No Way Back: Part 3 of 3. Andrew Gross

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 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.

       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.