Most Dangerous Place

by James Grippando

  Their eyes locked. Sylvia wasn’t often the one to blink in a stare down, but this time she was. A thin smile creased Kaval’s lips.

  “Gotta get back to business.”

  “Stay out of trouble,” she said.

  “You, too, baby,” he said in a cold, even tone. Then he opened the door and disappeared into his trailer.

  The defense team regrouped in Jack’s office. Manny ordered delivery from Tropical Chinese, insisting that it served the best dim sum in Miami. Jack had his own favorite, but he held his tongue for more important points of disagreement with his cocounsel.

  Isa wasn’t eating.

  “You okay?” asked Jack.

  “I don’t know if I’m bothered more by the note or by Sylvia Hunt’s reaction to it.”

  Jack had shared the prosecutor’s view that “she will not testify” simply meant that Isa was afraid of the truth. He wished he hadn’t.

  Jack pulled up a chair and faced her. “Let me ask you something, and I need a completely honest answer. Has David Kaval reached out to you at any time since he got out of prison?”

  “No.”

  “So the last time he tried was that collect call he made from prison. Is that right?”

  “Right. Last I know of.”

  “What do you mean that you know of?”

  “She doesn’t mean anything,” said Keith. “Isa has been a virtual prisoner since Kaval was released. How could he possibly contact her without us being aware of it? It’s not healthy, Jack. She spends twenty-two hours a day on the sixty-first floor of the Four Seasons.”

  “How would you know, Keith? You spend twenty-five days a month in Hong Kong.”

  “Okay,” said Manny, raising his arms like a boxing referee. “Everybody take a deep breath.”

  “Manny’s right,” said Jack. “This is exactly what Sylvia Hunt wanted to happen when she indicted Keith. She wants you to go at each other.”

  Keith went to his wife and took her hand. “I’m sorry, honey. It’s been one hell of a day.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Hannah Goldsmith knocked on the door and entered the room. Jack had taken her up on the offer to pitch in with legal assistance on spot assignments. She laid a one-page letter on the table in front of him. “Here’s a first draft,” she said.

  “What’s that?” asked Isa.

  “The video I took from the courthouse steps is useless,” said Jack. “But I’m hoping one of the news stations may have caught someone in the act of putting that Post-it on my laptop bag. I’m asking all the stations for their raw footage of us leaving the courthouse.”

  “That’s a good idea,” said Manny.

  Jack read it and made only minor edits. Hannah left with instructions to sign for Jack and get it out ASAP.

  “I don’t think it was Kaval,” said Keith. “If it has any meaning at all, I think her father is behind it.”

  “Why do you think that?” asked his lawyer.

  “For all the reasons we’ve talked about ever since he walked through that door and told Jack and me that she wasn’t raped.”

  “Isa, do you have any reason to believe that your father is in Miami?” asked Jack.

  “No.”

  “He wouldn’t dare come to Miami now,” said Manny. “Why risk getting slapped with a trial subpoena by us or by Sylvia Hunt and being forced to testify? He’s safe in Venezuela.”

  “Is that true?” asked Isa.

  “It is,” said Jack. “Unless he’s stupid enough to come here and get tagged by a process server, there’s no way Felipe Bornelli ends up being a witness in this trial.”

  “Unless he does so voluntarily,” said Manny. “But that’s not going to happen. Not in a million years.”

  “Or, maybe,” said Jack, thinking aloud, “not unless Isa promises that she won’t testify.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Isa.

  “Maybe the note is from him. Maybe he’s willing to say something that will help you—but only if you don’t get on the witness stand and tell the world what a complete ass he was when you called home and told him that you’d been raped.”

  “No,” Isa said firmly. “No way that’s what this is.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “You’re just wrong, Jack. Okay? You don’t know my father.”

  Jack sensed that she was pushing back too hard. “Or maybe I still don’t know everything that you and your father talked about at your meeting at Cy’s Place.”

  “How many times do I have to apologize for not showing you his letter right away? I wanted to go over it with Keith. We did. Then we gave it to you. What he said to me at the table, and what he wrote in the letter, it was the same message. ‘This is your problem, Isa, I’m not one of those parents who will lie under oath to protect his child, I’m not going to lie to protect anyone.’ It was his typical self-serving b.s., and as usual his words have no connection to the truth and no purpose except to hurt me.”

  That was a fair summary of what his letter said. But Jack still had doubts that the letter was a full recap of what Isa and her father had talked about face-to-face. It was just human nature to avoid putting the most damning statements in writing, and, despite his flaws, Felipe Bornelli was still human.

  Jack’s cell rang. He took the call without leaving the room. It lasted only a minute. Then he shared it with the group.

  “The lab came back with nothing. The only fingerprints on the Post-it are mine.”

  “Okay,” said Keith. “What do we do now?”

  “Move on and refocus on what matters,” said Jack. “First witness for the prosecution. Tomorrow. Nine a.m.”

  Chapter 51

  Jack’s day began with no surprises. He’d predicted a science lesson, and Sylvia Hunt delivered: witness one for the prosecution was Herbert Macklemore, M.D., one of seven full-time physicians at the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner Department who specialized in forensic pathology.

  The prosecutor was twenty minutes into a direct examination, the witness having explained his impressive credentials and his role as lead pathologist on the Sosa homicide investigation. The defense team was seated at its assigned table to the judge’s right. On the wall to their left was a projection screen, which faced the jury on the other side of the courtroom. The first image on the screen was a headshot of Gabriel Sosa taken from his passport.

  The victim, brought to life.

  Jack gauged the jury’s reaction. To them, Gabriel must have looked—normal. Nothing about those sincere brown eyes said, “I’m a rapist.” It took no stretch of the imagination to see him as a nice young man whom Isa had dated and invited back to her dorm room. This was the guy you’d expect Isa to take home to meet her parents.

  He was no David Kaval.

  “Next slide,” said the prosecutor.

  The jury squirmed, and a collective catch of the breath was audible throughout the courtroom. Jack tried not to react, but his client was less impassive.

  “What are we looking at now, Doctor?” asked the prosecutor.

  Macklemore adjusted his eyeglasses, applying his long, thin fingers to the tortoiseshell frame with a surgeon’s precision. He showed no signs of nervousness and, for that matter, barely any sign of personality. He reminded Jack of his college anthropology professor.

  “We have here a gaping head wound over the left front and mid scalp,” he said, using a laser pointer to help the jury follow along. “With a comminuted skull fracture and rupture of the meningeal membranes, which reveals the frontal lobe of the left brain hemisphere.”

  Two of the jurors averted their eyes.

  “What is a comminuted fracture?” asked the prosecutor.

  “A fracture in which a bone is broken, splintered, or crushed into a number of pieces.”

  “It would suggest severe trauma, correct?”

  “In Mr. Sosa’s case, definitely.”

  “Did you measure the wound?”

  “The laceration was fifteen centimeters f
rom the medial eyebrow ridge to the top of the head. The fracture was nine centimeters in length, with the deepest point of penetration at three centimeters.”

  It was big.

  “Doctor, I realize that I may be asking you to state the obvious, but based on your autopsy, were you able to determine a cause of death?”

  “Yes. Incised wounds and blunt trauma to the head.”

  “From multiple blows?”

  “No. A single blow from a heavy but sharp instrument, such as a meat cleaver or machete.”

  “Thank you. Let’s talk about the manner of death. Next slide.”

  It was a pair of photographs. “These are left and right images of Mr. Sosa’s upper torso and shoulder, with particular focus on the area extending from the axila—the armpit—to the clavicle.”

  “What does this show?” asked the prosecutor.

  “A matching pattern of wounds on the left and right sides, including serious abrasions and tears to the epidermis.”

  “You say a pattern. What does the pattern suggest?”

  “Significantly, the wounds are not horizontal. On both sides, the bruising and abrasions run vertically—upward—from the armpit, toward the shoulder.”

  “What does that tell you, Doctor?”

  “This is an issue we confront in strangulation cases. Are the wounds on the neck horizontal, which would suggest ligature strangulation? Or are they in a more vertical or inverted V pattern, which would suggest hanging? Here we have a vertical pattern.”

  “In terms of forensics, what does that tell you about the manner of death?”

  “Well, we have five choices for manner of death: natural, accidental, homicide, suicide, or undetermined. These wounds indicate that at some point in time before his death, Mr. Sosa was suspended in the air by either a rope or a chain.”

  “Perhaps by a steel-chain engine hoist that you might find in an automotive repair shop?”

  Jack could have objected, but what was the point? There was no disputing that the murder of Gabriel Sosa had been merciless. It all came down to whether Isa played a role in it.

  “Possibly,” said Macklemore. “I can say that the wounds are consistent with some form of torture, which in turn indicates that the manner of death was homicide.”

  More photographs followed. Cuts and bruises on his back indicated that Sosa had been whipped and beaten with either a hose or an electrical cord. The red dots on his abdomen were burns from lit cigarettes. Swollen and bruised testicles suggested that Sosa had been a human punching bag for the amusement of his assailant.

  The courtroom was silent, and the jurors struggled with the courtroom version of battle fatigue, clearly in need of a break.

  “Just two more slides,” said the prosecutor, and she brought up the image of the victim’s knees. “Multiple abrasions and contusions on the epidermis,” said Macklemore.

  “Skinned knees, in layman’s terms?”

  “Yes.”

  Finally, the ghastly image of Sosa’s right hand: he was missing three fingers.

  “These are what are commonly referred to as defensive wounds,” said Macklemore. “The kind of injuries one would sustain when fending off a knife attack, for example.”

  “To sum up, Doctor: All of this says what about the manner of death?”

  Gruesome. Horrific. Unimaginable cruelty. Those were just a few of the words that came to Jack’s mind.

  “Mr. Sosa was hoisted into the air and tortured. At some point he was on his knees,” he added, pausing to let the jury fill in the blank with the obvious implication: begging for his life. “The severed fingers are wounds that Mr. Sosa likely sustained while fending off an attack, which ended with a catastrophic blow to the head and traumatic brain injury. In short, the manner of death—”

  He stopped in response to a loud gasp from the public seating area, which was immediately followed by the echo of footfalls on tile flooring. Jack turned to see a woman running up the center aisle and then pushing through the double doors in the rear of the courtroom. The heavy doors swung closed, but even that could not completely muffle the sound of her wailing in the hallway.

  The judge had his gavel in hand, but he had yet to strike it. He knew what had happened, as did everyone else.

  “Gabriel’s mother,” Manny whispered, in case Jack had not yet deduced it.

  “The manner of death is homicide,” said Macklemore, finishing his answer.

  Jack’s gaze drifted toward the jurors. All six were reading Isa’s reaction. Watching her. Judging her.

  The judge checked the clock on the wall. “I think we could all use a break. Let’s all be back in fifteen minutes,” he said with a bang of his gavel.

  Sylvia Hunt seemed content to leave the photograph burning onto the projection screen. Jack waited for the judge to exit and then did the only thing he could.

  He went to the projector and turned it off.

  Chapter 52

  The defense found an empty conference room down the hallway. Jack closed the door, and the lawyers took seats at the round table. Keith and Isa remained standing, embracing one another. Jack gave them a minute, and then they joined the lawyers at the table.

  “I can’t take this anymore,” said Isa. “I just feel so . . . guilty.”

  The word seemed to hang in the air.

  “Guilty?” asked Jack.

  “Yes. For months I’ve been focusing only on the fact that I had nothing to do with the murder of Gabriel Sosa. Now I see these pictures, and I see his mother running out of the courtroom, and I can barely stomach the thought of what happened to him. Yes, he did a terrible, terrible thing to me. But this is an absolute horror that I could wish on no one.”

  “So you don’t mean guilty, as in—”

  “No, no,” she said. “Guilty is not the right word. Selfish, maybe?”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” said Manny. “This is a horrific crime, and this jury will want to hold someone accountable for it, whether you were raped or not.”

  “Are we back to that?” asked Isa. “Whether I was raped or not?”

  “No,” said Jack. “I think Manny’s point is that even though Sosa raped you, Sylvia Hunt mapped out an effective strategy in her opening statement. He didn’t deserve to die. He certainly didn’t deserve to die like this.”

  “What do we do about that?” asked Keith.

  “I have a thought,” said Manny. “Though I hesitate to raise it now, on the heels of this discussion of feeling selfish.”

  “Just say it,” said Jack. “This is a joint defense.”

  “Actually, that’s the point. My client is stuck in a joint trial, which in my opinion is not the safest place for a guy charged as an accessory after the fact. The gruesomeness of this murder is irrelevant to anything Keith is alleged to have done. If Isa is found guilty, this jury will find Keith guilty. I’m not so sure that would be the case in a separate trial.”

  “That argument has been made and lost. Judge Gonzalez has made it clear that there’s not going to be a separate trial,” said Jack.

  “I understand,” said Manny. “But I’m putting this out for consideration. Isa turned down the deal that Sylvia Hunt offered. But it may be time for Keith to think about cutting his own plea bargain. With or without Isa.”

  “No,” said Keith.

  Jack and Isa were conspicuously silent.

  “It’s a bad idea,” said Keith, looking at Jack. “Don’t you agree?”

  It was a delicate matter in any joint trial—offering guidance to another lawyer’s client. It was especially complicated where the question was coming from one of Jack’s oldest friends. In Keith’s mind the most important thing was his marriage. But if Jack were Keith’s lawyer, Jack would be telling him that he had a child who needed him and that the most important thing was his liberty.

  “When Sylvia Hunt presented the deal, she said it was the best offer that Isa would receive,” Jack said. “I interpret that to mean the door is still open for Keith.
”

  Keith was about to say something, but his lawyer stopped him. “We don’t have to decide this right now,” said Manny.

  Jack’s cell rang. Hannah Goldsmith was calling from the Freedom Institute. She’d been reviewing the raw footage from the television news stations all morning, searching for any clues as to who had reached out from the crowd and stuck the Post-it on Jack’s computer bag—the “She will not testify” message.

  Jack put her on speaker. “Whatchya got, Hannah?”

  “The Action News footage is the winner. I’ve been over it a dozen times now, breaking it down frame by frame.”

  “What do you see?”

  “No face. No body. Just a hand reaching out with the Post-it.”

  “That’s something,” said Jack.

  “Yeah, it is something,” said Hannah. “Something you may not have expected: the hand is a woman’s.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Jack.

  “I’d bet money on it. I can get a video-analysis expert to weigh in, if you like.”

  “Yeah,” said Jack. “Let’s definitely do that.”

  Chapter 53

  Relaxed. That was the word that came to Jack’s mind as the second witness for the prosecution swore the familiar oath. Testifying at trial and facing the sometimes brutal cross-examination of a criminal-defense lawyer wasn’t high on the list of favorite pastimes for most law enforcement officers. Retired MDPD detective Victor Meza appeared to be the exception. For three years he’d led the department’s investigation into the murder of Gabriel Sosa. The case was officially “cold” when he’d put away his shield, filed for his pension, and moved to Naples. He seemed pleased that the case, at least from MDPD’s standpoint, was finally resolved.

  Or maybe he was just glad as hell to be anywhere but on a shuffleboard court.

  “Detective Meza, what finally led you to Defendant Bornelli?”

  Meza’s opening testimony had covered the recovery of Sosa’s body, the leads, the follow-up investigation, and a series of dead ends. Then the prosecutor turned to the meat of her examination, a point in time roughly one month into the investigation—the detective’s interview of Isa.