by Andrew Gross
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 News 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 blond 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.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
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.
She was.
I hid myself against the far side of the Explorer and pressed the number I had already loaded in. I was just praying he hadn’t already called the police on me.
It started ringing. The receptionist answered. “Harold Bachman,” I said, as soon as I heard her voice.
“Who should I say is calling?”
Who should I say? My name was on every newscast in the country. “Wendy” was all I came up with. “Just tell him it’s incredibly urgent. Please.”
My head spun in circles while I waited for him to come on the line. I tried to figure out just what this meant. The world had shifted. Curtis had to have found this out as well. That was why he had to find Lauritzia. To see if she knew too. Or maybe to get to her father.
In any case, he was trying to find out who the real target was that day.
This is for Gillian, asshole.
“Hello.” Harold Bachman’s voice came on. He didn’t sound so excited to hear from me.
“Please, don’t hang up!” I begged, desperation resonating in my tone. “I’ve found out something I need to show you. I know you said not to contact you again. I understand. I just don’t have anyone else to turn to, Mr. Bachman. Please, just hear me out . . .”
I was sure he was about to cut me off. I was already on the verge of tears.
Instead, he said something that lifted the weight off my shoulders and almost knocked me off my feet.
“I have something too.”
I stood there, dumbfounded, grasping the phone with two hands. “You said you never wanted to hear from me again . . .”
“I looked them up. Like you said—Hruseff. Dokes. You knew about him as well, didn’t you?”
Even in my elation, my eyes were filling with tears. “Yes.”
“I’ve been down in DC. I went to see Sabrina Stein. Do you know who she is?”
“She was head of the El Paso DEA office. Hruseff and Dokes both worked for her,” I said.
“That’s right. I know they’re covering something up, Wendy.”
“I know that too. And I think I know what that is.”
“Look, this isn’t a good place to talk,” Bachman said. “Are you local?”
“I could probably be there in about half an hour.”
“Not here. You can’t come anywhere around here. Somewhere public. Crowded.” He paused a second. “Do you know the Stamford Town Center mall?”
“I know it.” I’d been there from time to time.
“There’s a Starbucks and a bunch of fast-food places on the main floor. I sometimes take the kids. There are lots of tables and usually a crowd.”
“I can get there.”
“Grab yourself a coffee and take a seat outside.
”
The patter of my heart wouldn’t stop. “This isn’t a trap, is it? Promise me you’re not going to lure me there into a bunch of cops . . .”
“Not unless they’re there for me, Wendy. I give you my word.”
Then my heart began to soar, with the spontaneous, grateful exhilaration of someone who felt the weight of grief and wrongful accusation tumbling off her shoulders.
“It’s just after five,” Bachman said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Thirty minutes later, I parked the Explorer on the second level of the mall’s garage and went inside.
I was sure there were security cameras everywhere. But there was also no reason for anyone to think I’d be here, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be looking for someone who looked how I looked now. The mall was pretty busy, going on six on a Wednesday afternoon. Teenagers milling around after school. Families already out for the evening, heading to P.F. Chang’s or the California Pizza Kitchen or the movies.
I went down the escalator and found the Starbucks on the first floor.
There was an amphitheater-style seating area with dozens of people on the steps. I ordered a latte and took a seat at an open table.
My heart wouldn’t sit still. I hadn’t been out in public this way since Grand Central, and I knew what had happened there. I looked at the crowd milling around me. I averted my face as a female security guard went by, talking into a radio. I wondered if she knew who I was or was just making her rounds.
Then I heard her laugh into the radio and my nerves subsided.
It was 5:45, and the later it got, the more I worried I became that Bachman wasn’t coming. Or that this was some kind of trap.
It wasn’t until I saw him at the top of the escalator that my fears began to subside.
He took it down, avoiding direct eye contact with me, looking randomly around. Finally our eyes met and he gave me the slightest smile of recognition. For a paranoid moment it rippled through me that this was only a scheme and that in seconds the police and the FBI were going to be all around me. But he stepped up to my table, took one last glance at the crowd, and sat down. He was in a gray suit with his tie loosened. His eyes were hooded but honest and his face pallid and drawn, his expression exhausted.
I grinned. “You look like you could use a coffee even more than me.”
“Don’t drink it any more. Reflux,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Too much acid.”
“In that case I’m pretty sure dragging you into this mess isn’t helping any either,” I said with a hesitant smile. “Mr. Bachman, I appreciate you being here more than you know. I know you’re taking a big risk.”
“You might put it that way. Anyway, if anything happens, I’m just your lawyer and you were coming to me in order to turn yourself in—”
“I thought you said you didn’t want to be my lawyer . . .”
“I’m not sure that I do. But something changed.”
“You went to DC?”
He nodded. “I looked them up. Hruseff and Alton Dokes. I saw they were both there. At the DEA. In El Paso. At the same time as the Bienvieneses were killed. I wanted to hear what Sabrina Stein had to say. And to find out why Eduardo Cano wasn’t ever tried.”
“And what did you find?”
“That I think she’s lying. Or at the minimum, covering something up.”
“Which would be . . . ? ”
He adjusted his wire-rim glasses. Bachman had bushy, gray-flecked eyebrows that made him resemble a professor. Right now I couldn’t have cared less if he looked like Joe the Plumber. “That the government may have had a hand in the Bienvienes murders. And might even have deliberately let Eduardo Cano get away.”
“What if it wasn’t the Bienvieneses’ murders?”
He blinked and furrowed his brow at me. “I’m not sure I understand?”
“I mean, they were killed. But what if they weren’t the intended target that day? What if it was someone else?”
“Okay, I’m listening.”
I looked at him closely. “Why are you even doing this for me? You said you couldn’t get involved.”
He shrugged and took in a long breath. “It isn’t just for you . . . Don’t take that the wrong way. I believed you when you first came to me. I just couldn’t . . .” He took off his glasses and rubbed his brow. “They took my wife’s life. For no other reason than because she was a good person, who acted from the heart. We all know who was behind this. I want him brought to justice. I want to know why. If she stepped into the middle of some kind of drug retaliation . . . or, God forbid, some kind of government cover-up . . .”
I reached over and took hold of Harold Bachman’s arm. “I’m not sure that’s what it was.”
“Not sure it was what?”
“A drug retaliation. I’m not a hundred percent sure that it was even connected to the drug trade at all. Or to anything I might have been thinking a day ago.”
“Ms. Gould, I’m here . . . I’m breaking every vow I made to myself. And to my kids.” His eyes locked on me. “What did you find?”
“You remember I asked you if you had ever heard anyone connected to this with the name Gillian?”
He nodded.
My eyes lit up with vindication. “Well, I know who it was.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Javier Perez had worked security at the Stamford Town Center mall for two years now after dropping out of Southern Connecticut State University. Weekdays, he did the ten-to-six shift; two nights a week he was a gate guard at this ritzy residential community in Greenwich. What he really wanted to do was take the test for the Stamford police academy. He wanted to wear a real badge, not this useless steel-plated one. He wanted to trade in the radio holstered to his side for a gun. He had an uncle who worked on the force who he was pretty sure could get him in.
Driving around in a cart, keeping an eye out for shoplifters or teens huddled in a corner smoking weed, pretending he was some big-time authority figure, just didn’t cut it anymore.
Javier was making the rounds in the garage, checking the plates of those who were parked in the handicapped spaces or had pulled into unauthorized spots. The only reason he’d even slap a ticket on their windshield was that if his boss came around and found he hadn’t, Javier knew he could kiss that recommendation to the Stamford PD good-bye.
He wound the cart up to the second floor, stopping for a couple of sweet-looking mamas who walked by him in the crosswalk; he nodded with an admiring smile. Then his eye went to a black Mercedes 550 parked in a space blocked off with yellow lines.
Probably some hedge-fund honcho’s wife who thought the world owed her special treatment, just run into Saks to pick up some outfit that probably cost as much as his car.
Javier stopped and shook his head at the hundred-thousand-dollar car parked smack in the yellow lines. It was time to take out his ticket pad.
But somehow his eye was drawn to the vehicle parked next to it. A big, blue GMC Explorer. He recalled that an APB had been tacked onto the bulletin board in the office for a dark blue Explorer. A 2004. With Vermont plates. Didn’t say why they were looking for it. Just that they were.
This one had Connecticut plates.
At least one of them, Javier noted, checking the front. The front plate was suspiciously missing. And he knew his cars: the squared-off grill and rear lights were particular to how Explorers were made six or seven years ago.
Something about this sucker didn’t seem right.
A tingling danced across Javier’s skin, not far from what he imagined he’d be feeling when he stood in that starched blue uniform one day when they presented him his badge. He took his radio and called Victor in the office.
“Hey, bro, you know that APB we received yesterday . . .”
Javier was thinking that application to the Stamford police academy might’ve just moved to the top of the pile.
CHAPTER FIFTY
I told Harold what I�
��d found. That Gillian was never a person. It never had been.
It was a town. The hometown in Colorado of Ana Lasser, the girl who had been killed in the second car along with the two other University of Denver students.
I told him how I was looking through the photos she had taken just before she was killed when I just happened on it.
“Hruseff told Curtis just before he shot him, ‘This is for Gillian.’ It was never about the Bienvienes. They were the ones who just happened in. It was always about this girl. Ana. On spring break with her friends. They were in similar cars. Maybe that was it.”
“But Curtis went to see Lauritzia in the hospital,” Harold said, cocking his head, “and Lauritzia doesn’t have anything to do with that girl. And you were sure that’s what got him killed.”
“No. Something to do with this girl Ana Lasser got him killed. I think the reason he needed to see Lauritzia was to confirm this. Her father carried out the hit. He needed to know if Ana was the intended target. Or the Bienvienes. That’s why he needed to die.”
My eyes went wide and fixed on Harold. “Eduardo Cano wanted to get back at Oscar Velez, and he wiped out his entire family. But not just for revenge. What if it was also to keep him silent? To keep him from ever divulging what he knew? That this was never, ever about those DEA agents. That they just happened in, just as randomly and tragically as we thought the three students had. But because they were DEA agents everyone assumed they were the targets. But they never were. It was always about this girl . . .”
“Why?” Harold said, shaking his head. He was a lawyer, clearly a person who operated in logic, and this wasn’t making sense.
“I don’t that know yet. I—”
My gaze was suddenly drawn to the sight of two uniformed police officers coming down the escalator.
“Maybe she photographed something?” Harold postulated. “Maybe she saw something at the hit she should never have seen and got it on film?”