Dead Write: A Forensic Handwriting Mystery (20 page)

Despite the cold weather, her palms began sweating inside her gloves, her heart racing as she glanced back at Ian. He was now shouting at a white-haired man who she guessed was the valet manager. The other man was gesticulating, yelling back just as angrily at Ian. A couple of restaurant customers walked outside. Seeing the argument, they hurried back into the building.

Holding the umbrella over the trunk to keep the rain out, Claudia pulled off her gloves. She leaned in and picked up Heather ’s folder and found several additional files underneath it. The second was labeled
Shellee Jones
. The third, predictably,
Ryan Turner
. The one missing name was Jessica McAllister, for what she thought were obvious reasons.

Slow down
, she told herself. This was exceeding the job she had come here to do. Still, the situation was intriguing. She had allowed herself to become involved and now she felt compelled to follow it through. So she asked the question: Why did Ian have these files in his car?

She flipped through the first folder and found a typical patient chart, the type that could be found in any doctor’s office. These people had been Ian’s patients—long enough for him to screen them for Grusha, at least. That gave him a legitimate reason to have the files.

Ian would never give permission for her to take the files as Donna Pollard had done. The small evening purse she carried would not conceal anything for later perusal. Another backward glance told her that Ian’s diatribe was continuing unabated. With her heart in her mouth, Claudia opened Heather Lloyd’s patient file and got her first glimpse of the doctor’s handwriting on the chart notes.

Most people thought that all doctors’ handwritings were illegible, but after studying the handwritings of thousands of physicians, Claudia knew that the cliché was a fallacy. Handwriting always told the truth about the writer, regardless of his or her profession, and many doctors had clear, legible writing. Ian was not one of them.

Given the minuscule writing size and letter forms that were simplified almost to the point of skeletal, the doctor ’s handwriting was effectively unreadable. The thick black ink he had used made the words even more difficult to read. Several ink smudges dotted the page, which were at odds with his obsessive need to clean the silverware.

The passing glimpse of the tiny scrawl left Claudia with a strong impression of a brilliant intellect, impatience, a short fuse, difficulty in connecting empathi cally with others. In the short time she had spent with him, she had already witnessed his acting out several of those characteristics.

She wanted to take the time to properly examine his handwriting, but she knew there wasn’t a second to spare. At any moment, he might end the argument with the manager and catch her spying on him. The more important and urgent task at hand was to see if she could learn why these charts were in the trunk of his car.

Keeping an ear on the situation across the parking lot, Claudia quickly thumbed through Heather Lloyd’s chart. From what she could make out in the trunk light, the medical chart detailed the physical examination that Heather had undergone in Ian’s office: blood pressure, temperature, other vitals. But one item caught her notice: On Heather’s visit, Ian had given her sample prescription capsules to treat a head cold.

The blood thrummed in Claudia’s ears. Detective Gray had told her that Heather had taken a higher than normal dose of cold medication, which left her groggy and probably contributed to her death. Had Ian done something to the capsules to make them more potent? Or advised Heather to take a stronger than recommended dose?

She moved on to Shellee Jones’ file. The words
Severe Peanut Allergy
made her catch her breath. Printed in all capital red letters at the top of the chart, the words were surrounded by large asterisks. Someone had written in the chart notes that at her mother’s urging, Shellee carried an EpiPen with her. Claudia knew what an EpiPen was.

A man she’d once known, a friend of her father ’s who was highly allergic to shellfish, had carried such a kit with him at all times. Once, when this man had gone out to dinner with her family, his throat had swelled after he inadvertently ate food that contained an allergen. A child at the time, Claudia had been horrified and fascinated to see him inject the epinephrine that saved him. He’d stabbed the tip of the EpiPen right through his trouser leg into his thigh. She could still remember his struggle to breathe and how his wheezing respirations had slowly returned to normal after the shot.

She opened Ryan Turner’s folder with shaking hands. Suddenly, she became aware of the strobe of red lights.

Turning, she saw that a police cruiser had pulled into the parking lot and stopped at the valet kiosk. Those worried customers must have called the cops. Two patrolmen got out and approached Ian and the parking attendant.
Damn!
How much worse could the evening get?

On the other hand, the appearance of the police gave her the gift of a little extra time to browse Ryan’s file.

The young med student had been in generally good health, but a note in the chart indicated that he had suffered from bronchial asthma after a bout of pneumonia the year before. Could Ian have somehow used his asthmatic condition to engineer his scuba diving death? She knew there were some big holes in that theory, but . . .

Staccato, angry footsteps were headed in her direction. The red lights were no longer pulsing. Under cover of the umbrella, Claudia carefully replaced the files back in the box and slammed the trunk closed. She spun around to face Ian McAllister.

His eyes blazed in the pale blur of his face, and for a frightening moment she thought his anger was directed at her.

“I’ll sue them,” Ian said in a voice hoarse from shouting. He took the umbrella from her hand and held it over them both as he unlocked the car and saw her inside. “The manager wouldn’t even come over and look at the damage. Insisted they never came near the car, but—”

“Someone called the police?” Claudia interrupted.

He threw her a dark look as if she were at fault, and didn’t answer. Thank god he was too distracted to realize how long she had been hovering at the rear of his car.

As soon as they were on the road, the tirade started up and continued in an endless loop throughout the thirty-minute drive: They had damaged his beautiful vehicle; he would sue them; he would never patronize the restaurant again.

“I can’t believe they would allow this to happen,” Ian ranted. “An Aston Martin DBS! A fine performance machine—do you have any idea what the repairs are going to cost?”

Claudia didn’t bother to answer. He wasn’t listening to anything but the rasp of his own voice.
Shut up!
she wanted to shout at him.
I don’t want to hear any more.
But she wasn’t stupid. She suffered the ride in silence, afraid that if she said out loud what she was thinking, he might turn his rage her way after all.

Chapter 19

“Are you out of your mind?”

Grusha Olinetsky sprang up from her desk and began to pace her office. Her respirations, quick and shallow, could easily be seen through her fashionable charcoal and black striped suit. Anxiety had brought her almost to the point of hyperventilation. She swung back to Claudia, her face a mask of despair. “Do you vant to destroy me even faster?”

Claudia kept her tone even. “No, Grusha, I don’t want to see you destroyed at all. But you brought me here because you already knew that something was seriously wrong. If Ian is killing your clients—and maybe his own daughter—you can’t just let it go on. How do you know you won’t be next?”

“Of course I vill not be next,” Grusha said bitterly. “The person doing this vants me to suffer. If I am dead, the suffering vill be over. Where vill be the pleasure for him in that?”

Claudia chewed on her lower lip, making a mess of her lipstick. So much for the suggestion she had made, that Grusha talk to the police. Yet she could not sit by and do nothing while the indications—if not actual physical evidence—of multiple murder piled up.

“Why vould
Ian
do this? I have done nothing to him.”

“Did you know that his daughter had HIV?”

“What?”
The matchmaker’s mouth gaped open. “But I don’t understand.”

“Jessica was going to rave parties and sleeping around, doing drugs. She found out she’d contracted HIV, and she planned to tell her father. Then she died.”

Grusha looked even more bewildered. “But she killed herself.”

“It seems to look that way. But I have to admit, given the deaths of your three other clients, and with him having their files in his car, it does make me wonder.”IT

Claudia had spent most of last night lying awake in bed, thinking it all through. When they had parted company in the hotel lobby, Ian offered a half-assed apology for his shameful behavior. But his extreme reaction to the imagined damage to his car, and his abusive manner toward the valet, had left a sour taste in Claudia’s mouth, one that she would not soon forget.

She said, “The level of anger I saw in Ian last night was utterly appalling. And it was over nothing—there were no marks on his car. I dread to imagine how he would react to something serious, like the news that his daughter had been defying him, carrying on a secret life, and had HIV. I have two alternate theories about it, but they end up in the same place.”IT

Grusha dropped onto the sofa and covered her face with her hands. “I did not ask you to develop theories, Claudia,” she whined through her fingers. “You said you are not a detective. Why, then, are you detecting?”

“When the shit is hitting me in the face, Grusha, I
am
involved. You involved me, and I allowed it. And, I’m sorry, but I’m not as dumb as a box of rocks.
I
can see there’s a connection between all these deaths, and
you
can, too. Now, when we talked about this before, you said that if I saw anything, you would go to the police.”

“But what you are talking about is not the handwriting. We said if you saw anything in the
handwriting
.”

“You’re splitting hairs. Handwriting shows potential for behavior. It can’t predict that someone will kill. Ian’s handwriting shows his short fuse and his anger, but I can’t say that means he set up these killings and carried them out, just that there are some red flags. Bottom line, the situation has to be brought to the authorities. Let
them
figure it out.”

Grusha slumped back against the sofa. Her jittery breathing had slowed and she seemed to resign herself. She sighed. “Tell me about these theories you have.”

“Okay, this is with the assumption that Ian is the culprit. One, Jessica told him about having contracted HIV and her secret party life. He was so frantic at learning about it that he went crazy and killed her. Then, realizing what he’d done, he set it up to look like a suicide. It wouldn’t be the first time that has happened to someone.

“Two, Jessica did kill herself and he couldn’t stand losing control over her, so in his narcissistic rage, he needed to have a replacement to act out on, and you happened to be handy. The second option seems more plausible because of the way it’s been done.” She floated the concept that she’d discussed with Zebediah. “In his twisted thinking, he could convince himself that you were at fault for her disease, and take revenge by harming what he knows is most important to you—Elite Introductions.”

“But this makes no sense,” Grusha protested. “He is the one who gives the members a medical examination. If somebody sneaked in vit a disease, it vould be
his
fault, not mine! And from what you just said, it was
not
one of my clients who infected her vit this loathsome scourge. He cannot blame that on me.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense to you or me, as long as it makes sense to him.”

“I did not vant to match that girl,” Grusha said, getting heated. “She was far too young—a child of eighteen. Ian insist that I find her a suitable man, and then he complain about everyone I introduce her to. Nobody good enough.” She paused, thinking about it. “Do you think he is the one who broke into Dr. Pollard’s office?”

Claudia shrugged. “I don’t know. The guy was behind her when he hit her, so she didn’t see him. It’s possible that he was looking for Jessica’s file, to see if there was anything in it that might incriminate him—if he is the killer. I know it’s a stretch, but Jessica could have told him she had been seeing Donna Pollard for therapy, taunting him, knowing there was nothing he could do about it.”

Grusha didn’t bother to ask how she knew so much about Jessica and her relationship with her father, and Claudia didn’t volunteer the information. What she had read in Jessica’s therapy file would remain between her and Donna Pollard. If, indeed, Ian had been Pollard’s intruder, he had gotten away without finding what he had been looking for. Unlucky for Donna that she had appeared just then.

“There’s something else I want to ask you about, Grusha,” Claudia said, determined to bring up the subject that felt to her like the elephant in the room. “You’ve been adamant about not going to the police, and you’ve more than implied that the reason is something from your past.”

The matchmaker gave her a wary look. “This has nothing to do vit what is happening to my business.”

My business.
To her, the dead clients represented dollars more than they did lives. It occurred to Claudia that Shellee, Ryan, and Heather were a means to an end to Grusha Olinetsky. She didn’t see them as individuals. She needed a steady stream of attractive people to introduce to other attractive people. Their deaths were a threat to her livelihood, and that made them more an inconvenience than anything else.

Claudia hesitated, then plunged ahead. “I’d like to take a sample of your handwriting, Grusha. I should have asked for it before we ever began working together. Under the present circumstances, I’m not going to continue without it.”