead.”
CHAPTER 12
A search warrant for the two self-storage units at the Spare Room II that Evans and Tim had rented was issued on October 18, 1997. The goal was to obtain an arrest warrant for Evans, but the Bureau had to first find evidence of any burglaries he—and, possibly, Tim—had been involved in.
Inside the two small storage units Evans and Tim owned was nothing of any particular interest to Horton as members of the Bureau began to search them. There were some old books, a few collectors-edition Beatles records, several ceramic knickknacks and a few pieces of worthless jewelry. Essentially, the last person inside the storage units had, it looked like, taken what he wanted in a frenzy and left everything else scattered about.
Interestingly enough, though, Horton noticed, the unit reeked of stale bleach—and someone had recently cleaned a large patch of cement by the garage door.
Horton ordered everything in the unit bagged and tagged. “Get this stuff out of here,” he told several troopers, “and log it.”
The storage facility had video cameras set up near the entrance. It was an eight-second-delay device, so the quality wouldn’t be that good, but anyone who had entered or exited would be on videotape.
Horton ordered copies of the videotapes from October 3 through October 5.
A day later, after painstakingly watching hours of videotape, there he was, the man of the hour, entering the Spare Room II in his pickup truck. The video was cloudy and grainy, but Horton could see that the bed of Evans’s truck was full of items.
How did Horton know for sure it was Evans? For one, the license plate number matched. Second, Evans had a distinctive profile: the crown of his bald head was perfectly round, and he had distinguishable strands of frizzy hair protruding out from the sides of his head, much like Bozo the Clown. Additionally, Evans had shoulder and neck muscles so large they looked deformed. Most important, he had always told Horton he never allowed anyone to drive his truck.
When the Bureau matched up the codes Tim and Evans had been issued by Spare Room II for gaining entrance through the main gate, they found both code numbers had been used throughout the day and night of October 4. But the following Sunday morning, at some point after 2:00 A.M ., Tim’s code number had stopped being used. Only Evans’s number had been accessed after that.
As the reports filed in, it was clear that Tim and Evans had been partners in crime for at least the past seven or eight months and had pulled off several major jobs together. A Bureau investigator in Dutchess County, New York, reported that his team had been looking at Tim and Evans for some time regarding a heist in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The stolen property had turned up in an antique shop in Cold Spring, New York, and the person who purchased it picked out both Tim and Evans from a photo lineup as being the sellers.
Michael Siemsen
Nathalie Saade
Sharon Sala
T. Davis Bunn
Laurie McBain
Alexandra James, Stardawn Cabot
Susan Kiernan-Lewis
Tess Oliver
Emma Miller
Jim Gallows