Most Dangerous Place Read online

  Dedication

  To Tiffany, with love.

  Always.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Spring Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Summer Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Fall Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by James Grippando

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Spring

  Chapter 1

  “Baby doll definitely has your hair,” said Keith.

  Isabelle Bornelli shared a weary smile with her husband. They were twenty-two hours into a flight from Hong Kong to Miami. First class on a Boeing 777 is a 1–2–1 configuration. Isa and Keith were separated by an aisle. To Isa’s left was their five-year-old daughter, Melany, sound asleep with her head in Isa’s lap, her face buried beneath chestnut waves of silk.

  “It’s a strong gene,” said Isa.

  Isa was a stunning brunette who didn’t look back fondly on her childhood pageants, but getting tapped at age six by a top beauty academy in Caracas fed her mother’s vicarious pursuit of the coveted “Miss” titles. In a country whose unmatched number of Miss Universe winners was a source of national pride, pageantry wasn’t just the poor girl’s ticket out of the barrio: it was a shot at a better life for the entire family. But not for the Bornellis. Isa’s father abhorred pageants, espousing the revolutionist’s view—as proclaimed by then president Hugo Chavez—that plastic surgery was “monstrous.” Ultimately it was Felipe Bornelli’s faithful service to the Chavez regime that lifted the family out of a crumbling apartment in the hardscrabble hills west of Caracas. Isa was eleven when her father landed a diplomatic post with the Consul General of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in Miami. Isa got a top-flight education at Miami’s most prestigious international middle school. Even better, she managed to avoid butt implants at age twelve, the surgical shortening of her intestines at sixteen, a mesh sewn to her tongue that would turn eating into torture, and other extreme measures that the “Miss Factories” encouraged girls to take in pursuit of someone else’s definition of “perfection.”

  Isa brushed away a curl that had fallen across Melany’s face, and a hint of sadness creased a mother’s smile. That beautiful hair also hid the hi-tech gadgetry that enabled Melany to hear.

  “Time to wake up, sweetie,” said Isa.

  Melany had barely moved since their brief and only stop in San Francisco, which left Isa with no one to talk to. Keith was head of wealth management in Hong Kong for the International Bank of Switzerland, and he’d spent the entire flight on his laptop, except to eat or nap. Isa hadn’t slept at all; this was no family vacation.

  Melany wasn’t born hearing-impaired. When IBS offered Keith the post in Hong Kong, Melany was like most other twenty-two-month-old girls in Zurich—which meant that she had not yet completed her full sequence of vaccinations against haemophilus influenzae type B. “Hib,” however, wasn’t included in Hong Kong’s childhood immunization program. Two months before her third birthday, Melany developed bacterial meningitis, caused by Hib. Doctors gave her a 90 percent chance of survival, which sounded good in theory, until Isa thought of the last ten people she’d said hello to and imagined one of them dead. Weeks later, when Melany started to improve, doctors warned of a 20 percent chance of long-term consequences, anything from brain damage to kidney disease, from hearing loss to limb amputation. By her fourth birthday, it was confirmed that Melany had landed at the unfortunate end of the spectrum: the infection had destroyed the tiny hairlike cells in her cochleae and left her profoundly deaf in both ears, unable to hear even sounds in excess of 95 decibels—a lawn mower, a drill, or even a jackhammer.

  Hearing aids were ineffective. Their only hope was a bilateral cochlear implant in the inner ear—a tiny mechanical device that essentially did the work of those ravaged hair cells that stimulated the auditory nerve. Melany’s surgery was a success—for a time. Six months into Melany’s auditory rehabilitation, something went wrong in the right ear. The doctor in Hong Kong assured them he could repair it, but Isa wasn’t taking any chances. A second failure would lead to further ossification of the cochlea and leave Melany permanently deaf in one ear, no longer an implant candidate. In March, Isa flew her daughter to Miami for evaluation by the surgeon who had pioneered cochlear implants at Jackson Memorial Hospital. He undid surgery number one and sent Melany home to heal. In April, after the risk of infection had passed, they were back for surgery number two.

  “We’ll be landing shortly,” said the flight attendant. “I’ll need you to buckle your daughter’s seat belt.”

  Isa adjusted Melany’s audio processor. She didn’t normally sleep with the device, but it wasn’t a big deal if she did. The only external parts were the microphone and speech processor, which fastened behind the ear like a hearing aid, and a transmitter that was worn on the head just behind the ear.

  “Wake up, honey.”

  Melany’s eyes blinked open, and Isa breathed out her anxiety. Ever since things had gone awry with the right ear’s implant, there was a palpable sense of relief when Isa got confirmation that the left was still functional—that Melany’s brain could perceive the sound of her mother’s voice, even if she wasn’t actually “hearing” in the traditional sense.

  Melany sat up, still half-asleep as she put her arms around Isa’s neck and nuzzled against her shoulder. Isa glanced again in her husband’s direction. He was typing on his smartphone.

  “What are you doing?” asked Isa.

  “Letting Jack know we’re on time.”

  Jack Swyteck was Keith’s friend from high school. He was picking them up at the airport.

  “You can’t text from an airplane,” said Isa.

  “Actually, I can. I have one bar.”

  “I mean it’s not allowed.”

  The floor vibr
ated beneath her feet, followed by the hydraulic whine of the landing gear. The flight attendant returned. “Seat belts, please. And, sir: no texting.”

  “Sorry,” said Keith.

  Isa lifted Melany and maneuvered her into her seat. “For God’s sake, Keith. You’re going to get us arrested.”

  Keith tucked his phone away, then reached across the aisle to hold Isa’s hand. “Honey, you’re really stressed. It’s going to be okay. I promise.”

  “What’s going to be okay?” asked Melany.

  She’d missed the first part of her parents’ conversation—the part that had landed mostly on her right ear, the ear that needed fixing.

  Keith captured a gentle kiss from his lips in his fist and passed it across the aisle to Isa, who then planted it on Melany’s forehead. It made her smile.

  “Everything, sweetie,” said Keith. “Absolutely everything is going to be A-okay.”

  Jack Swyteck maneuvered the three-wheel jogging stroller through a crowded International Terminal at MIA. His wife hurried to keep up, and two-year-old Riley was squealing with delight as the pram zigzagged around passengers like a test car around cones.

  “Hey, Jeff Gordon, can you slow down, please?” said Andie.

  “We’re late,” he said.

  They were always late. It was an immutable axiom of parenthood that the amount of stuff a daddy Sherpa schlepped from the house on any given car trip was inversely related to the size and weight of the offspring. It was equally well established that no matter how well planned the journey, it was impossible to reach the ultimate destination without having to return to the car and fetch a stuffed animal, a blankie, a sippy cup, or some other thing that, quite naturally, was the very item that Riley couldn’t live without at that particular moment.

  A TSA officer stopped them at the security post at the end of the international terminal. They could go no farther, having reached the airport version of a velvet rope: nylon barricade tape connected by stanchions. Jack staked out a spot that offered a clear view of the exit doors from U.S. Customs, and there they waited.

  “Think you’ll recognize him?” asked Andie.

  Jack hadn’t seen Keith Ingraham in more than a decade, and it would be the first time each had met the other’s wife and daughter.

  “Yeah, but only because I checked out his photo on the IBS website.”

  “Does he look that different?”

  “Looks exactly the same, except for the shaved head.”

  “That’s quite a difference.”

  “Not really. His hairline was already receding our senior year of high school. I guess he finally threw in the towel. Looks good on him. Like a younger Bruce Willis.”

  Riley made an unusual noise from the stroller. She was mimicking the elderly couple beside her, who were speaking Chinese. Andie apologized in Mandarin—she’d learned a few basics on one of her undercover assignments—then continued.

  “Why did you guys lose touch?”

  “A typical story, I suppose. Keith stayed in Miami and studied business at UM. I went away for undergrad and law. By the time I came back to Miami, he was working on Wall Street for Sherman & McKenzie.”

  “So while you were living on a shoestring budget and defending death-row inmates at the Freedom Institute, your ol’ buddy Keith was making money hand over fist at S and M.”

  “‘SherMac’ for short. Never ‘S and M.’”

  “Funny, but when I was spending seventy hours a week on mortgage fraud investigations at the height of the Great Recession, most of us at the Bureau referred to them and their inflated balance sheets as ‘S and M’: smoke and mirrors.”

  That was one of the many interesting things about being a criminal-defense lawyer married to an FBI agent: it was one surprising revelation after another, the number of friends who had perhaps come close to getting burned by Andie Henning and the long arm of the law but who, unlike Icarus, lived to fly another day. “Keith is with IBS now,” said Jack.

  “Ah, S-S and M. Swiss smoke and mirrors.”

  “Such a cynic,” he said with a smile.

  A steady flow of travel-weary passengers continued through customs. Eager friends and family waited alongside Jack and then greeted loved ones with hugs, smiles, and tears of joy as they proceeded to the other side of the tape. Jack kept an eye on the exit. Finally, even from the other end of the long corridor, the recognition was instantaneous.

  “There they are,” he told Andie.

  Keith returned Jack’s wave as he and his family approached. Keith was pushing a fully loaded luggage cart. His wife and daughter walked hand in hand beside him.

  “Wow,” said Andie. “If that’s what his wife looks like after flying halfway around the globe, your ol’ buddy sure married himself one beautiful woman.”

  Andie wasn’t the jealous type, though it still puzzled Jack the way women checked out other women. Not that he wasn’t thinking the same thing.

  The big moment was a typical male reunion: mutual backslapping and hugs that weren’t quite hugs, followed by Jack’s insistence that he help with the carry-ons—a tug-of-war that ended, predictably, with Keith piling the smaller bags atop an already overloaded luggage cart and asserting, “I got it.” The adults were halfway through the introductions when Riley climbed out of her stroller to say hello. She clearly wanted to be Melany’s instant best friend. Melany was more reserved or, perhaps, just worn out.

  Jack put Riley back in the pram, and they were ready to roll when a pair of officers approached. Jack recognized the uniforms of the Miami-Dade Police Department. The taller one spoke.

  “Isabelle Bornelli?” he asked.

  Their caravan stopped before it really got started. Smiles faded, and a sudden uneasiness fell over the group.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “You’re under arrest.”

  The second MDPD officer stepped toward Isa and quickly cuffed her hands behind her back. She did not resist.

  “Whoa,” said Keith. “What is going on here?”

  The arresting officer gave Isa the familiar Miranda warning, but Keith kept talking. “This is crazy. Look, if this is about the text message I sent from the airplane, I—”

  “Keith, stop talking,” Jack said firmly, kicking into his defense-lawyer mode.

  “No, I need to know what this is about.”

  “Keith, listen to what I’m telling you,” said Jack.

  Keith pressed on. “What is my wife being arrested for?”

  The officer was stone-faced. “Murder.”

  “What!”

  “She’s under arrest for the murder of Gabriel Sosa,” said the officer.

  The next few words stumbled from Keith’s mouth. “What—how? I—we don’t know anyone named—”

  “Keith, I’m very serious,” said Jack. “Stop talking. Isa, do not answer any questions or speak to the police about this. Say only that you want to speak to your attorney. Do you understand?”

  The expression on her face was one of terror, but she nodded.

  “Mommy, where are you going?” asked Melany in a voice filled with concern.

  “Give her thirty seconds with her daughter,” Jack told the police, and they did. Isa got down on one knee and tried to explain things to Melany. A crowd of onlookers had gathered, forming a rough semicircle on the public side of the TSA security tape. Jack moved a half step closer to the officer, speaking loud enough to be heard but not overheard, making sure that the police understood the situation.

  “I’m an attorney,” said Jack.

  “Are you her attorney?” the officer asked.

  “He is now,” said Keith.

  “I’d like to see the arrest warrant.”

  The officer handed Jack a copy. It was just one page and, as was usual, did little more than reference the applicable provisions in the penal code and recite the judge’s finding that, based on the affidavit of an MDPD detective, probable cause existed to believe that Isa Bornelli had committed the specified crime. Th
e details would be in the detective’s supporting affidavit, which Jack would have to get from the court or the state attorney.

  “Let’s go, ma’am,” said the officer.

  Isa instinctively tried to hug her daughter, but the handcuffs wouldn’t allow it. She was fighting back tears as she kissed Melany on the cheek, and her knees wobbled as she rose.

  Jack handed Keith a business card and told him to tuck it into Isa’s front pocket, which he did. “That has my cell number on it,” Jack told her. “We’ll follow you to—”

  Jack stopped himself, not wanting to say “detention center” in front of the children. “To where you’re going,” he said. “But call me if you need to talk before we get there.”

  Isa said nothing; she looked numb. Keith started toward her for one last embrace, but Melany started to cry, so he went to her instead, lifting her into his arms.

  “It’s okay, baby. Mommy is just going to have a friendly visit with the nice policemen,” he said in a voice that wouldn’t have fooled Riley, much less a five-year-old.

  The police took Isa away, but not toward the main terminal exit. They retreated to the other side of the security tape, and a TSA agent escorted them through the secure area, making it impossible for her lawyer or even her husband to follow.

  “We love you!” Keith called to her, speaking for Melany, too.

  Isa glanced over her shoulder as the police led her farther and farther from her family. Jack took a good look at her expression, and then he grabbed a quick glimpse of Keith before his gaze returned to Isa. Her focus was on Keith, but Jack stole a moment of eye contact before she looked away.

  Jack didn’t share his thoughts with Keith, but from his vantage point, there was no mistaking what Isa was telling her husband without words:

  She knew Gabriel Sosa. Isa knew exactly what this was about.

  Chapter 2

  Jack and Keith hurried to his car in the Flamingo parking garage. Andie queued for a taxi and took the girls to the house on Key Biscayne.

  Jack was on his hands-free phone as he steered toward the airport exit. It was after business hours, so he dialed Abe Beckham at home. Abe was a senior trial counsel at the Office of the State Attorney for Miami-Dade County, one of several go-to prosecutors in first-degree murder trials. He wasn’t exactly a friend, but Jack had tried two capital cases against him, and there was mutual respect.