Most Dangerous Place

by James Grippando

“Then how did this happen?” asked Jack. “Allegedly.”

  “Ms. Johnson’s boyfriend was the go-between. Someone approached him on the outside and paid him ten thousand dollars. The quid pro quo was Ms. Johnson’s accusation that the corrections officer was planning to sexually assault Ms. Bornelli.”

  “What does the boyfriend say?” asked Jack.

  “He denies it, of course.”

  “Do you have any proof that the boyfriend was actually paid ten thousand dollars?”

  “No, but we have good reason to believe that he and his new girlfriend are ten thousand dollars richer.”

  “New girlfriend?”

  “Yes. Ms. Johnson got used, which is why she came clean. It is fully documented that the so-called boyfriend made three separate visits to Ms. Johnson after Ms. Bornelli became her cellmate. He hadn’t visited a single time in the six months prior.”

  “Are there recordings of the conversations between Ms. Johnson and her boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Then what proof do you have that he directed Foneesha Johnson to make false accusations?”

  “As I indicated, we have the sworn testimony of Ms. Johnson.”

  “Who is now a proven liar.”

  “I don’t think that’s been proven,” she said.

  “She made the accusations, which were credible enough for the state attorney to agree to release my client on bail before trial. She now recants and says she was bribed. She has to be lying about something.”

  “This isn’t a debate about the quality of the evidence. The bottom line is that the corrections officer has been absolved.”

  “Are you planning to bring charges against anyone?” asked Jack.

  “Not at this time.”

  “But you’re not ruling it out?”

  The prosecutor paused to frame her response. “The FBI’s investigation is over. MDPD’s isn’t. We will reevaluate if additional evidence surfaces.”

  “Let me get right to my immediate concern,” said Jack. “Will this have any impact on my client’s release on bail?”

  “No.”

  “Isa will remain free?”

  “Yes—until she’s convicted, of course.”

  “We’ll see about that,” said Jack, and the meeting ended on that note. The junior prosecutor walked Jack and Manny to the elevator, and the defense lawyers rode down alone.

  “Just to clear the air,” said Manny, “you don’t think that I jeopardized my law license and paid that boyfriend ten thousand dollars, do you?”

  Jack was watching the blinking numbers over the door. “No. I don’t.”

  “Who do you think did? If it happened.”

  “I don’t know. But I can tell you this: I plan to have a very serious conversation with my old friend Keith when he gets back from Hong Kong on Saturday.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” said Manny.

  The elevator doors opened, and they walked across the lobby.

  “Are you surprised that the state attorney is leaving Isa out on bail?” asked Manny.

  “No,” said Jack. “You?”

  “Not at all. In fact, it’s a smart strategy.”

  “Agreed,” said Jack. “Leave her out on bail, watch her on the outside, and see who she talks to.”

  Manny exited through the revolving door first, and Jack followed. “Let her hang herself,” said Manny, “figuratively speaking.”

  “Exactly,” said Jack.

  “So what’s our next move?” asked Manny, still walking.

  They were beyond the shadow of the state attorney’s office. Jack stopped to put on his sunglasses.

  “We make sure no one hands our client a rope,” he said, and then he started toward his car.

  Chapter 37

  Isa picked up Melany from art camp at noon. After lunch they stopped at Alice C. Wainwright Park, south of the Brickell area. The park’s green space was relatively small, but it was right on the bay. A five-star view of the city skyline from a limestone bluff beneath the palm trees was alone worth the visit—though Isa was already finding herself somewhat numb to that experience, waking day after day in the Four Seasons with Miami’s natural and manmade beauty at her feet. Every few minutes a biker or jogger passed on the asphalt trail that stretched along the mainland coastline and over to Key Biscayne, but mother and daughter essentially had the park to themselves. Melany headed straight to the swing set. Isa watched from a park bench in the shade of a giant oak.

  “Be careful,” Isa called out.

  Melany was pumping hard and flying high. They were beyond the four-week post-op ban on all strenuous activity, but it was hard for Isa to shift out of mother-bear mode.

  “Look at me, Mommy!”

  She was dipping her head back and pointing her toes to the sky, her beautiful hair blowing in the wind, the links of chain creaking in back-and-forth rhythm. Isa resisted the impulse to tell her again to take it down a notch. Once was enough. There were plenty of other people in the world to tell her what she couldn’t do.

  Suddenly, she jumped from the swing, launching herself into the air.

  “Melany!”

  Isa leapt from the bench, but there was no chance of catching her. Melany landed on the grass with a thud, and Isa was a second too late to break the fall. She was on her knees at Melany’s side.

  “Are you okay?” she asked with urgency. “Are you hurt?”

  Melany wasn’t crying, at least not at first. She seemed stunned for a moment, but as soon as she sat up and fully realized what had happened, the tears came in abundance.

  “Tell me where it hurts,” said Isa.

  She didn’t answer. Isa quickly checked the audio processors, first the left and then the right. Everything looked fine—at least on the outside.

  “Can you hear what I’m saying?”

  Melany was still crying, but she nodded in the affirmative. Then she burrowed her face into her mother’s shoulder.

  “Honey, you scared me to death.”

  The sobbing continued, but it seemed to be coming under control. Melany seemed more frightened than injured.

  “Why did you do that, honey?”

  Melany sniffled and said, “That man again.”

  “What?”

  “That man. I saw him over there.”

  She was pointing toward the cinder-block building that housed the restrooms. Isa looked but saw nothing.

  “What man?”

  “Scary.”

  Isa held her daughter’s head steady, forcing her to look her mother in the eye. “Melany, tell me what the man looked like.”

  She’d stopped crying, but her eyes were still cloudy. “Scary.”

  “Melany, listen to me. Was he taller or shorter than Daddy?”

  “Shorter.”

  That ruled out David Kaval, which had been Isa’s first thought, however irrational. “Older or younger?”

  “Older.”

  “White or black?”

  “Medium. A little darker than you.”

  Isa felt chills. It wasn’t a lot to go on, but the way Melany had put it—“a little darker than you”—sent Isa’s mind whirling in a familial direction.

  “You said again.”

  Melany blinked, confused. “What?”

  “You said you saw ‘that man again.’ Have you seen him before?”

  She nodded.

  “Where?”

  “The park.”

  “Which park?”

  “The one by Harbour City Mall.”

  It took a moment for Isa to process what she was hearing. “Do you mean Kowloon Park? Back in Hong Kong?”

  She nodded. “When Soo Hong took me.”

  Soo Hong was their babysitter. The aviaries at Kowloon were Melany’s favorite. “Are you sure it was the same man?”

  “Yes. He was watching me.”

  “Did he—did he get close to you?”

  “Kind of.”

  Isa was breathing faster. “How close?”

&n
bsp; She didn’t answer. Isa suddenly recalled a visit to Kowloon about a month after the first implant surgery, when Melany returned with a bruise on her leg. In broken English Soo Hong had told her that Melany had taken a fall.

  “Melany, how close? How close did he get to you?”

  Her eyes welled. “Stop yelling at me!”

  Isa wasn’t yelling, but Melany’s aural processing was more dependent on visual cues than most children’s, and Isa’s demeanor must have created that impression. “I’m sorry, honey,” Isa said, struggling to display a more relaxed and pleasant expression. “I just want you to tell me as much as you possibly can remember, okay? Now—how close did the man get?”

  “Kind of close.”

  Isa swallowed the lump in her throat. “Close enough to talk to you?”

  She nodded once.

  Isa could barely get out the next question. “Did he? Did he speak to you?”

  A tear trickled down her daughter’s cheek, and it was all the response that Isa needed. Isa reached for her phone to call the police. She needed to report this and—and say what? That Isabelle Bornelli, who failed to report her own rape, would now like to report that her daughter saw a scary man in the park?

  Melany suddenly sprang to her feet, moving much more quickly than Isa could react.

  “Melany!”

  Isa jumped up and started after her, but Melany had a sizable head start and was running faster than Isa had ever seen her move. She raced past the picnic tables and was headed down the slope toward the limestone bluff at the waterfront. Isa followed, calling out her name, commanding her to stop. Melany made it to a low stretch of leafy sea grapes and ducked inside the bushes. Isa caught up a few seconds later and found her sitting cross-legged in the undergrowth, hiding in the tangle of thin branches and exposed roots that supported the canopy above. Mother and daughter were breathing heavily from the fifty-yard dash. Isa got on one knee and looked her daughter in the eye.

  “Don’t ever run from me like that!”

  Melany didn’t answer. Isa was in no frame of mind to scold her any further. Her tone softened. “You don’t have to run, sweetheart. You did nothing wrong.”

  Melany shook her head firmly. Perhaps it was an expression of disagreement. Or maybe it was her way of saying that even though her mother’s lips were moving, she couldn’t hear a word of it. Isa noticed that she’d removed her audio processers and was clutching one in each fist.

  Isa was still holding her cell phone, but she tucked it into her pocket. She wouldn’t be calling anyone. She stood up slowly, her head and shoulders rising above the low-slung canopy of sea-grape leaves as she gazed out toward the bay.

  I will kill you, she heard herself thinking. Kill you, if you ruined what I have with my daughter.

  Chapter 38

  Jack and Theo drove to the Billfish 24-Hour Diner in the upper Keys for an early breakfast. Very early. They had to arrive before six a.m., when the graveyard shift ended for John Simpson’s widow.

  The report from Sammy at Club Inversion had proved reliable. The Kawasaki Ninja ZX-14R was a precision machine that, in the eyes of most drivers, was little more than a blur shooting by on the Expressway. According to the police report referenced in the two-year-old Miami Tribune article, Simpson was doing more than 100 m.p.h. when, at approximately three a.m., his motorcycle slammed into the back end of a U-Haul truck that had run out of gas and come to a complete stop in the fast lane on I-95. At that speed, a helmet barely reduced the splatter. He was survived by his then thirty-three-year-old wife, Ilene.

  A few minutes of social-media research was all it had taken to learn that Ilene Simpson lived in Key Largo and worked the graveyard shift at the Billfish Diner.

  The Billfish was popular year round, and with the summer “mini-season” for Florida lobster under way, it was packed with night divers who’d already caught their limit, and with recreationalists who wanted to be on the water before sunrise. No open stools at the counter, and every table in the small dining room was taken, with barely enough room for waitresses to pass. A booth in front opened just as Jack and Theo entered. They grabbed it, and their two-hour drive in the middle of the night suddenly felt worthwhile. Duct tape on Naugahyde was the authentic Billfish experience, and they were in the glow of the legendary neon sign in the window that rechristened the old eatery—appropriately, perhaps—as the “illfish Diner.”

  “That’s Ilene,” said Theo, indicating. “The waitress standing by the pie display.”

  “You sure?”

  Theo double-checked her Facebook profile photo on his phone. “Yeah. That’s her.”

  Jack tried not to be too obvious about his quick glances in her direction. Ilene was a thin woman with shoulder-length, dirty-blond hair and a mosaic of colorful tattoos that coiled around her left arm from her wrist to her shoulder. She didn’t seem to smile much, and had Jack not read in the Tribune that she was in her mid-thirties, he would have guessed older.

  Another waitress came to their table and placed two mugs and a pot of coffee on the table. “You boys ready to order?”

  Theo put down his menu. “I’ll have Ilene’s special.”

  “We ain’t got an Ilene’s special.”

  “Yeah, you do,” he said, glancing toward her coworker behind the counter. “Ask Ilene to pop over here. Tell her Sammy from South Beach sent us.”

  “Fine. But you’re in my booth, so you gotta order something.”

  Theo went for the steak and eggs with a side of blood-orange doughnuts in a creamy coconut glaze. Jack was fine with coffee and a bagel. The waitress collected the menus and headed to the kitchen.

  Jack checked the clock on the wall: 5:58 a.m. “She’s off in two minutes. What if she slips out the back door?”

  “You worry too much. She’ll sit down with us.”

  Two minutes later, Theo was proven right. Ilene left her apron at the counter, crossed the dining area, and stopped at their table. There was no squeezing in next to Theo, so Jack made room on his side and invited her to sit.

  “How do you boys know Sammy?” she asked, as she slid into the booth.

  “He gave us your late husband’s name,” said Jack, and then he handed her a business card. “I’m the lawyer for Isabelle Bornelli—the former UM student charged with murdering the man who raped her. You’ve probably seen something about her case on the news.”

  “I don’t watch the news.”

  “That’s okay. We’re here to talk about old news. We have it on good authority that John Simpson and David Kaval kidnapped the man who raped Isa and tortured him to death. Gabriel Sosa was his name.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Think hard,” said Jack. “Mr. Kaval is the chief witness against my client. I don’t know if it matters to you or not, but from everything I’ve learned so far, he’s going to paint your late husband as the badass who literally took a hatchet to Gabriel Sosa.”

  She paused, seeming to consider what Jack was saying. “Look, Mr. Swyteck, I’m tired, and all I want to do right now is go home and climb in bed.”

  “I just have a few questions.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about your case, but it sounds to me like this rapist got what he deserved. If John was involved, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “My client saw David Kaval and another man hassling Sosa on the night of the murder. Kaval testified that the man’s name was John and that he worked at Club Vertigo—Club Inversion is what it’s called now. Sammy says that would be John Simpson.”

  “Sammy would know,” she said in a tired voice.

  “Know about the murder?”

  “No. He would know John.”

  “Would he know David Kaval?”

  “I have no idea. John and Sammy knew everybody. That’s what I liked about John. Other things I could have lived without.”

  “Like what?”

  “It doesn’t matter. John’s gone. I’m hooked up with someone pretty special now and want to move forwa
rd. So I’ll tell you the same thing I told the last guy who came in here asking questions: let John rest in peace.”

  “Last guy? Who was that? Someone from law enforcement, like an MDPD detective?”

  “No, I’m talking more recent. A detective came by a while ago.”

  “Shit, man,” said Theo, groaning. “I told you they knew John Doe’s last name. Bastards.”

  Jack noted it as something the prosecution should have shared with him, but that was for another time. “Can you tell me who this guy was—the one who was asking about John?”

  “I don’t remember his name. Not sure I ever got it.”

  “How recent was it?” asked Jack.

  “Last month some time.”

  “What did he look like?”

  She gave him some basics—short, Hispanic, maybe in his sixties—which was enough. Jack scrolled through his iPhone library and retrieved a photo of Isa’s father that he’d downloaded from the Web. It was taken when Felipe Bornelli worked in the Venezuelan consul’s office in Miami.

  “This is more than ten years old,” he said, showing it to Ilene. “But could it be this guy?”

  She took a closer look. “Yeah. His hair’s gone grayer, but that looks like him.”

  Jack didn’t volunteer his identity. “What did he want to know?”

  “I don’t remember. It wasn’t a long conversation. He seemed pretty satisfied to hear that I didn’t know anything about this case.”

  Jack shook his head, confused. “I had to take David Kaval’s deposition in prison and track down Sammy at Club Inversion to figure out that ‘John Doe’ in the indictment was your husband. How did this man even know to talk to you?”

  “Got me,” she said. “I think you’ll have to ask him that.”

  Jack looked at Theo across the table. “Yeah. I think we will.”

  Chapter 39

  By ten o’clock Jack was back in Miami and sitting behind his desk. Thirty minutes later he got an e-mail that changed his plans for the day. It was from an address and a server that he didn’t recognize, but the subject line said “From Felipe Bornelli,” which made Jack curious enough to open it. The message read:

  I want a meeting with my daughter. Just the two of us. Can you arrange it?