No Way Out

Wednesday, 2 September 2009 — 17:45 PDT (20:45 EDT)

Bethel Newton was going home.

She had boarded the flight at noon and touched down at Miami International Airport five hours and twenty five minutes later. She had taken only hand luggage — having ditched practically everything that reminded her of her all too brief stay in California.

Her folks were expecting her. But she remained uncertain of what to expect. She had told them of her plans by text message while the taxi snaked its way to the airport in Los Angeles, where she had stayed when Gene went up to Oakland to answer the subpoena. She had used up practically the last of her precious cash to make the journey. But she didn’t have the courage to speak to them by voice and they hadn’t replied to her message.

She wondered how they would take it. She had rejected their overtures of support during her ordeal in California. Would they want to have anything to do with her now?

These thoughts were playing on her mind as she raced from the arrivals lounge past baggage collection and into the arrivals hall.

“Bethel Honey?” a woman’s voice shouted. “Over here!”

She looked round to see a somewhat plump thirty-nine year old woman waving to her. It was her mother. And she wasn’t alone. Her step-father Jack, twelve-year-old sister Judy and two-year-old half-brother Benny were also there.

Bethel Newton’s eyes flooded with tears as she raced towards her waiting family.

Wednesday, 2 September 2009 — 18:00

Claymore had been silenced by Gene’s words and was still struggling to take it all in. He had long suspected it — since the day he had first walked into the meeting room with her and Alex. But he hadn’t been sure. And she had said nothing.

After a long silence, Claymore finally spoke.

“I thought it was her.”

“What do you mean, you thought?”

“It was so long ago. She was… I don’t know how old.”

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen,” he repeated quietly, as if the magnitude of his crime from twenty five years ago were only now sinking in. “I still remember her face. It’s haunted me ever since. That was why I stopped you know. It wasn’t getting caught. It was her eyes… those wounded eyes.”

“Shut up!” Gene yelled.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to torment you. And I wasn’t making a play for sympathy. I just want you to know the truth. When she first came into that room and Alex introduced her… The face had changed of course. But I still remembered. When he said the name, it didn’t confirm it because I never knew the names.”

“Of course you didn’t! What did the names matter? We weren’t people to you.”

“That’s what I was like then! It’s not the man I am now! The men you should really hate are the men who are still like that — like that scum-bag Louis Manning.”

“Who?” She seemed stunned by this.

“Louis Manning. He’s the guy who really raped Bethel Newton.”

“How do you know?” asked Gene, confused.

“They were talking about it after Andi finished questioning you. That police woman, Detective Riley, came up and told them about the new DNA tests. The DNA came from some guy called Louis Manning. We both matched the DNA in the first tests — but that didn’t mean anything because they said that something like one black man in five hundred has that same DNA. It was from the Y chromosome or something like that. So then they did another test and that cleared me and implicated him.”

“What sort of a test?” asked Gene.

“It’s kind of like the opposite of the test. They had another DNA sample from her left hand and they did a different kind of DNA test. It looks at DNA that comes from the mother.”

“Mitochondrial DNA?”

“Yes that’s it.”

“And they got this from another sample? From her left hand?”

“Yes. The thumbnail I think.”

“And you say this test cleared you?”

“Yes — and it implicated the other guy.”

“But how did they get him in the first place… this Louis…”

“Manning. Well what happened was he tried to rape one of the reporters covering the case… Martine Yin.”

“Holy shit!”

“Holy shit’s the word. And then they checked out the car he was driving. You see it was a Merc and he crashed it into a police car — or rather the cops crashed into him. And it was my car.”

“Your car.”

“Yes, my car. The one that was stolen two days before Bethel Newton was raped. And that’s when they started figuring things out. One of the cops noticed that he looked a bit like the suspect description in the Bethel Newton case. So they decided to test his DNA too. And at first there were some shenanigans at the DNA lab — and with the computer too. But then they did those new tests and they got him.”

“So is he in custody now?”

“As far as I know. I think he’s in the hospital or something, ‘cause he broke his leg when then the cops side- swiped his auto. But I think they’ve got him under arrest.”

Gene took a deep breath.

“And you think that because this Louis Manning is the man who raped Bethel I should just blame him and forget about what you put Andi through in that courtroom — forcing her to relive the experience.”

“Like I said, I wasn’t sure it was her. And what was I to do? I didn’t want her defending me. I even tried to say so. But I couldn’t say why without making it worse — for both of us. But how come she never said anything? I mean she must have known it was me?”

“Because she bottled it all up inside her. That’s what I meant about keeping it all locked up. It wasn’t me I was talking about. It was her. She sat next to you the whole trial and she didn’t even remember that twenty five years ago you were the one who raped her!”

Claymore’s head dropped. Only now the full measure of his shame and guilt weighed down upon him.

“Turn that up!” snapped Gene.

He looked up to see a mug shot of Louis Manning on the TV. Picking up the remote hesitantly, he complied with Gene’s command.

“Manning was only be guarded by a single police officer at the time and it appears that he took advantage of a moment of distraction to drug the officer’s coffee with sleeping pills that he had been stockpiling while at the hospital. Police are refusing to say anything about the state of the injured nurse, but according to unofficial sources he said something to her just before he left, about having an old score to settle. Neither the police, nor the hospital, will confirm or deny these reports.”

“Oh my God!” said Gene as the report continued.

She turned sharply on her heel and raced out.