Читать книгу No Way Back: Part 3 of 3 - Andrew Gross, Andrew Gross - Страница 11

The Amtrak express train rocked gently back and forth, speeding to New York City.

Harold sat in the quiet car and took a sip of his vodka.

Mexico is an excellent place to commit murder. He thought of what Sabrina Stein had said. Because you will surely get away with it.

He had no proof, nothing he could share with anyone. Nothing that would make someone think he was doing more than just grasping at straws.

Just that Hruseff was part of Stein’s DEA team back in El Paso. And that it was he who killed Curtis at the hotel. Curtis, who was looking into the deaths of Dean and Rita Bienvienes, who were in El Paso at the very same time, and who was sure he had found something. Something that led him to Lauritzia Velez.

Which may well have been that the Bienvienes were murdered in Culiacán by Eduardo Cano—and with the complicity of the U.S. government.

Why?

Look them up, Wendy Gould had begged him. Harold recalled her pretty but desperate face disappearing behind the closing elevator door.

They’re all connected. All of them.

That phrase kept on coming back.

All of them.

As soon as the train pulled out of Union Station in DC, Harold had googled the other agent who was with Hruseff at the hotel.

Alton Dokes. The agent Wendy claimed was framing her for her husband’s death.

He couldn’t find much of a history on him, only a ton of recent articles that quoted him as lead investigator on the manhunt for Wendy Gould. But he did find one linking him to an article from the San Antonio Express-News, from back in 2008, a year before the Bienvienes were killed.

As a DEA agent, Dokes had been implicated in the shooting of a seventeen-year-old Mexican crossing the border from Juárez. The boy ended up being a drug mule, and the shooting was ultimately ruled justifiable. Dokes was fully cleared.

“Sabrina Stein, Senior Agent in Charge of Operations out of the DEA’s El Paso office, commented, ‘We are glad this episode is behind us and a dedicated agent is able to resume his duties … ’ ”

Harold took a sip of his vodka. So Dokes was there too.

All of them.

He was sure Sabrina was hiding something. But what could he possibly prove? This wasn’t enough to cast even the slightest suspicion off of Wendy. Even if he handed what he had over to the authorities, he knew it wouldn’t go further than the person he told. That two government agents had been in the same place years ago at the same time two fellow agents were murdered in Mexico? That, years later, they’d both had some connection to a journalist who had been killed? A journalist who was looking into that very story.

Scratch any of us, Sabrina Stein had told him, you never know what you will find …

The train’s rattling brought him back from his thoughts.

You’re crazy to get involved, Harold told himself. Look what it’s already cost you. You made a vow. To protect your kids. You’re all they have now. This was over. He’d already seen what could happen. His wife’s desire to protect Lauritzia had cost them everything. They had nothing now, except themselves …

Harold finished his drink and gave the woman sitting across from him a pleasant smile. As he went to shut the lid on his laptop, he fixed on his screen saver, a photo of Roxanne. Her arms around Jamie and Taylor in their backyard, their sunny faces promising everything beautiful in life.

He could shut the computer a thousand times, but it wouldn’t shut it out.

Not completely.

There was one person who would know all this, Harold realized. Who might hold all the secrets.

Curtis had gone to see Lauritzia in the days before he died. It was time to know what he had told her.