by Rene Fomby
“No,” he answered.
Harry lifted the medical records up slightly, shaking them for emphasis. “And you are also unaware that when those doctors examined your daughter’s vagina, they found that her hymen was completely intact.” Harry stopped for a second to let the import of that statement sink in, then took a step forward and delivered the hammer blow. “Mr. Clark, what the medical reports are saying is, even though your daughter claimed that she had been brutally molested earlier that evening, that Alfredo Herrera threw her into the back seat of his car, yanked off her jeans and those pink lace panties and thrust himself repeatedly into her vagina, over and over and over, when the doctors took a look an hour or so later, they discovered that your daughter was still—a virgin.”
“That can’t be so!” Clark was staring directly at his daughter, who refused to look up. “They must’ve got it wrong. She told me—”
“And so what you’re saying, Mr. Clark—and please correct me if I’m getting this wrong—you trust the word of a fifteen-year-old girl over the professional opinion of several trained ER doctors?”
“She would never lie to me!” Clark insisted. Beads of sweat were starting to form above his eyebrows.
“Okay, then, let’s take a look at what she told the police. Again, she never shared any of that with you?”
“No,” he said, his hands now shaking visibly.
Harry looked over at Lewis, who gave him a quizzical look in return. They both had read the police reports of Gina Clark’s interviews the day after the rape, and there was nothing there of any importance. For the life of her, Lewis couldn’t figure out where he might be going with this. So she just needed to survive the revelation that Gina’s hymen had somehow survived the assault, and her case was back on solid ground.
“Your honor, may we approach?” Harry asked.
“Counselors.” Judge Henry motioned for them to come forward.
Standing in front of the judge, Harry considered Lewis very carefully. She wasn’t displaying any evidence of nervousness. So either Lewis was one of the world’s greatest actresses, or else she had no idea what he was about to reveal. He turned back to face the judge.
“Your honor, as you know, Harris County normally hands over its evidence burned onto one or more DVDs. I give them a blank DVD, they give me back a disc with all the reports, photos and any video they have from the scene and from interviews.” He paused and held up a small USB thumb drive. “So, on Friday, when someone from the DA’s office dropped this off at my office downtown, saying it was supplemental evidence for the trial, I got a little curious, to say the least. There wasn’t anything on the thumb drive that I hadn’t already been given before, so at first I just chalked it up to someone doing their due diligence, making sure they had fully complied with the Michael Morton Act, the law requiring them to hand over all their evidence in the case. But then I got to thinking.” He paused briefly to stare at the thumb drive. “Why a thumb drive?”
In his left hand he had two sheets of paper, one he handed to the judge, and the other to ADA Lewis, standing off to his right.
“Here’s a listing of all of the files on the drive. You can see that I’ve also included the file attributes, something you very rarely ever look at, because you have to make a special effort to see them.”
He reached forward over the judge’s bench and pointed to one line, a third of the way down the page. “And this is what I found on the thumb drive, your honor. See that little ‘H’? That means the file is hidden. It’s on the drive, but you can’t normally see it unless you make a special effort, something hardly anyone knows how to do. It wouldn’t even show up in a normal file listing. And while you can hide a file on a thumb drive, you can’t on a DVD. So there’s the answer to my question. Why use a thumb drive instead of a DVD?”
Harry glanced over at Lewis again, and noticed a growing look of shock. And panic. Which was just about to get worse for her.
“Do you know anything about this, Ms. Lewis?” the judge asked.
“No, no, your honor. This is the first time I’ve heard about this thumb drive. And I don’t recall ever hearing anything about that particular file.”
“Okay.” Judge Henry sat back, steepling her hands and thinking. “It seems we have a major problem, here. If this thumb drive is legitimate, that means the State has a Morton violation on its hands. And in that case, I’ll have no choice but to find the defendant innocent.” She paused a bit longer, considering her options. “The other problem is, we’ll need to prove up that what Mr. Crawford is telling us is true, that this thumb drive really did come from the DA’s office. And that the State willfully withheld valuable information from the defense. Mr. Crawford, are you ready to bring in witnesses who can do that for us?”
“No, your honor, not at this time. It’s all kind of last minute. But I think, if we just take a look at what’s in this hidden file, it will prove itself up. The issue here isn’t the thumb drive, it’s the file that was hidden from me. And obviously, quite intentionally. My guess is that someone from the DA’s office wanted to cover their bases regarding the Morton Act, just in case this file ever popped up somehow down the line. So by giving me this drive at the last moment, they could make a claim that I had the file in my possession all along, and just didn’t know how to look for it.”
“A flimsy argument, but I can see your point.” The judge looked at Lewis. “Mr. Crawford says let’s play this file. Do you have any objection at this point? After all, you haven’t had a chance to review it yet.”
Lewis chewed quietly on the inside of her cheek. This really looked bad for her department, and maybe even for her. It would almost certainly trigger an investigation, and anyone with even a hint of dirt on their hands would be fired immediately. And maybe even disbarred. So the best course right now was to simply come clean. Distance herself from the problem.
“No, your honor, I trust that Mr. Crawford has viewed the file, and knows that it’s appropriate to show in this courtroom.”
“Very well, then, let’s proceed.” The judge raised her voice so she could be heard clearly throughout the room. “Mr. Crawford, I’m going to allow you to show us what’s on that file. And Ms. Lewis? You’re not off the hook entirely, here. Assuming any of this is true, and I’ve got a feeling Mr. Crawford is about to prove that up, we’re all going to have a very frank discussion after we’re done here. You understand?”
“Yes, your honor, and I agree. We all need to find out exactly what happened here.” Lewis turned and walked quietly back to her desk, her mind spinning with what might be inside the hidden file. The filename offered little in the way of a clue, just the case name and a sequencing number, plus the fact that it was clearly some kind of video. As she sat down, she glanced over at her client, who was staring at her with obvious concern and confusion. Lewis had nothing at this point to give her, no answers until they found out what it was that Harry was about to reveal.
Meanwhile, Harry plugged the USB drive into the courtroom computer and pulled up the file. “Your honor?” he asked before he pressed play. She nodded back at him, and he clicked on the mouse.
The video was set in a police interrogation room. About thirty seconds into it, a female police officer walked into the room, followed by Gina Clark. The officer motioned for Gina to take a seat in front of her.
“You know anything about this?” Lewis whispered to her client. “I’ve never seen this video. You remember what you said to this cop?”
For the first time since the trial had started, Gina Clark had an unmistakable look of alarm in her eyes. She’d completely forgotten about the interview. It was part of a lot of things the whole sorry experience had managed to lock away in her mind. “No,” she finally whispered back.
The police officer walked the on-screen Gina Clark through a long list of preliminary questions, then settled into questions about the assault itself. She gently probed Clark for details about the assault, and on-screen C
lark explained how the unnamed mystery man had forcibly ripped her jeans and underwear off her while she lay on her back in the back seat of the car, then climbed on top and proceeded to rape her. She described in great detail the feel of him entering her and tearing her apart inside, over and over, until she finally had to scream out “stop!” Harry glanced around, and saw that there wasn’t a single dry eye in the courtroom, save his and Fredo’s. Even the translator looked disturbed. Up on the witness stand, Gina’s father was staring directly at Alfredo now, looking every bit like he was about to carry through on his earlier threat. The bailiff moved imperceptibly closer to him, ready to intervene if he had to.
“Now, ma’am, let’s back up a little.” The police officer was using the classic tactic of moving back and forth in time, trying to make sure her interviewee’s story stayed consistent. “To the best of your ability, tell me what happened after the two of you left the mall. Why did you agree to go with him out to his car?”
“He asked me if I wanted to listen to some music, and I said sure. Also, we were making kind of a scene inside the mall, so I thought it might be better to go somewhere a little more private.”
“And you weren’t at all worried about being alone with a strange male in his car? You weren’t worried about your safety at that point?”
“No. He had been very nice to me inside the mall. Even bought me a Coke and a churro, and we seemed to be getting along well, even though we could barely understand each other.”
“Okay, then, you left the mall. What exit did you use?”
“We walked through the Dillard’s, out the south entrance. His car was parked almost directly in front of the store, maybe twenty or thirty feet away. It’s kind of hard to tell for sure. It’s all kind of a blur to me right now.”
“I can understand that,” the officer assured her. “Can you tell me a little about the car? What kind of car was it? What color?”
“It was either brown—or blue, maybe. It was just a normal car, with four doors. I don’t know if it had a hatch in the back. And I think it may have been a Ford, but I can’t promise that.”
The officer looked flustered by that answer. “Okay, then, you got into the car with him. Did you sit in the front?”
“Yes, the front passenger seat. And he sat in the driver’s seat. He started the radio, and it was playing some Mexican music. He looked at me and smiled, then changed the station to one of the popular English-language stations. I don’t know which one.”
“What happened next?”
“Well, we started making out again, then all of a sudden he stopped. I didn’t know why, but he just gave me this look, and then he reached over and locked my door.”
The officer wrote a few lines on her notepad. “What did you do at that point?”
“I—I wasn’t sure how to unlock the door, and I knew I was trapped, so I kinda panicked, and tried to push him away.”
“Are you telling me, you’re fifteen years old and can’t figure to how to unlock a car door?” the officer asked, tapping her lips softly with her pen.
“Like I said, I panicked. I didn’t know what to do, I’d never been in this kind of situation before. And that’s when he grabbed me and threw me into the back seat.”
Every eye in the courtroom turned toward Alfredo at that point. At best he stood about five foot six, and weighed less than 150 pounds soaking wet.
The officer stopped and set her pen down on the table. “Now, Ms. Clark, I need you to be completely honest with me. You’re telling me that this guy—a guy you just met, that you didn’t even know his name, but a guy you’ve told me was right about your size—you’re saying he was able to grab you and toss you into the back seat, and you couldn’t stop him, or even put up a fight? How is that possible?”
On-screen Gina Clark stared at the police officer for what seemed like a minute, and then, in a voice so low it could barely be heard, even in the hushed courtroom, she stammered, “I—I had a dream about all this the other night. And—and I think I just dreamed that part up.”
“Uh huh,” the officer responded, her eyes narrowing at the sudden revelation. “And—I haven’t seen the medical records from the hospital yet, but when I do—are they going to be consistent with what you’ve told me today? Are they going to be consistent with your story that you were, in fact, brutally raped in the back seat of that car?”
The girl looked down at her hands, now trembling visibly, while the officer simply stared at her, waiting for an answer. Finally, again in a voice so light it could barely be heard, she answered. “No, I just dreamed that part up, too.”
Her father came over the top of the witness stand before the bailiff could even react, bolting across the well of the courtroom to grab his daughter by the shoulders, shaking her like a rag doll. “What do you mean you dreamed it?” he screamed. “Twelve years, twelve years I’ve been holding this guilt inside about how I’d failed you, how I’d failed to protect you, and it was all just a lie?”
The bailiff and another officer had arrived now to pry him away from his daughter. Judge Henry was banging away with her gavel as hard as she could, but no one seemed to be listening. “Order! Order in the court! Order!”
“I—I’m sorry, Daddy!” in-court Gina squeezed out between her tears. “I—I never thought they would find him! I just—I just couldn’t tell you what I’d done, the way I’d behaved. I was so ashamed, and the rape thing—I never thought anyone would ever find him, anyone would ever get hurt—”
The interpreter had to raise her voice almost to a scream in order to be heard. When she was finally finished, Alfredo just looked over at Harry and smiled.
86
Akko, Israel
Sam felt like she had walked into a scene more befitting an alien encounter than the opening of a thousand-year-old stone wall. She was standing in a large room, easily a hundred feet on either side, with stone walls and floors and a vaulted stone ceiling arching twenty feet or so into the air above her. The entire outside wall facing the Mediterranean Sea was covered with a transparent glass cage, stretching ten to fifteen feet above the floor. Set into the side of the cage was an airlock of sorts, and men dressed in what could only be described as astronaut suits were moving in and out of the cage, pausing briefly in the airlock for the atmosphere inside to recycle.
“What in the world?” She turned to face Archie, who was grinning furiously.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” he asked. “To be honest, I was blown away when I first saw this, too. This is the first time I’ve ever been on a dig where we had to implement these kinds of precautions, but we don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past and cause anything inside the wall to be damaged by our carelessness.”
“What exactly is all this?” Sam asked.
“It’s exactly what it looks like, a sealed airlock,” Archie explained. “You see, the space inside the tunnel and vault have been sealed up for at least seven hundred years, with almost zero air exchange between what’s in there and the air out here. As a result, it’s very likely that allowing fresh, highly oxygenated air inside the chamber could cause permanent damage to whatever might be waiting for us. Do you remember the famous terra-cotta warriors from the tomb of Qin Shi Huang in China?”
“I think so. You mean the ones that are all lined up like toy soldiers?”
“Yes, yes, that’s the one. Well, when the tomb was first unearthed, the soldiers were very brightly painted, almost identical to how they looked when they were first buried, sometime around 200 years before Christ. But as soon as the warriors were exposed to air, all of the pigment flaked off, leaving behind only the unpainted terra-cotta surfaces. Unfortunately, that same mistake has been repeated over and over again throughout history. We don’t want a repeat of that today, and as a result, we’ve filled the space outside of the entrance with a dry, chemically inert gas. Obviously, that kind of gas is incompatible with the biological needs of anyone working inside of there. Hence, the suit
s, which are modified versions of the suits used by doctors and biologists when they’re working with highly contagious diseases.”
“I see,” Sam said. “That all makes sense, now. And you’ll be wearing one of those suits when you enter the tunnel, I presume.”
“Yes. Not ideal, but until we know that there are no bodies or ancient documents in there that need to be carefully preserved, we can’t afford to take any chances.”
As they were talking, the workers inside the cage were making quick progress in dismantling the wall covering the entrance to the tunnel. Within an hour, the stones had been removed down to a height of around two feet.
“I think we’re about ready,” Archie suggested. “Time to suit up. You want to tag along?”
“Can I?” Sam had never considered the possibility that she might actually be one of the first people to set eyes on the lost Templar treasure. “I mean, yeah, of course! That is, if it’s not a problem …”
“No, you’d be more than welcome,” he assured her. “Most of the researchers out here will be handling the cataloguing and preservation of whatever we find down there. But the privilege of being the first to lay eyes on all of it, that’s my Geraldo Rivera moment. And I’d be honored to have you share it with me.”
“Well, okay then. Count me in.”
It took them almost fifteen minutes to get settled into the light blue environmental suits, with the seals and airflows tested redundantly. By then the wall was only a foot high, easy enough to step over, even inside the bulky suits. Sam followed Archie through the airlock to the inside, where a member of the Israeli team was already waiting, handing each of them a small flashlight.
“The flashlights are LED, and are designed to put out a relatively low amount of light,” Archie explained, his voice sounding muffled and artificial over the suit’s built-in speakers. “It’s unlikely that bright lights would damage anything, but once again, we’re not taking any chances.”
