No Way Back: A Novel (11 page)

“A 9mm handgun was also found at the house, which is now being tested to determine if it matches the weapon used in the shooting of the law enforcement agent in Mr. Kitchner’s hotel room. An unnamed police source suggested the make and caliber could prove to be a match.”

The same gun
. That was impossible. I’d left the gun on the bed in Curtis’s room. I tried to think back to the gun Agent Number Two had used to shoot Dave in my car.

I never saw it, of course. I was speeding by.

I read the section again as my stomach turned upside down.

“No, no, no!”
I shouted. “That’s a complete lie! It didn’t happen that way at all!”

They shot Dave in the car, not inside the house. And the gun from the hotel couldn’t be there. Unless . . . I began to see the script.

Unless they took it.

Unless they had taken it directly from Curtis’s room and used it on Dave. I didn’t have to even finish reading to see how incredibly incriminating this looked. They were framing me for Dave’s death, just as they were trying to frame Curtis at the hotel, make it seem like he was the one who had drawn on Hruseff.

“No!”
I shouted again. “No. That’s not how it was at all!”

“Ms. Gould was seen drinking in the company of Mr. Kitchner at the hotel bar shortly before they moved upstairs. A police spokesman speculated she may have panicked and grabbed a gun when some confrontation between Mr. Kitchner and the second victim took place in Mr. Kitchner’s room.”

Panicked? Of course, I panicked! The bastard murdered a man right in front of my eyes. He was about to turn his gun on me!

I clicked to the next page. “After fleeing the hotel, it is presumed Ms. Gould made her way back to her home, where after a possible altercation with her husband, she shot him as well, and fled. Her Range Rover SUV was reported missing from the garage.”

Gripped by nausea, I scrolled through the rest of the article, numbly coming to accept how this would all look to the world. To my kids! The whole thing had been twisted. Twisted to make it look like I had killed that agent in a panic and fled. Then made it home and killed Dave.

In horror, I saw how every detail about the entire evening would only back up this very scenario. Even Pam, who would attest to how upset I’d been about my argument with Dave the night before. How I’d mentioned this cute stranger at the bar. As if I’d scoped him out.

It was all,
all
going to back up exactly how they wanted it to look. I read on, until I crashed headfirst into the one moment I regretted from my own past that now was twisted to fit in too:

Ms. Gould worked in financial sales and studied law at Fordham University. She was a Nassau County police detective assigned to the Street Crime Unit, who resigned in 2003 after she and two other members of the unit were involved in the shooting death of an unarmed twelve-year-old boy in Hempstead. Ms. Gould, then 26, and two other detectives were brought up on charges of reckless discharge of a deadly weapon after Jamal Wilkes was shot five times while being chased through an abandoned building. Sergeant Joseph Esterhaus, the team leader, discharged his weapon eight times believing he had seen a weapon in Mr. Wilkes’s hand. He and fellow detective Thomas Swayze were charged but ultimately cleared in a departmental review. Ms. Gould, Wendy Stansi then, who fired her weapon twice, neither shot striking the victim, was not criminally charged and left the force. Ultimately, no weapons were found on him, only a plastic water bottle, prompting outcries of the reckless use of firearms and racial profiling.

Senior Homeland Security agent Alton Dokes announced that “as one of the victims was an agent of the Federal government, federal authorities would be taking the lead in this case.”

I stared at the screen, my body encased in sweat. I could only imagine what anyone reading this would now think of me. What my own children would think.

That I was a loose cannon. Of questionable moral character. That I had done this kind of thing before. That I had killed their father. With the same gun I had taken after panicking and killing a federal agent.

After sleeping with someone I had met at a bar just an hour before!

You have to believe me,
I had begged them last night on the phone.
You’re going to hear some things . . .

Not to mention that the very people now in charge of trying to apprehend me were the ones who had set it all in motion. Who had the most to gain by keeping me silent.

The most nerve-racking, sickening feeling knotted up in me. If I ended up in their hands, I didn’t know what would happen. These agents had already tried to kill me. Twice. And here I was at our house in Vermont, which was easily traceable. The news report had been posted only ten minutes ago.

I had to get out of here now!

I threw on some new clothes, a T-shirt and a blue Patagonia pullover over my jeans. I bundled a few other things together—clothes, toiletries, the laptop—and hurled them into a duffel bag from the ski room, grabbed a parka, and ran downstairs. I was about to toss them into the Range Rover when I realized my car was no longer safe to be driving now. An idea hit me. Our neighbor across the street, Jim Toby, was a New Yorker who kept an Expedition in his garage up here. It was a Thursday. He and Cindy wouldn’t be up. I knew the security code. We’d been watching over each other’s ski houses for years.

I started up the Range Rover and drove it around the back of the house, under the deck, so it was out of sight. Anyone who searched the house would easily find it, but at least someone just passing by wouldn’t realize I’d been there.

I lugged the duffel and my jacket across the street to Jim’s, a modernized A-frame from back in the sixties. I punched the security code—his and Cindy’s wedding anniversary, 7385—into his garage panel. The door slid up, and the familiar navy SUV was parked there just as I’d hoped. I tossed the duffel into the backseat and hopped behind the wheel. The keys were in the well; I drove out, closing the garage door behind me. I headed straight down the hill, my heart pounding insanely inside me, not a clue in the world where I would head. Suddenly I saw flashing lights appear ahead of me; two state police cars sped up the hill. I held my breath. My rational side told me I was safe in this car; no one would stop me. But my nerves jumped out of control. I closed my eyes and averted my face as they shot by.

I blew out a relieved but anxious breath. It was clear where they were heading.

If I’d only left five minutes later, I would have been caught.

I knew I couldn’t do this forever. I had one chance, and that was to turn myself in to someone who would hear my story first. I drove down the hill toward West Dover, the realization beating through me that I was a fugitive in three murders now.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I
t’s funny, how you might not speak to a person for years, someone who was once a key part of your life. But then, when you need someone in a moment of crisis, theirs is the one name that comes to mind.

In my case, that was Joe Esterhaus.

Joe took me under his wing when I was a rookie on the Nassau County police force, and I guess he caused me to leave it too. I come from a family of cops. My father was one. He and Joe came up together. My older brother too, out of the One Hundred and Fifth Precinct in Queens, and he happened to be on assignment in lower Manhattan and rushed into the South Tower on his twenty-eighth birthday when it was hit by a plane the morning of September 11. It was why I signed up, as a twenty-four-year-old bond salesperson on Wall Street, trying to give some honor to his life. I never really wanted to be a cop. I wanted to be a soccer player. I’d played left wing on the soccer team at Boston College. My junior year, we even made it to the Big East championship game.

Joe was one of those people in your life that you would always want in your foxhole, no matter how hard he pushed you or even yelled at you in public. He ran the respected Nassau County Street Crime Unit, and it wasn’t just that he’d known me since I could first kick a ball, or went to my First Communion, even my high school graduation. Or just because of my brother Michael, whose death made them all weep like babies. For them all.

It was that his best friend, my dad, Timothy Edward Stansi, was a first responder. He’d lost a son that day, and took a leave, and spent that last good year of his life picking through the ruins, never finding a sign of him. By 2003 he was dead from congestive lung disease.

That was why I was fast-tracked out of cadet school and put straight onto the Street Crime Unit. It was a way for Joe to keep a promised eye on me. He kept me under his wing. Though it didn’t take long for me to realize it wasn’t for me.

When Dad got sick, Joe became kind of a second father to me. Before the incident at the Haverston Projects, he was the first person I would have called, and if I told him I wasn’t guilty, no matter how it looked, I wouldn’t have had to say another word.

But soon after, things just fell apart. It was an angry time back then, after Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima in the city; everyone pointing fingers, shouting about racial profiling and trigger-happy cops. We ended up cleared by a department review, but he was forced to resign. He started drinking, and his wife, Grace, died from breast cancer. I went to law school for a year. Then I met Dave, at an advertising cocktail party. Our lives just moved in different directions. I suppose we both kind of reminded ourselves of a different past. Mine moved forward; Joe’s, well, his was never the same.

Truth was, I hadn’t spoken to him in a couple of years.

Still, he knew half the people of any importance on the forces in New York and on the Island, and the other half would probably say they knew him.

I pulled the car over on Route 100, not knowing where to go or who to call, my name out there in connection with three murders. I wished that my dad was around, but he wasn’t.

The only other person I could think of was Joe.

“Wendy!”

“Joe, thank God, I didn’t know who else I could call,” I said, the nerves clearly audible in my voice. “I wasn’t even sure this number was still good.”

“It’s all right. I’m glad you did. Wendy, before you say another word, you have to be careful about the phone.”

“I think it’s safe, Joe. I stopped at a market on the way. I bought a disposable one.”

“Good. That was smart. Wendy, we’ve all heard the news. No one can believe a word of what they’re saying. What the hell is going on?”

“Joe, listen, before I tell you anything, you need to believe me—what they’re saying isn’t true! I didn’t kill Dave, I swear. You know that. And I damn well didn’t kill that government agent the way it’s being said. It was entirely self-defense. He was shooting at
me
! I’m scared, Joe. I stumbled into something, and I’m being set up. I saw something . . . and now to keep it quiet they’re trying to kill me too.”

“Who’s trying to kill you, Wendy?”

As calmly as I could, which wasn’t easy under the circumstances, I told Joe everything that had happened to me over the past twenty-four hours. How I’d met Curtis at the Hotel Kitano bar and ended up in his room.

“First, I swear, Joe, nothing really went on . . . We kissed a little, that was all. I know how all this must sound—”

“Wendy, I don’t care about that stuff. But they’re saying you killed a government agent . . .”

“It’s true. But it was one hundred percent self-defense, Joe. I was actually in the bathroom, getting ready to leave . . .”

No matter how many times I went through it, I still couldn’t quite believe it had actually happened.

“Joe, he was trying to make it seem like the guy had pulled a gun on him.” I told how I’d identified myself as an ex-cop and how, instead of putting down his weapon, he made a move. “He was one hundred percent intending to kill me too. I’m sure of that. He might have been a government agent, but this was a murder, Joe. An execution. And I watched it happen.”

“Did you happen to see what agency the guy was from? No one’s saying.”

“You sitting down?” I told him how, before I left the room in panic, I pulled his ID. I sucked in a breath, knowing exactly how this was going to go over. “Homeland Security.”

There was a pause. I heard him blow out a breath. “Nice work, Wendy.”

“I know . . . Joe, all I could think of was that my life was about to fall apart if anyone found me there. When I ran out in the hall I ran straight into the guy’s partner. He took a shot at me and I panicked and ran. I went down the fire stairs. I don’t even know how I managed to get away.”

“You took the train home. Why didn’t you go straight to the police?”

“Because the police would have brought me right back there. I’d just seen someone murdered in front of my eyes! The killer’s partner had just tried to kill me too! I was scared to death. I didn’t know what I’d stumbled into. Not to mention, all I could think of was that my whole life was about to fall apart. If I hadn’t run, I’d be dead! I’d be dead,” I said. “But Dave . . . Dave would be alive . . .” A wave of guilt mixed with shame rose up in me. I started to sob again. I couldn’t hold it back.

“I know. I know, Wendy. I know exactly what you’re feeling. I know this is hard. But these are only questions someone else is going to put to you. And with a lot more at stake behind them. Why did you take the gun?”

“I didn’t take the gun,” I said, wiping away the tears.

“They’re saying Dave was shot with a weapon they’re matching up against the one in the hotel.”

“I’m telling you I didn’t take the gun, Joe. That’s all a frame-up. I left it back at the hotel.”

“So how did Dave get killed?”

I took him through how I’d made my way home, and how I realized I’d left my tote bag and that they had to know who I was. “I grabbed Dave and told him we had to get out of there. We were actually heading to the police, in the car about to leave, when all of a sudden these lights flashed on from behind us. It was them!”