No Way Out

“I need to speak to Martine Yin… now!”

She reached into her inner pocket as if she were reaching for a police badge — or a gun. It did the trick — that and the continuous eye contact. The frightened girl at the reception desk keyed in the name on the computer and stuttered:

“You can use the white courtesy phone. Number 9214. You’re the second person who-”

Gene had already shot off towards the staircase. She knew exactly what that four digit number meant. The first digit — nine — meant that she was calling a room in the hotel, rather than any of its services. The other three digits were the room number. The second digit was of course the floor and the last two digits designated the room itself. Martine was in room 214 on the second floor.

But the thing that had spurred Gene into action with such haste was the additional wording that the receptionist had tacked on to her answer: “You’re the second person who-”

At the second floor, Gene looked at the arrows indicating which way the room numbers went. 214 was to her left. She turned and strode briskly in that direction, looking at the door numbers as she went past them to make sure that she didn’t overshoot the mark.

Then, as she got to the room, she stopped abruptly and pounded on the door.

She was greeted by silence. But she vaguely recalled that in that split second before she knocked, she had heard the sound of a human voice… a male voice.

She pounded again.

“Louis! I know you’re in there!”

She heard the sound of motion inside the room and then the sound of a door handle. The door opened slowly to reveal a young black man in his late twenties standing there with a beaming smile on his face and his leg in some sort of a synthetic cast. As the man stepped aside, still holding the door, she noticed two other things. One was the prone, terrified figure of Martine. The other was the gun in Manning’s hand, held loosely at his side with an almost insultingly casual indifference.

He motioned for Gene to enter the room with an arrogant flick of his head. She complied, the look on her face quite neutral.

“Hi Louis,” she said, as he closed the door behind her.

“Hi… Mom.”

Wednesday, 2 September 2009 — 19:15

Andi had turned off the road just before the Golden Gate Bridge and was driving to the Golden Gate parking lot. But she had no recollection of how she had got there. When she pulled up, she lowered the visor with the vanity mirror and started fixing her makeup. She couldn’t remember what she was doing there or why she had decided to come there. She just had a vague awareness of her new surroundings. She wondered if perhaps she was just a puppet and that some one else was pulling the strings.

Then she remembered.

She got out of her car and smoothed down her rumpled dress with a few brisk movements of her hands.

“I’m never going to have to look at him again.”

Of course she wouldn’t: the case was over. She started walking towards the nearby bridge. There was pedestrian access from this side.

She walked along the footpath from the parking lot that led to the bridge, by-passing the toll gate. It was a slow leisurely walk. There was no reason to run. She might as well take in the views and savor the atmosphere as she remembered her final words to Claymore in court.

“It’s just a case of taking the plunge and moving on.”

Wednesday, 2 September 2009 — 19:20

“I bribed some one at the records office to let me see the file,” said Louis Manning.

He was talking to Gene Vance like she was an old friend. But she sensed that he was taunting her. And she couldn’t forget the helpless figure of Martine, secured to the bed by handcuffs, unmoving, but breathing heavily with a look of terror in her eyes.

“I didn’t think it was that easy. I thought it was only on TV soaps and cop shows that public officials are all on the take.”

“Oh I didn’t bribe her with money.”

“Then what?”

“I got her hooked on crystal-meth. That made it easier to control her.”

He seemed to be taking pleasure in the way he described it, like he was taunting her.

“How much did you find out?”

“It had both my parent’s names. I’d never heard of you until then, but I knew who he was. There it was staring me in the face — my father a convicted rapist and political activist. So I started reading about him and learned all about who he was and what he stood for, not to mention how he turned his back on it and joined the establishment. Then I checked up on you and found out where you worked. That’s when I realized what had happened.”

“When was that?

“A while back.”

“So at the time of… you knew.”

“Yes, but I didn’t rape her ‘cause of that. And then when you got involved — and Andi — that was just like… kind of like the icing on the cake. How did you figure it out?”

“Elias Claymore told me-”

“How the fuck does he know?”

“Not about you. I mean not directly. He told me that the Y-chromosome DNA — when they finally got it right — matched both him and you. That didn’t mean much because it also matched thousands of others. But then they did another test with the last-remaining evidence sample, a mitochondrial DNA test-”

“What the fuck is that?”

“It’s a test for DNA that’s inherited from the mother. It can’t identify an individual but it can identify sisters and brothers and any relatives from the same maternal line, like cousins and things like that. And it matched you.”

Manning looked puzzled.

“But if it goes back through loads of generations, then somewhere along the line it probably matches others too.”

“Yes but how many of them have their father’s DNA matching Elias Claymore?”

“So it was the combination of the two that gave it away.”

“Actually no. You see what I know, and what nobody else knows, is that the DNA in that third sample didn’t come from the rapist. It came from me. I was assigned to Bethel Newton before they took the evidence samples and when we met, she was so emotionally overwrought that she gripped my arm and dug her nails into me, or at least one nail. That was the third nail clipping sample.”

Manning was wide-eyed with incredulity.

“You mean they realized it was me, and all the time it was based on false evidence?”

Wednesday, 2 September 2009 — 19:25

Elias Claymore pulled up in the Golden Gate parking lot and leapt out of his car without even bothering to