so quick to talk. “What box?”
It was Javier’s lawyer who told me to ask the girl about it. Her “box of bad things” is how she’d laughingly described it to her schoolmate.
“It’s a small enameled case she keeps under the sink.”
“I don’t ever look at her things. The maid cleans that room.” I had the feeling that any minute now this entire episode would be blamed on the family maid. I’d be right behind her.
I didn’t need to tell Gina’s mother right then about the marijuana and the rolling papers she hid in the box. “It’s where she keeps a supply of condoms.”
Mrs. Borracelli slumped back in the chair. “You’re saying she gave Javier the condom? Is that what she told you?”
“On her third visit here, that’s what she told me.” Getting a statement from the teenager had been like pulling teeth. I had chipped away at her story with bits of information that came from the alleged rapist and her closest friends.
Gina had admitted that after she and Javier were “fooling around” on her bed, she left the room to undress—he never pulled her clothes off, as her original statement read—and to bring a condom for him from her stash in the “box of bad things.”
This back and forth of deconstructing the evidence went on for another ten minutes. Mrs. Borracelli dabbed at tears with her embroidered handkerchief. Her voice softened as she looked to Mercer as an ally in this.
“But why would she do this, Mr. Wallace? Why would she exaggerate so much?”
“It’s not the first time, ma’am. I can’t answer that.”
“Gina may have given the reason in the texts she wrote, just minutes after Javier left her room.”
Mike referred to that kind of message, which cyber cops had pulled up and printed out for me, as TWI: texting while intoxicated. Rare that the contents of them didn’t come back to haunt the sender.
“But he spent the night in our home. How could he do that if he raped her?”
“You can put all the facts together, Mrs. Borracelli. I don’t think you’ll find that there was a rape. I suppose like most kids, Gina thought there’d be no record of her texts,” I said, removing a sheaf of papers from my file. “But they’re all saved in the memory of the cell phone. I’ve given Gina a copy. I had hoped when she left here last week she would show them to you herself.”
“What do they say, Ms. Cooper?”
Gina had texted Javier after he tiptoed out of her room and went down the hall to sleep. She was giddy with the mix of intoxication and what she described as lovemaking. Her only concern was that he not tell any of the kids at school that they had hooked up, for fear that one of the girls might call her boyfriend—her “real” boyfriend—who was away at boarding school.
“I’m going to let Gina tell you that. I want you to hear it from her. Ask her to show you the photos she sent along with the message.”
Sexting—using the cell device to send photos, in this case, nude shots of herself, usually wound up circulating among school friends and out to the world on Facebook or some other social network.
After Javier left the Borracelli apartment, Gina slept till noon, then kept a doctor’s appointment to get shots for a trip to Africa for which the family was preparing. She mentioned nothing to the doctor, missing an opportunity to be examined for injuries or possible DNA. It was only two days later, when girlfriends began asking her if it was true that she had slept with Javier, that Gina was compelled to come up with a story: that he had forced himself upon her.
Mrs. Borracelli looked defeated. I had been in this unhappy position countless times before, but it saddened me on so many levels whenever it occurred. “I don’t know if she will tell me anything at this point.”
“Why?”
“She said this morning that she didn’t want to see Javier prosecuted.”
I was glad she had reached that conclusion. I couldn’t find any evidence of a crime.
“Gina just wants him to be thrown out of school,” Mrs. Borracelli continued. “She doesn’t wish to see him anymore.”
Doesn’t wish to see him? So she calls their tryst a rape? I had a new training case for the office rookies who came fresh from law school, anxious to grow the skills to reach the pinnacle of prosecutorial ranking: homicide assistants. They would have to work their