No Way Back by Andrew Gross

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.
    â€œWendy 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.
    â€œPolice 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.”
    â€œOf course I was fleeing!” I said out loud. I was scared for my fucking life that they were trying to kill me!
    â€œLater, 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.
    â€œA 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.
    â€œNo, 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.
    â€œNo!” I shouted again. “No. That’s not how it was at all!”
    â€œMs. 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