David Kessler - No Way Out

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

“Hi… Mom.”

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.”

“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?”

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.

“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-”