David Kessler - No Way Out

“Where is he now?”

“I got rid of him.”

“But you said…”

“I said I couldn’t bring myself to have an abortion. And I tried to bring him up on my own. But it was hard. Everyone told me I should try and find a man. They said forget the looks. Just find yourself an ugly, lonely guy with a full wallet and a lonely heart. ‘At least he’ll provide for you both and he won’t leave you.’ That’s what my friends said. Maybe they were right. But I wasn’t ready to deliver myself into the hands of another man. I was looking for some one gentle to share my life with, even before that.”

“You mean because of your sexual preference.”

“If that’s what you care to call it.”

“But what about… getting rid of him?”

“I gave him up for adoption.”

“But you said you wanted to keep him.”

“ Of course I wanted to keep him. I wanted to love him. He was my child. And when he was a baby, weak and helpless, I could do that. I didn’t think of him as part of you, I thought of him as part of me . But when he got towards two, things started to change. His facial features started to develop and he began reminding me of you. Also he was stubborn. He was developing a mind of his own. Instead of being the baby who responded with a smile when I scooped him up in my arms, he became this strong-willed brat who wanted his own way every time. And then it all started coming back: all the memories of another overgrown little boy who wanted things all his own way and didn’t care who he hurt to get it!”

There were tears in the eyes of both of them. If Claymore’s pain failed to equal that of Gene, it was offset by the knife of guilt that twisted in his gut.

“So you gave him up after you’d already bonded with him?” asked Claymore tensely.

“ Yes! ” said Andi, choked up with tears.

“But you still loved him?”

“Of course I still loved him!” By now she was crying more hysterically than she had been in court. But she still held on to the gun aimed squarely at Claymore.

“And that’s what you’ve had to live with all these years?”

“Yes!”

He leaned forward.

“I can help you… if you’ll let me.”

He started to get up, but stopped in his tracks when she raised the gun and aimed it at his face.

“I don’t need your help! I can handle my own pain.”

“Look… I know it’s an impertinence for me to offer my help. But like you said you’ve been bottling it up all these years. You’re entitled to some relief… some rest.. some inner peace.”

“I wasn’t talking about me !” she screamed. “When I said how hard it was to keep it all bottled up, I didn’t mean me !”

“Then who?” he stuttered, helplessly

“I was talking about your other victim — the fourteen-year-old girl who didn’t come forward at the time you raped her!”

Claymore could barely find the breath to speak. But he forced himself to say the name: “Andi.”

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.

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.”