"Not guilty!" The judge declared.
Claire Dearing and Owen Grady let out a sigh of relief, looked at each other and then embraced each other, happy that their situation with the Costa Rican authorities was finally over, while in the middle of the audience who had attended their trial, Pedro Merced, who originally came as a witness and a representative of InGen, got up and headed for the exit. As soon as he was outside the Alajuela courthouse, he informed Palo Alto about the verdict.
If the trial had taken place not in San José but in the city of Alajuela, half an hour by car from the capital's centre, it was because the Burgo Nuevo incident and the run which had ensued had taken place in the eponymous province as well as that of Puntarenas, with the majority of the facts, and the most serious of them, occurring in the first.
Throughout the morning and early afternoon of August 6, about fifteen witnesses had been called to the bar. Among those were one of the police officers who had arrested them at the Tarcoles river bridge, Elena and Alonso Baró, a guard from the InGen port complex in Puntarenas, a few employees from Site D, a waitress from The Laden Mule who had seen the couple in the company of Rodrigue Santagar and even Basil Pabellón from the Cañada de las águilas… Some testimonies had been in favour of the couple, others not. Of course, InGen and those it bribed accused the pair not of murdering Jocelyn Hodgson and the farmer Laureano Herrera, but of failing to help them when they were attacked by dinosaurs, which autopsy reports had clearly demonstrated, while the guard from the port complex said that they had used disproportionate violence during their escape. The judge had nodded softly as he listened and after the last witness had talked, while the jury debated, Claire and Owen had felt uncertainty about their situation and prayed that all the effort they had made since their arrest was not in vain. Fortunately, Rodrigue Santagar had kept his word and, somehow, he had manage to persuade the justice to be lenient towards the couple.
When the latter crossed the doors of the courthouse alongside the DIS agent, the police pushed aside the demonstrators who were there so the trio could pass. As they walked down the entrance's steps, they looked at them. On one side were haters who brandished hateful messages and vilified Claire when she walked past them but she ignored them and held her head high, suspecting that some of them must have been paid by InGen's management. On the other, people were applauding and even cheering her…
Applause and cheers?
She turned to the source of this applause and cheers. She saw faces smiling at her, those of men and women of their age, including couples, older ones and younger ones as well. Most seemed to be locals and were holding signs with various messages such as "InGen are the real culprits!", "They are innocent. Free them!", "Heroes, not criminals!". Pleasantly surprised, Claire smiled back at them, wondering if those supporters were a minority or not.
"I didn't expect you to have supporters, let alone that they come," Rodrigue noted in English.
"Look, if a dumb and obnoxious guy like Trump has some, why not the fallen queen of Isla Nublar?" She replied with a shrug. "Even if we put my worst acts on Youtube, I'm sure that some people would still applaud me in a non-ironic way. It almost makes me want to do politics."
"To get back to it you mean?" the DIS agent asked. "You were already doing politics when you were director of Jurassic World."
"He's got a point," Owen pointed out to his girlfriend.
"It's a bad idea though, it didn't work for me," she said.
They reached the sidewalk and turned to head for their car, but just before getting in, Claire froze in surprise when she saw a young woman among the crowd. She was holding a sign with an illustration of the fallen park director pasted on it. It showed her bareheaded but clad in the armour of the Ghost of Nublar, holding her helmet under one arm and a sword in the other, and seeming to stare into the distance with strong apprehension but also courage. At the bottom of the illustration was written the word Defiance. For Claire, the message was clear: The young woman was among those who believed, rightly, that she was the Ghost of Nublar and represented some sort of rebellion figure.
Against whom? InGen? And in this story, the Indominus would be a metaphor of it?
She admired the great care shown in the illustration as well as its accuracy because the artist had even thought of drawing her ring above the index finger of the gauntlet worn on the right hand, a silver ring adorned with a red gem around which were coiled two snakes. The ring she had lost when Masrani's Bane ripped off her forearm. She looked at her forearm and noticed that she hadn't even thought of putting the silicone glove on over her prosthesis earlier. She shrugged her shoulders discreetly, it didn't matter at all. At the time, she even felt the urge to take off her half-mask and reveal her face as it was, no matter what it would arouse in people. Horror, disgust, compassion, some strange attraction... She wouldn't care. She was tired of wearing this mask every time she was in public, and if she ever wanted to convince more people that she was the Ghost of Nublar, show her scar, the mark of the terrible ordeals she had been through, could be a good starting point.
"Claire. Get in before someone tries to shoot you," Rodrigue suggested to her in a half joking tone.
She got into the vehicle, sitting in the back next to Owen, and the driver drove off, heading for the residence they had been assigned, somewhere near the Escazú district, west of San José.
When they returned there around 6 p.m., the couple was struck by great fatigue, the emotional after-effects of the trial and the tasks they had had to accomplish for the Costa Rican government. During the raid on the warehouse owned by Sebastián Bonel, where the laboratory and the Compsognathus were found, they had stayed behind with Rodrigue but they had been equipped with bulletproof vests anyway, just in case. Just before, Claire remembered that some members of the Unidad Especial de Intervencion had given her hostile looks but she knew why: Several of their comrades had been killed on Isla Nublar by the Indominus during the Fall. Then, they had helped the veterinarians with the Compsognathus and provided advice to the Parque Zoológico Nacional Simón Bolívar for the future housing of the survivors.
In addition to that whole affair with the Unicorn Candy, they had to participate in two tracking sessions in the province of Guanacaste, one before the raid on Sebastián Bonel's properties and one after. During these sessions whose purpose was to find Toro, they had assisted agents from the Public Force and the Ministry of the Environment. During the second session, they had discovered fresh tracks but before they could catch up with him, the carnotaur had retreated into an area of dense forest, where vehicles could not follow it and where a track on foot could have could quickly turned into a nightmare, especially since it had happened shortly before nightfall. Knowing that they wouldn't find the predator before the couple's return to the United States, or their incarceration if his plan failed despite his best efforts, Rodrigue had asked Owen to give the agents a crash course in dinosaur tracking. Despite the short deadlines, the Raptor Whisperer had not only complied but he had also strongly recommended that they ask Caer Draig if it was possible to organize a more complete training with the grey guards, or even ask if it was possible for a squad to come on the mainland to help the government track down Toro.
While Rodrigue spoke with the guard assigned to the residence, Claire opened her laptop, went to her mailbox and began to write a message for Guillaume Vuillier. On his side, Owen was writing to his mother to let her know too. Rodrigue came to bring them two envelopes.
"Here are your tickets," he said, holding out one. "You leave Sunday morning. Thus, you'll have just enough time to rest a little before heading to Orick for the sale and take the opportunity to settle all this mess with the Lockwood Foundation. I sincerely hope it will stand by your side and not InGen's."
"Thank you," Claire told him.
The DIS agent gave them the second envelope, which he and the guard had previously opened to check that it was safe.
"And you also got a little gift from San Francisco. It's from a friend of yours. He left a message inside."
She looked at the shipping address, nodded, and put the envelope right next to her laptop while Owen looked at their plane tickets to tell Caitriona about their arrival time at Reno's airport.
"Rodrigue. Thank you for everything," the fallen park director said.
"You're welcome," the agent replied. "You've been a huge help to me, you know. I should be the one expressing thanks. This evening, I invite you to the restaurant to celebrate your victory at the courthouse and the beginning of our friendship. It will be on me. But I'll let you rest a bit. I'll pick you up at eight?"
"Sounds good", they agreed.
Rodrigue nodded and left the residence, leaving the couple alone. Having just finished her message for the WDMC director, Claire sent it and immediately began writing a second email. In the recipient box, she entered Elijah Mills' address, wrote him a message, but when came time to click on "Send", she hesitated for a moment, as if she knew that sending this email would not be worth it. Her gaze drifted to the envelope next to the laptop, the one sent from San Francisco.