No Way Back

by Andrew Gross

  I blinked my eyes open. I sat up and looked around the familiar living room of our ski house in Vermont. The truth knifed into me, like a punch in the solar plexus. I had driven here in the dead of the night. Arrived here at four in the morning. Exhausted. Not knowing where else to go. I just needed a place to collapse and think. Think what to do. Who I could contact. I opened the door and hurled myself onto the living room couch and just passed out. I slept like a corpse, hiding from my haunting dreams. The sun cut through the room. My watch read 9:30 A.M. The truth dug into me that if I were here, and not back in my own home, then what I’d been praying was just an awful dream was real. Exactly the way my mind was rebelling against remembering it.

  Please, please, don’t let me really be here …

  I looked around and saw the antique signs we collected. CHEAP CORN, 5C. HOOF IT TO DIAMOND GRAIN AND CATTLE. The vintage board games Dave scoured flea markets for displayed on the wooden shelves.

  The vintage pinball machine in the corner.

  I recalled how I had pulled over to the side of the highway, somewhere in Massachusetts, and called the kids. I woke Neil in the middle of the night at school.

  “Jeez, Wendy, what’s going on?”

  “Neil, something terrible has happened. To your father …” I did my best to tell him; the words fell from my lips like stones off a ledge. “Dave’s dead. He’s been killed, Neil. I’m so sorry …” Then in the vaguest, clumsiest way I tried to tell him what happened. I knew it wouldn’t make any sense. Only make me appear guilty and all mixed up. Agents coming to our house in the night. “What agents?” he asked, becoming clearheaded. Shots as I tried to escape.

  “Escape from what, Wendy? What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean, Dad’s dead? He just called me earlier today. You’re sounding crazy …” He was an eighteen-year-old kid, and I was telling him his father had been killed, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him why.

  “What are you saying, Wendy?”

  “Neil, honey, I need you to trust me and do something for me,” I said, urgency coming through the desperation. “I want you to go to your aunt Ruth’s and uncle Rob’s in Boston. First thing tomorrow morning. Just go! Don’t ask me why. This is important. You’re going to hear some crazy things … about what happened to your father. About me … Sweetheart, all I can tell you is they’re not true. I loved your dad very much, and now I’ve done something, I don’t know how, that’s gotten him killed. I just don’t want you to believe what they may be saying—”

  “Saying?” His sleep-strained voice grew elevated in exasperation. “What are you talking about, Wendy? What’s happened? What can’t you tell me?”

  Tears rushed into my eyes. I only wish I knew.

  “Neil, you’ve always trusted me like your own mother. And I think you know that’s exactly how I’ve always felt about you. Like you’re my own! And now you just have to trust me, honey. I can’t be with you just now. It won’t be safe. For you. Something’s happened and I need to sort it out. I know I’m sounding crazy. I know I’m not telling you what you want to hear. Just get to your uncle Rob’s. It’ll be safe there. And please, I beg you, Neil, don’t tell a soul where you’re heading. Not even your roommates.” I knew the people who were looking for me could find him. Could do to him what they had done to Dave. “Just go, first thing in the morning, okay? Promise me that, honey—”

  “This isn’t a joke, is it, Wendy?” he said, fighting back tears.

  “No, honey, it’s not a joke. I wish it was. Just promise me you’ll go, okay?”

  Now he was weeping. “Okay …”

  “And I give you my word, baby, whatever you may hear, it’s not the truth. I swear to you on that! Now go, I have to call Amy. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.” I heard him sniffling, trying to sort through the shock and confusion and grief. “I love you, baby.”

  “I know. I love you too, Wendy.”

  I hung up, the bass drum inside me beating through my brain. Then I did it all over again, with Dave’s daughter, Amy, six hours ahead in Spain. She was just heading off to class. Amy, who had always had issues with me. She was nine when Dave started seeing me, a year after separating from her mother. Old enough to feel like I had stolen him away from her, and kept him from ever going back. I understood. It just took her a while to learn to truly trust me. But eventually we worked it out. Neil was always my baby. I’d lived with him since he was eight. How I wanted to put my arms around them both. I needed to. I’d just lost my partner in life as well.

  My world was crumbling too …

  I knew I couldn’t stay here for very long. It was no secret we owned the house. Once word got out—maybe it already had!—someone would surely come by and check. The West Dover police. Or one of the neighbors. I got up and flicked on the TV, hoping to hear something about what was going on. I went into the kitchen and put on some coffee, then trudged over to the computer we kept there and punched in Google News.

  I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for. To find nothing—like none of it had ever happened. Which would still mean my husband was dead, and that a government kill squad hadn’t even informed the police and were trying to silence me.

  Or what I saw, the third article down.

  Which stopped my heart as quickly as if a syringe of paralyzing fluid had been injected into it.

  PERSON OF INTEREST IN NEW YORK TRIPLE MURDER NAMED.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Numb, I focused on the headline and knew what everyone must be thinking. My kids. My family. Pam.

  Anyone who knew me.

  My eyes riveted on my name. Wendy Stansi Gould.

  I almost retched, my name juxtaposed with such horrible crimes. But there it was, hitting me squarely in the eyes. Taking away my breath. I could barely move the cursor, my hands were shaking so noticeably.

  The article was from the AP, and posted only eight minutes earlier.

  “A person of interest has been named in the string of Metro New York shooting deaths that began Wednesday night in a posh midtown hotel room and ended in an affluent suburb where the husband of the person police are seeking was found dead.”

  Found dead? Dave wasn’t “found dead.” He was killed. Something already didn’t seem right to me.

  “Wendy Stansi Gould, 39, whose husband, David Michael Gould, was found shot to death at his Pelham, N.Y., home, is being sought in connection with his and two other shooting deaths: a man identified as Curtis Kitchner, a freelance journalist, and a person yet to be identified, said to be a federal law enforcement agent. Both were shot in Mr. Kitchner’s room at the Kitano Hotel. Ms. Gould is suspected to have been present at both crime scenes.”

  I felt the blood rush out of my face.

  “Police report that Ms. Stansi Gould was seen with Mr. Kitchner at the hotel bar only minutes before he was found dead in his hotel room, the result of an apparent shooting incident with the unidentified law enforcement agent. Soon after, Ms. Gould was spotted fleeing the hotel.”

  “Of course I was fleeing!” I said out loud. I was scared for my fucking life that they were trying to kill me!

  “Later, when investigators arrived at her house in Westchester,” I read on, “they found the body of Ms. Gould’s husband in the kitchen of their tony Pelham Manor home.”

  What! My stomach started to come up. Dave wasn’t shot in the kitchen. He was shot in my car. As we tried to escape. A numbness began to take hold of me as I started to see exactly what was going on.

  “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

  It’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?”