Most Dangerous Place

by James Grippando

  “Jack will bring him in line.”

  She breathed deeply, and Keith could hear the stress. “I’m afraid the damage has already been done by Manny’s strategy. What if Jack is right? What if the jury thinks I lied to David when I told him I was raped?”

  “They won’t think that, Isa. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Yes, it does. Here’s how it could have happened. Kaval comes to see me. He wants us to get back together again, like we’ve done a dozen times before. Break up/make up/break up/make up. I tell him it’s really over between us this time. He doesn’t accept it. I tell him he better accept it: I had sex with Gabriel. He flips out. He can’t believe I would sleep with a guy I hardly know. He—he’s gonna hit me. I freak. I don’t know what to do. I tell him it was rape. Gabriel raped me, I say. And then . . . well, then the rest happens.”

  She’d laid it out so quickly that Keith, too, felt breathless. It was a bit unnerving the way Isa had stitched together such a plausible false-accuser scenario. If the prosecution was able to present that theory of the case in convincing fashion, Isa was cooked.

  “That’s not what happened, though. Right?” he asked.

  “No! Good God, Keith, how could you even ask that question? I told you what happened. You know the truth.”

  “I do,” he said as she laid her hand atop his on the rail.

  But he didn’t.

  Chapter 56

  The first witness on Thursday morning made Jack a little sick to his stomach, figuratively speaking. Ironically, it was a doctor who was making him feel that way. Cassandra Campos was the physician on duty when Isa had visited the student health center on Saturday morning.

  “Did Ms. Bornelli state that she had been sexually assaulted?” the prosecutor asked.

  “No. She reported only that she’d engaged in unprotected sex the night before.”

  “What was the purpose of her visit?”

  “I don’t recall any purpose other than to report that she’d had unprotected sex.”

  “Those were Ms. Bornelli’s words—‘unprotected sex’?”

  “That’s what I wrote in my notes. ‘Unprotected sex.’”

  If the words unprotected sex found their way into the Q-and-A one more time, Jack would nominate the prosecutor for “Witness Coach of the Year.”

  “Did you prescribe any course of treatment for Ms. Bornelli’s unprotected sex?” asked Hunt.

  “I see here in the patient record that she was written a prescription for a ‘morning-after’ pill.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I’m sure I would have told her that the morning-after pill does not prevent sexually transmitted diseases. Other than that, no.”

  “Nothing further.”

  Ten minutes, and the prosecutor was finished. And Jack knew exactly where Sylvia Hunt was headed. No rape. Isa’s false accusation had cost Gabriel Sosa his life. There was only one victim in this case.

  Manny’s “no rape” strategy had backfired.

  Jack approached the witness and did the best he could. “Dr. Campos, you testified earlier that you wrote Ms. Bornelli a prescription for the morning-after pill, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you see Ms. Bornelli before or after August 24, 2006?”

  The doctor seemed to recognize that the date had some significance—or she was at least vaguely aware that Jack was setting a trap. “After, of course.”

  Jack approached the bench and handed up the applicable FDA regulation. “Judge, I’d ask the court to take judicial notice that, effective August 24, 2006, the morning-after pill was available over the counter, without a prescription, to any woman eighteen years of age or older.”

  The judge granted the request and so stated for the record. Jack continued with the witness.

  “Doctor, would you like to reconsider your testimony?”

  “Uh, yes,” she said, stammering. “I apparently was mistaken when I said I wrote a prescription for Plan B. I probably told her to go to the pharmacy and buy it.”

  “She didn’t need a prescription, did she?”

  “Not at that time, no.”

  “Ms. Bornelli could have walked into any pharmacy and purchased the morning-after pill for about twenty-five bucks.”

  “In theory.”

  “No, in reality, she didn’t need to see a doctor to get the morning-after pill, did she, Dr. Campos?”

  “No. She did not.”

  “So let me ask you a few more questions about this, because I really want you to help me and the jury to understand why Ms. Bornelli went to see a physician. Ms. Bornelli made an appointment to see a doctor, correct?”

  “Yes. If you have no appointment, you see the nurse practitioner.”

  “She kept her appointment,” said Jack.

  “Obviously.”

  “She told you that she had engaged in unprotected sex.”

  “That I remember very clearly.”

  “And your only response was to tell her what every college freshman in America already knows: she could get the morning-after pill over the counter from the pharmacy.”

  “Objection,” said Hunt. “Argumentative.”

  “Overruled. Please answer the question, Dr. Campos.”

  “Well, like I said. I also told her about sexually transmitted diseases.”

  “Great. Nice work.”

  “Objection.”

  “Sustained. Easy, Mr. Swyteck.”

  “Doctor, did it ever occur to you that this young woman had gone to see a doctor—a medical doctor—for some reason other than to be told that she could buy a morning-after pill at the drugstore?”

  The silence was, as they say, deafening. It was as if at that very moment—in a crowded courtroom, under cross-examination by defense counsel—the thought finally had occurred to Dr. Campos.

  “I don’t really recall,” she said in a weak voice.

  Jack didn’t relent. “You didn’t ask if she’d been sexually assaulted, did you?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t check Ms. Bornelli’s body for cuts or scratches?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t examine her for any signs of forced entry?”

  “No. She said she had unprotected sex.”

  “Yes, we heard you the first fifteen times,” said Jack.

  “Objection.”

  “Sustained. Really, that’ll do, Mr. Swyteck,” said the judge.

  “Just a couple more questions,” said Jack—and these were from Isa. “Dr. Campos, how much time did you spend with this patient? Five minutes?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Could it have been less than five minutes?” he asked, his tone more assertive.

  “We’re very busy on Saturday mornings. Short-staffed, too. It very well could have been a quick in and out.”

  “Less than two minutes?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Possibly less than two minutes?”

  It wasn’t a concession that Jack would have gotten at the top of his examination, but the witness seemed beaten. “Possibly.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.” Jack returned to the table and took his chair beside Isa.

  “Great job,” she whispered.

  Jack gave his client a little nod of appreciation. It wasn’t the killer cross-examination that blew a case wide open, but it was a helpful first crack in the government’s new theory that the rape was a fabrication. Cracks could win trials for the defense. Or they could draw reinforcements from the prosecution.

  Either way, Jack knew the battle was far from over.

  Chapter 57

  “The state of Florida calls David Kaval,” Sylvia Hunt announced.

  Jack showed no reaction, but he saw Isa reach beneath the table and squeeze her husband’s hand. They’d all known this day was coming, and Jack had told Isa on their way to the courthouse that Kaval would likely make an appearance before the lunch break.

  Kaval came down the center ai
sle, like any other witness, no longer a prisoner who had to enter through a side door in the company of law enforcement. He stepped through the swinging gate on his way to the witness stand. He was wearing a long-sleeve dress shirt and a tie—at the insistence of the prosecution, Jack presumed, in order to hide the tattoos. His black shoes were polished and his gray slacks were pressed. He was clean-shaven, with his hair neatly styled and combed. Jack wasn’t close enough to see, but he wouldn’t have been surprised to find that Sylvia Hunt had manicured his fingernails as well. The transformation was remarkable. The contrast between Gabriel Sosa and David Kaval—between the boy next door and the man who’d wanted him dead—had evaporated. If Jack had asked a stranger to pick out the bad boy Isa had dated in college, he probably would have guessed Keith.

  Appearances could be so deceiving.

  Kaval swore the oath, took a seat, and looked pleasantly at the jurors—more good coaching.

  “Good morning, Mr. Kaval. Would you please introduce yourself to the jury.”

  The next few minutes unfolded like a job interview. Kaval told the jury where he lived, where he’d grown up, where he’d attended high school.

  “You’ve made some mistakes in your life, haven’t you, Mr. Kaval?”

  He had, he told the jury, but his good behavior at FSP had shaved eighteen months off his sentence, and he was determined to turn his life around. He was planning to re-enroll at Miami-Dade College and was looking for a job. No drugs and no trouble with the law since his release from FSP, not even a traffic citation. His deal with the prosecution in this case—no jail time for his role in the murder of Gabriel Sosa—was just one more step toward putting the mistakes of the past behind him.

  “Tell us about your relationship with the defendant, Isabelle Bornelli,” said the prosecutor.

  “It was special,” he said, and for the first time since entering the courtroom, his gaze drifted toward the defense table, straight at Jack’s client. “Me and Isa had a very special relationship.”

  The reaction from Isa was so visceral that Jack sensed it. Kaval’s mere use of the word relationship, it seemed, had nearly knocked her off the chair.

  Kaval told an attentive jury how he’d met Isa during her first week on campus, how inseparable they were throughout the fall, and how his heart had broken when she’d told him that they should “see other people.”

  “When did you find out that she’d gone on a date with Gabriel Sosa?”

  The questions kept coming, and his answers flowed like a polished script. Jack had read the transcript of Kaval’s grand jury testimony many times, so nothing came as a surprise. Still, reading it on a printed page had been one thing. Words that seemed dead on the printed page took on new effect in a packed courtroom. His recounting of the conversation in which Isa had told him about the assault had been particularly convincing—and helpful, Jack thought. As Kaval told it, Isa sounded like anything but a false accuser. Nor did she sound like a woman particularly set on revenge. Until the final question before the lunch break—regarding the last thing Isa had said to him on the day she’d told him she was raped.

  “‘I just wish he was dead,’” he said, quoting Isa.

  “Those were Ms. Bornelli’s exact words to you?” the prosecutor asked, a verbatim replay of the grand jury examination. ‘I just wish he was dead’?”

  “Yes. Those were her exact words.”

  Sylvia Hunt paused. More than paused. She stopped long enough for all six jurors to shift their gaze from the witness to the accused.

  “It’s almost noon,” the judge said, his words coming like an eleventh-hour stay of execution, a welcome break to the uncomfortable courtroom silence. “Let’s reconvene at one o’clock.”

  He cracked the gavel, all rose on the bailiff’s command, and the judge exited to his chambers. The clerk’s office had accommodated Jack’s request to use the conference room down the hall for lunch so that the defense team didn’t have to fight the media getting out to a restaurant and back. They took the side exit to the corridor. A young woman approached Isa as they rounded the corner in the hallway. She looked familiar to Jack, and he thought he might have seen her once or twice outside the courthouse with the other “Rape Victims Matter” demonstrators.

  “There’s another rally,” he heard the woman tell Isa. She handed Isa a flyer, said she hoped Isa could come, and stepped away. Jack and Isa continued down the hall.

  “Who was that?” asked Jack.

  “Her name is Emma. She organizes student rallies to increase awareness of sexual assault on college campuses.”

  Jack took the flyer from Isa’s hand and read it. “The rally is this Saturday. That’s smack-dab in the middle of your trial. You know you won’t be going, right?”

  “I have no intention of going.”

  Jack stopped and looked her in the eye, making sure she understood. “You’re not going.”

  “I said I had no intention.”

  Coming from most clients, that answer would have sufficed. Not from Isa. “The prosecution will probably rest its case tomorrow—maybe by the end of today, depending on how Kaval behaves. Then the ball is in our court. This is the weekend, Isa. This is when we decide if you take the stand in your own defense. I’m not asking if you have any intention to go to that rally. I want this to be clear: you’re not going. Got it?”

  She nodded, though Jack’s words seemed to trigger a sobering, if not numbing, realization that it was getting late in the game.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I got it.”

  Chapter 58

  Jack returned to Judge Gonzalez’s courtroom expecting a rough afternoon.

  I just wish he was dead. The judge had given the jury an entire lunch hour to chew, swallow, and digest those words. Jack had been mulling them over for weeks. He knew Isa’s side of the story—that she hadn’t meant it literally. Jack had expected something very different from Kaval. He’d worried about it. He wondered how Keith would react. He’d even dreamed about it.

  Do you really mean that, Isa? You wish this guy was dead?

  Yes.

  Really, really mean it?

  Yes! I want him dead!

  Okay.

  You’ll do it, David?

  No, baby. We’ll do it.

  The time for speculation and bad dreams was over. The jury was seated. The judge reminded the witness of his oath. Sylvia Hunt picked up exactly where she’d left off, with Isa’s own words.

  “Mr. Kaval—what did you take Ms. Bornelli to mean by that?”

  Jack braced himself. Isa was looking down, her vague reflection staring back at her from the polished mahogany tabletop.

  Kaval leaned closer to the microphone and said, “I didn’t take it literally that she wanted me to kill him.”

  Jack wondered if he was still dreaming.

  “What did you understand her to mean?”

  “That she wanted me to scare him.”

  Manny scribbled out a note and passed it to Jack: WTF?

  “What did you do?” the prosecutor asked.

  “I called my buddy John Simpson and we made a plan.”

  “What was your plan?”

  A series of questions followed. Kaval described the scene at the club, where Isa pointed out Sosa as her attacker and they followed him to his car. They tailed Sosa in their van and bumped his car on purpose. When he got out of his car to inspect the damage, they hassled him, trapping him between the two vehicles.

  “What did you do then?”

  “Simpson and me threw him in the back of the van and drove to the automotive shop.”

  “Was Ms. Bornelli with you?”

  This was it, thought Jack—the point at which Kaval’s story would no longer match Isa’s, where Kaval would reveal himself as the star witness for the prosecution.

  “No,” said Kaval. “As I recall, Simpson and me were hassling Sosa. Isa got out of the van and started freaking out. So I told her to get lost. She ran. Then we put Sosa in the van.”

&n
bsp; Jack did all he could to keep his jaw from dropping in front of the jury. What the hell is going on?

  “Where did you take Mr. Sosa?” asked the prosecutor.

  “Simpson had a buddy who worked at a body shop in south Miami. He stole a set of keys and gave Simpson the alarm code. That’s where we took Sosa.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “We pulled Sosa out of the van.”

  “Did he fight back?”

  “A little. But at this point his hands were tied behind his back. Duct tape on his mouth. One of us put a blindfold on him.”

  “Where did you take him?”

  “We went in through the office door. Then went right into the main garage area and took off the blindfold.”

  “Why did you remove his blindfold?”

  “It’s a scary place after hours. These heavy chains hang from the ceiling to lift engines out of cars. We wanted him to see all that. You know, like I said, the idea was to make this scary.”

  “Did you use the engine chains?”

  “First John ripped off his shirt.”

  “Then what?”

  “We wrapped the engine chains around him. One on each side, under the arms and up over the shoulders.”

  Jack made a note. That was consistent with the wound pattern described by the medical examiner.

  “Was Mr. Sosa resisting at this point?” asked the prosecutor.

  “Not really. More begging—or whimpering. He still had duct tape on his mouth.”

  “Did you hoist him up?”

  “Not yet. Simpson—John could be a really scary guy—he starts laying out all these tools on the garage floor in front of Sosa.”

  “What kind of tools?”

  “Pliers. Screw drivers. Wire cutters.”

  “Things that someone might use as instruments of torture?” asked the prosecutor.

  “Yeah. Things that would really scare him.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I walked up to Sosa. He wasn’t quite as tall as me, but I squatted a little and got right in his face. And I started yelling.”

  “What did you yell?”

  “You want me to yell it like I did? Word for word?”

  “Yes. As best you can remember.”