No Way Out

by David Kessler

  Gene hadn’t lied about getting to the Waterfront Hotel quickly – and she hadn’t lied about getting a motorbike either. Starting the bike had been easier than finding it. The irony that Oakland was the birthplace of the Hell’s Angels was not lost on her either, as she stole the bike and raced across the Bay Bridge, dodging stationery vehicles along the way.

  By the time she rode into the Hotel parking lot, her heart rate was as fast as the rev counter on the engine. She got quite a few stares as she dismounted the bike. But she was too pre-occupied to notice. Instead, she merely raced into the hotel lobby and up to the front desk. There were several people ahead of her, but she used her intimidating height and build to face them down as she pushed her way up to the desk.

  “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 check if he had parked it straight. That was the least of his worries.

  He looked around and wandered round too. Then he saw it: a red Ford Mustang. Was it Andi’s? Or just another like it. It was the only one in the lot. He raced over to it and looked at it. There was no obvious sign that it was hers. But equally none that it wasn’t.

  It has to be, he told himself.

  But was she about to do what he thought she was about to do? And how long ago had she got here. It was a long walk to the bridge. And when he last saw her, she wasn’t exactly dressed for running.

  Is there still a chance? Can I get to her?

  Certainly there hadn’t been any incident’s on
the bridge recently because otherwise this whole area would be bustling with activity – not to mention gawking members of the public.

  He looked round at the bay. To his left the sun was low in the sky but still above the horizon.

  He sprinted towards the bridge, up the slope, chugging away breathlessly. He hadn’t put on rolls of fat, like some men his age. Nevertheless he was no longer a young man, and although he could run, he felt it in his lungs, his heart and the sinews of his thighs.

  He was panting and hunched with cramp in his ribcage when he got onto the pedestrian walkway of the bridge. But he didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried when he saw Andi walking the same path, almost staggering, as she receded from him in the distance.

  All he knew was that he wanted to sprint towards her, but his legs wouldn’t let him.

  Wednesday, 2 September 2009 – 19:30

  “Looks like it,” said Gene, taunting him right back. “Maybe you shouldn’t have escaped. Maybe you should have brazened it out.”

  “No, they still had me for the attempted rape on…” He half turned to indicate the terrified young woman on the bed. “But if the last DNA sample was actually from you – and if you knew that – then how did you figure it out?”

  “It was the coincidence that got me thinking. You see the very fact that Bethel ID’d the picture of the young Elias Claymore on the cork board at the rape crisis center was itself interesting. I knew the rapist couldn’t be Claymore, because of the age factor. But still, it had to have a reason. There had to be a cause. And the obvious cause was the son that I gave up – the son that Claymore never knew he had. That also made the match of the Y-chromosomal DNA somewhat less of a coincidence. It meant all of a sudden that there was a causal explanation.”

  “So now we both know. What about my father? Does he know?”

  “I didn’t tell him.”

  “Why not?”

  “I had to see you first. I had to speak to you.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “And am I what you expected?”

  “When I gave you up, I didn’t expect anything. I was only thinking of myself.”

  “Well at least you’re not a hypocrite. But what about now?”

  “I knew you raped Bethel… knew you tried to rape Martine–”

  “Still intend to,” he cut back almost under his breath. The contempt was manifest in the quiet, off-the-cuff tone.

  “Look, I admit that I wronged you. I could make excuses and say it’s because of what your father did to me, but – yes – I still wronged you. But Martine didn’t. All she did was defend herself when–”

  “You don’t get it do you? What Claymore did was part of his nature. It’s in a man’s genes. It’s part of their nature. Men try to reproduce their genes. And the stronger men succeed.”

  “But not by rape.”

  “They don’t need to. In the animal kingdom the concept of rape is meaningless. The males fight amongst each other to establish superiority and then the females go naturally and willingly with the strongest males. The weaker males get the leftovers. Its only in the human species that women look for other things like sympathy and kindness and wealth. A female animal doesn’t want a good provider, she gathers or hunts for the food herself. She just wants strong genes to bind with hers to make sure that her own genes survive in her offspring. Even in the human species, most women know that the best provider isn’t necessarily the best biological father for their children. That’s why they marry rich men and then cheat on them with hunks from the street. Adultery’s as natural for a woman as it is for a man.”

  “You’ve been reading the wrong books.”

  “Books are one of the few things they give you behind bars. Some cons toke. Some work out. I read books.”

  Wednesday, 2 September 2009 – 19:35

  Claymore was sprinting along the pedestrian walkway as fast as he could, trying his best to keep Andi in his line of sight. But his heart sank when she arrived at the southern suspension tower. For at that point, he saw her moving off the walkway and round the tower, onto the observation platform behind it. That – and a similar platform at the northern suspension tower – were the points where suicides jumped off.

  He arrived at the suspension column in time to see Andi clambering over, apparently with a bottle of gin or vodka in her hand. He felt a knot in his stomach as terror swept over him. If he shouted out to her, he would frighten her. If her decision was final, it would make her jump. If she was still undecided, it would take her by surprise and might very well startle her and cause her to lose her grip. If he rushed her, it would also frighten her.

  He stood there frozen with indecision, his feet stuck to the ground beneath him. As she completed her climb to the other side, she held on with one hand as she took a swig from the bottle.

  And then she saw him.

  For a second his heart went into his mouth as he thought this was the end for her. But instead, she simply smiled.

  “Oh hi Elias?” she said, in what sounded a bit like a little girl voice.

  He looked at her still feeling helpless, and yet in some way liberated from fear by precisely that sense of desperation. Behind him the sun was setting making her squint, so he couldn’t tell if she had been crying. Was she sad? Lost? Already too far gone?

  He looked around. There were plenty of cars on the bridge. But here, behind the suspension column, they were virtually concealed from public view. And at this time, on a baseball day, there weren’t many pedestrians about. They were, effectively, alone.

  He had to reach out to her in the only way he could. But now the “only way he could” meant not with his body, but with his mind… with his words.

  “Andi don’t do it!”

  She was smiling. But he couldn’t tell if it was from her mood or the setting sun in her eyes.

  “What do you want?” she asked hesitantly, putting the bottle down on the ledge and holding on with both hands now.

  “Don’t do it… don’t jump.”

  She half turned her head and looked round at the water 220 feet below.

  “Why not?”

  He tried to take a step forward, but she released the grip of one of her hands, as if warning him of how easy it would be to jump.

  “No! Wait!” he pleaded, stopping in his tracks and holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Andi listen to me. You’ve blotted it out of your mind. The rape. The pain. It was me. I was the man who raped you all those years ago. You’ve closed off the past and shut it out of your mind. But it’s been there all the time... in the background.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said weakly, her voice now distinctly like a little girl’s as some distant memory pierced her consciousness.

  “You’ve been doing these things to yourself,” he said, the desperation, “…the messages... the threats... switching the DNA files and then leaving a trail for them to get back to you, like you were framing yourself... it was you all along Andi. You were doing it to yourself!”

  “Why would I want to do those things to myself?” she asked. He didn’t know about the pills or how mush she had drunk. But she was clearly out of it.

  “It was your way of handling the pressure… the painful memories. You couldn’t take it, so you blotted it out. And then you must have created another person to carry the anger for you, so that you could get on with your life.”

  “What do you mean ‘created another person’?” she asked, crying with the pain of recollection as she memories of the rape came fleeting in and out of her mind.

  “I don’t know all the reasons. I only know that it’s because of what I did. You wanted revenge. You wanted me to be punished – as I deserved to be. But you also wanted to forget your pain. And I guess you couldn’t handle both. The one wasn’t compatible with the other. So the part of you that wanted to forget, blotted it out. And then the other part of you set about getting revenge. But then, just now at the trial, because you were helping me, the other p
art of you didn’t just want revenge on me. It sought revenge on you too.”

  “Revenge?” she echoed confused, as her mind drifted into some far off world.

  “Yes. You were the one who modified the jury selection software.”

  “No!” Andi whined, wiping back the tears with the backs of her free hand. “It was Lannosea!”

  “Don’t you see Andi? You are Lannosea. She’s part of you – the strong part. She’s the part that wants revenge, the part that wants to punish the other part for helping me. Lannosea is just the angry side of you. She carries the anger, but you still carry the pain. That’s why she hounded you with those E-mail messages and threats. That’s why she broke into the DNA database and framed you. It was you doing to yourself to punish yourself.”

  “No you’re wrong! It can’t be that! I wouldn’t betray some one who trusted me.”

  “Andi I’m not blaming you. God knows, I’ve got no right to blame anyone! But you need help.”

  “I don’t need any help from you!”

  It looked like she was about to jump. He had to stop her.

  “Lannosea!” he shouted desperately. “If you let her jump, you’ll die too!”

  Wednesday, 2 September 2009 – 19:38

  Alex, meanwhile, was going nowhere. He was snarled up in traffic on the Bay Bridge. In the other direction, much of the traffic was headed towards the baseball game. But on days like this, the whole road network gets clogged up as people try to find alternative routes to beat the bottlenecks. The trouble is that everyone has the same idea and that just creates more bottlenecks.

  He had tried calling Martine’s hotel room several more times, but got no answer. He had considered asking the hotel to send a member of staff to check. But they would probably think he was crazy and even if they didn’t they were unlikely to treat it as a matter of any particular urgency.

  But Gene must be there by now.

  It was strange the way she was suddenly helping him after what he had effectively put her through in court. And yet in a way it made perfect sense. She probably felt guilty about what she had done herself. And this was her way of trying to redeem herself.