No Way Back: A Novel (24 page)

She uncrossed her legs. “No litigator likes to take on a case they can’t win, Mr. Bachman. I’m sure you’re familiar with that. Especially one that can make or break one’s career. For several reasons, Oscar Velez’s testimony was a matter of concern from the moment he chose to defect. I think the answer to your question lies much more with the witness, Mr. Bachman, than with the United States government.” She glanced at her watch, reflecting surprise at the time. “Now, if you have no more questions, I’m sorry but I have to cut this short.”

“I understand.” Harold closed his pad and began to pack his briefcase. Then he stopped. “Just one more. There’s an addendum to this case that I found a little curious.”

“Which case are we speaking of, Mr. Bachman? Cano’s or Lauritzia Velez’s?”

“I’m sorry, but to me, Ms. Stein, they are becoming pretty much the same.”

“Well, as a representative of the United States government, I’m sorry that you feel that way.”

“The Homeland Security agent,” Harold said, “who was shot and killed in that hotel room in New York City a week ago . . . I think his name was Hruseff?”

Stein nodded. “That’s correct.”

“I was surprised to discover that he once worked for the DEA. Out of the El Paso office, as it turns out; coincidentally at the same time as the Bienvieneses’ killings . . . I guess that also means he worked under you . . .”

“And your guess would be correct, Mr. Bachman.” Stein stood up. “Ray was a good man. Very sad, what happened. And if I recall, there was a third person in that room. I’m pretty certain that when she’s found—and she will be, soon, I promise you—and all the facts come out, it will show that Ray was simply doing his job.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Harold said, and stood up too.

“Only I don’t see what that particular incident has to do with Eduardo Cano.” Sabrina Stein cocked her head. “Ray was working for a completely different government agency at the time he was killed. On matters totally unconnected with his past role—”

“The other person in the room . . . who Hruseff allegedly shot,” Harold said. “I think his name was
Kitchner
. . .”

“Curtis Kitchner.” Sabrina Stein nodded.

“He was a journalist. As it happens, he was looking into Eduardo Cano at the time of his death.”

“Into Cano?” She began to walk him to the door. “How would you possibly know that, Mr. Bachman? I never saw that come out anywhere.”

“Because he visited Lauritzia Velez. In the hospital, just a few days before his death.” Harold picked up his briefcase. “I was merely pointing out how this Cano seems to have his imprint everywhere. And how the two cases might be related.”

There was a moment of silence between them. Drawn out long enough to take on a shape, hard and stony, and even a pro like Sabrina Stein couldn’t hide how she was working to put it all together.

That was the moment Harold first thought she might be lying.

“Eduardo Cano continues to be a dangerous man, Mr. Bachman. A fact that I think you found out for yourself, firsthand. But to your point on Agent Hruseff, we all seem to cross paths in this business if we stay in long enough. Scratch any of us, and I suspect that’s what you’ll find. And now I’m afraid I have to move on . . .” She stopped at the door. “Once again, I feel like I haven’t been altogether helpful.”

“No, you have. I want to thank you for your time. But if you don’t mind, just one more quick thing. Any chance you ever come across someone named Gillian who was connected with this case?”

“Gillian?” Stein blinked at the name.

“Maybe someone connected to Hruseff? Or possibly another agent?”

“Gillian. No, I’m sorry. Where did
that
name happen to come up?”

“No matter.” Harold shrugged. “Just something this Curtis Kitchner seemed to have on his mind.”

“I see. Once again, I feel I haven’t been very helpful to you. Anyway, it’s been a pleasure meeting with you again, Mr. Bachman. Please keep me informed of what you find.”

She opened the door and they shook hands.

“I like your pin,” Harold said, noticing her lapel. “Looks Aztec.”

“Yes, it is,” Sabrina Stein said. “I actually got it while down there.”

Almost involuntarily she seemed to adjust it on her lapel—a turquoise and silver grasshopper.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

T
he Amtrak express train rocked gently back and forth, speeding to New York City.

Harold sat in the quiet car and took a sip of his vodka.

Mexico is an excellent place to commit murder.
He thought of what Sabrina Stein had said.
Because you will surely get away with it.

He had no proof, nothing he could share with anyone. Nothing that would make someone think he was doing more than just grasping at straws.

Just that Hruseff was part of Stein’s DEA team back in El Paso. And that it was
he
who killed Curtis at the hotel. Curtis, who was looking into the deaths of Dean and Rita Bienvienes, who were in El Paso at the very same time, and who was sure he had found something. Something that led him to Lauritzia Velez.

Which may well have been that the Bienvienes were murdered in Culiacán by Eduardo Cano—and with the complicity of the U.S. government.

Why?

Look them up,
Wendy Gould had begged him. Harold recalled her pretty but desperate face disappearing behind the closing elevator door.

They’re all connected. All of them.

That phrase kept on coming back.

All
of them.

As soon as the train pulled out of Union Station in DC, Harold had googled the other agent who was with Hruseff at the hotel.

Alton Dokes. The agent Wendy claimed was framing her for her husband’s death.

He couldn’t find much of a history on him, only a ton of recent articles that quoted him as lead investigator on the manhunt for Wendy Gould. But he did find one linking him to an article from the
San Antonio Express-News
, from back in 2008, a year before the Bienvienes were killed.

As a DEA agent, Dokes had been implicated in the shooting of a seventeen-year-old Mexican crossing the border from Juárez. The boy ended up being a drug mule, and the shooting was ultimately ruled justifiable. Dokes was fully cleared.

“Sabrina Stein, Senior Agent in Charge of Operations out of the DEA’s El Paso office, commented, ‘We are glad this episode is behind us and a dedicated agent is able to resume his duties . . . ’ ”

Harold took a sip of his vodka. So Dokes was there too.

All of them.

He was sure Sabrina was hiding something. But what could he possibly prove? This wasn’t enough to cast even the slightest suspicion off of Wendy. Even if he handed what he had over to the authorities, he knew it wouldn’t go further than the person he told. That two government agents had been in the same place years ago at the same time two fellow agents were murdered in Mexico? That, years later, they’d both had some connection to a journalist who had been killed? A journalist who was looking into that very story.

Scratch any of us,
Sabrina Stein had told him,
you never know what you will find . . .

The train’s rattling brought him back from his thoughts.

You’re crazy to get involved,
Harold told himself
. Look what it’s already cost you. You made a vow. To protect your kids. You’re all they have now.
This was over. He’d already seen what could happen. His wife’s desire to protect Lauritzia had cost them everything. They had nothing now, except themselves . . .

Harold finished his drink and gave the woman sitting across from him a pleasant smile. As he went to shut the lid on his laptop, he fixed on his screen saver, a photo of Roxanne. Her arms around Jamie and Taylor in their backyard, their sunny faces promising everything beautiful in life.

He could shut the computer a thousand times, but it wouldn’t shut it out.

Not completely.

There was one person who would know all this, Harold realized. Who might hold all the secrets.

Curtis had gone to see Lauritzia in the days before he died. It was time to know what he had told her.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

I
was down to my last few dollars. Hiding out in parking lots and business parks after dark, catching bites to eat at drive-thru windows. I realized that the first time I hit up an ATM, my location would be given away. Not to mention a photograph taken of how I looked.

But I was getting to the point where I really didn’t care.

I’d been in the same clothes for five days now. I also knew Jim and Cindy were probably up in Vermont by now, and there might well be a national APB out on the Explorer at this very moment. Every time I saw a flashing light, or a police car randomly drove by, my blood froze and I came to a standstill, sure that it was the one car that had closed in on me.

So far one hadn’t. But I knew I was on borrowed time.

Driving out of Stamford, I passed a tiny lodging on Route 172 in Pound Ridge, just across the New York border, called the Three Pony Inn. It looked quiet and empty. Just what I needed. I just said the hell with it and pulled in. I desperately needed a shower and to wash my clothes. And to sleep in a bed. The place was a family-run B and B, and the proprietors’ teenage son was manning the front desk when I came in, doing his math homework. I paid for a night at $109 with a Bon Voyage gift card I found in my wallet—one of Dave’s advertising accounts, which I knew to be completely untraceable. But my funds were running out.

The first thing I did in the small but cozy room was run the shower. It was amazing how just letting the warm spray stream down my body revived me with the feeling that I could get through this and that everything would somehow be okay.

I washed out my T-shirt and underwear and spread them on the towel bar to dry. I laughed to myself that if the police barged in right then, they’d have to arrest me in my towel—I didn’t have anything dry to wear. I looked at my face in the mirror. I hardly recognized what I saw. I put on the TV and curled up to the news, ecstatic to be in a bed for the first time in days and stretch my legs on the cool linens. There had been another massacre in a village in Syria. A New York City assemblyman was being sentenced on corruption charges. There was nothing on me. I was exhausted. I closed my eyes and fell asleep to the news.

I woke around three in the afternoon and called to the front desk to ask if there was a computer I could use. I was told there was an Internet setup for guests in the sunroom off the main lobby. When my clothes dried I cautiously made my way down. A woman was at the desk now, and she asked genially if I wanted a cup of coffee and I gratefully said that I would. I sat at the desk in the sunroom, decorated with a patterned couch, English roll-leg chairs, and equestrian prints.

There was an old HP computer there, and the first thing I did after logging on with the hotel code was to check Google News to see if there was anything new on me. There wasn’t, but I did spot a headline on Curtis:
HOTEL
SHOOT
-
OUT
VICTIM
HAD
TIES
TO
KNOWN
DRUG
TRAFFICKERS
.

I clicked on the link.

FBI sources say that Curtis Kitchner, the journalist who was shot dead in his New York hotel room after a confrontation with a federal law enforcement agent, had maintained contacts and carried on conversations with drug traffickers familiar to law enforcement agencies, some high on the DEA’s most wanted list, leading investigators to speculate that was the reason he was under surveillance by federal authorities.

Investigators now seem certain it was not Mr. Kitchner who fired the shots that killed Agent Raymond Hruseff of the Department of Homeland Security, and are still searching for Wendy Stansi Gould of Pelham, New York, who was believed to be in the hotel room at the time. Ms. Stansi is also being sought in connection to the shooting death of her husband at their home in Pelham later that night, but her whereabouts remain unknown.

So here it is,
I said to myself, the stream of misinformation that would make it seem as if Curtis was the bad guy and had instigated things and that Hruseff was merely doing his job. The article was from Reuters, without a byline. Otherwise I might have contacted the author to tell my side of the story.

I was growing more and more certain this all had something to do with the two rogue government agents covering up the murder of two DEA agents four years ago.

Hruseff and Dokes had both been at DEA in El Paso at the time of the Bienvienes killings. Four years later, in completely different jobs, they were both at the hotel with Curtis. It seemed certain they wanted something covered up. Something from their past, that Curtis had found out and had linked to Lauritzia Velez. Why else would he go to find her? Perhaps to find her father, who was connected to the Culiacán killings too.

Which was also connected to a person whose name had yet to come up in anything I had read or anyone I had talked to: Gillian.

I knew that until I uncovered who that was, all I had was just supposition. They’d sink their teeth into me the second they had me in cuffs. I had nothing, nothing except suspicion in the face of overwhelming evidence that I’d shot Hruseff in panic and killed Dave to cover up what I’d done . . .

Hell, I couldn’t even convince Harold.

Before closing the computer, I went back one more time to that article Curtis had written about the Culiacán ambush. Maybe if I just read it one last time, I might see what it was Curtis knew. I had to be missing something.

I looked at that shooting from every aspect I could find online. The newspaper coverage. The
Dallas Morning New
s did a series of articles on it, first casting suspicion on the Bienvienes. Then the DEA’s own internal investigation that cleared them fully, which was published eight months later. I looked at whatever I could find on Eduardo Cano and why his trial never took place.