Andrew Gross - No Way Back - Part 3 of 3

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.

It all still led nowhere.

I even found an article in the Greenwich Time about Sam Orthwein, one of the college students killed in the ambush, and another in the Denver Post : LOCAL UNIVERSITY MOURNS THREE OF ITS OWN.

In frustration, having read through everything else I could find on the subject, I clicked on it.

The article began, “They were three about to embark on the road where life would take them in just a couple of months, but where it led in the hills of central Mexico was to a tragic end for three promising University of Denver students, as well as grief and heartbreak for their families and friends who loved them.”

I looked at pictures of Sam, Ned Taylor, and Ned’s girlfriend, Ana Lasser.

I’d already read about Sam; he was described in Curtis’s article. Ned Taylor came from Reston, Virginia. He was a soccer player and a sociology major. Ana Lasser was pretty, with shoulder-length blonde hair, high cheekbones dotted with a few freckles. The article said she was a photography major at Denver. It said some of her photographs were currently part of an exhibition at the Arts Center. There was even a link to them. A follow-up note said the collection had been expanded to include some of her final shots, taken moments before her death.

I clicked on them, not even sure why.

I scrolled through Ana Lasser’s photographs of old-woman fruit vendors in their stalls by the road—sharp-cheeked, sun-hardened faces. I saw Culiacán, with its white stucco houses and church towers. I looked in the deep-set eyes of a young boy in a narrow doorway staring back at the camera. I realized this would have been just moments before the shooting. Was he one of them? One of those child killers enlisted by the cartels who a second later would have pulled out an automatic weapon like a toy and sprayed death on them? Or was he just staring back at Ana, the killers scrambling in doorways and on rooftops, knowing what, seconds later, was about to take place? His look held a kind of fascination for me.

“Ana Lasser,” I read in the bio accompanying her photographs, “who was tragically shot and killed along with two other DU students in Culiacán, Mexico, moments after taking these shots, was a senior at DU majoring in photography. She came from …”

Suddenly it was like the off switch in my body turned on.

I stared at the words that followed, my brain sorting through what it meant. My eyes doubling in size.

“She came from Gillian, Colorado …”

I read it again, the truth slamming me in the face that I’d been looking at it all wrong.

This is for Gillian, asshole… .

All wrong.

Suddenly the whole thing seemed to just fall into place. What Curtis had to have known that led him to Lauritzia. What she had to have known.

And more important, what Hruseff would have killed for in order to keep secret.

You have no idea what you’ve stepped into, he’d said as he raised his gun at me.

Now I did. Now I did know.

That that ambush was somehow not related to the Bienvienes at all. But to this girl …

Ana. Lasser.

“A photography major … from Gillian, Colorado …”

I read it again and again, unable to lift my eyes. This murdered girl, this seemingly random victim, who, I now knew, hadn’t stumbled into tragedy after all. But was at the very heart of it.

Who, I now realized, was Gillian.

I pulled out the throwaway phone from my bag and rushed outside. My hands shook, not from the late-October chill but from the sudden realization that Ana Lasser was Gillian. That the Bienvieneses hadn’t been the intended targets of that ambush at all.