Dead Write: A Forensic Handwriting Mystery

by Lowe, Sheila

  “It’s okay,” Jovanic said, the cold leather of his bomber jacket pressing against her cheek as he held her close. “I’m not going to leave you. I love you.”

  Why did hearing him say the words hurt her ears, as if he had yelled them at the top of his lungs? He had said them before, but something was different. She let him tilt her face up and a shudder of happiness went through her when they kissed. He was a tough cop; he had seen more horrible things in his years on the force than any one person should have to. But at this moment in time, he was the man who was giving her his heart and, god help her, she trusted him with hers.

  He was treating her as if she were breakable. She didn’t want it that way. She let him know with her own urgency. They fumbled with each other’s buttons and zippers, shed their clothing in record time, and stripped back the ugly bedspread.

  Hours later, after they had slept for a while and then made love again, Claudia curled against him, holding onto his arm around her, feeling safer than she had felt—maybe ever. Something had changed between them. She knew with certainty that whatever it was they had, had risen to a new level. And without his saying a word, she understood that she did not have to worry about Alex, or anyone else.

  “I want to tell you something,” Claudia said in a voice that was almost a whisper. She hesitated, gathering her courage to share something that she had been avoiding thinking about for a very long time. “I want you to know why sometimes I get so cold.”

  Jovanic gave a chuckle and held her against him. “Baby, cold is something you could never be. Afraid of being close, maybe, but cold, never.”

  She thought about that, musing on his perception of her and how accurate it was. “Yes, afraid of getting close, for sure. But there’s a pretty good reason for it, and I—” Now that the time had come, it was more difficult than she had expected. The shameful secret that she hated had been with her for so long it had become part of her, like a vestigial organ. She had told no one, not even Kelly or Zebediah.

  Jovanic didn’t press her, just let her ready herself in her own time, but she could sense him steeling himself, too, for what he was about to hear.

  “When I was nine,” Claudia began, “something happened. My mother was working that summer and my brother was in nursery school. My parents said I was old enough to stay home alone. It was supposed to be different back then in the sixties. And my dad’s best friend, Jack . . .” She paused. Could she do this? Realizing that she was breathing too rapidly, she forced herself to slow down. “He lived next door and he offered to watch out for me.” It was getting easier, as if once she had started, the flow of words could not be stemmed.

  “He wasn’t married, didn’t have any kids of his own. He was kind of like an uncle to me, and I adored him. He had this baby blue ’57 T-Bird convertible that impressed all the neighborhood kids, but I was the only one who got to ride in it. He used to drive me around with him when he went on errands. He’d buy me ice cream, take me to the zoo. I thought he was the greatest. Then one afternoon I went over to his house to watch TV. I remember it so well. No one was home at my house and it was so quiet. I was bored, didn’t feel like doing anything.

  “So I went next door. The front door was open and he called out to me to come in. He was in the bedroom. He was lying in bed.” She tried to keep her voice nonchalant—old habit—don’t show your vulnerability. “He pulled me on top of him and started French kissing me.” The memory of how his tongue had tasted as it probed her mouth still had the power to repel her.

  He had kissed her that way, sucking on her lips until they were rimmed with blue. An hour later, when he’d let her go at last, she’d run home and put her face close to the bathroom mirror, rubbing and rubbing at her mouth, hoping to get her lips back to their normal color before her mother came home from work. The rest of her would never be normal again.

  At the time, it had seemed to happen all at once; yet as an adult looking back at the memory, Claudia recognized now that Jack had been grooming her over a long period of time for what had happened.

  “I could feel his erection under the covers, but I didn’t know what it meant,” she said in a murmur. “I just knew something was horribly wrong. I tried to get off him, but he wouldn’t let me go.”

  “Did he—” Jovanic struggled, but he couldn’t seem to say it.

  “Yes, he raped me, and—” She took a ragged breath. At last those words had come out of her, and she realized with a sense of amazement that the sky hadn’t fallen in. “I couldn’t tell anyone what had happened. He said he would kill my cat Tommy if I told, and I believed him.”

  Jovanic buried his face in her hair, kissed the top of her head. The way he held her close made her feel safe.

  “My god, Claudia, I’m so, so sorry, baby. I guessed it had to be something like that, but you never said . . .”

  “You did? And you’re okay with it? I mean, with, well, you know, ‘damaged goods’ and all that.” She wanted to look at him, but the sense of shame had been burned for too long into her brain, even after she was old enough to know, logically, that the blame had not been her burden to bear.

  His arms tightened around her. “Okay with it? I’d like to shoot the motherfucker ’s balls off.”

  “He died a couple of years later,” Claudia said. “Pancreatic cancer, I think. For a long time I felt guilty that I was happy about it. That was hard. My parents were devastated by his death. He was one of their closest friends.”

  “So they didn’t know what he did to you?”

  “I’ve never told them. That wasn’t the only time it happened. He’d come to the front door when my parents weren’t home and I would run and hide in the closet. I’d scrunch up in there and make myself as small as I could until he stopped knocking. But there were times when they left me in his care, not knowing . . .” Claudia swallowed convulsively. “And that’s why I have so much trouble trusting.”

  She rolled over to face Jovanic. His eyes were squeezed shut and she could see tears between the lashes. She brushed them away with gentle fingers and laid her head against his chest, feeling strangely light. As if unburdening herself had moved a fifty-pound weight off her heart and allowed her to breathe freely for the first time in months.

  They ordered room service and sat cross-legged in bed, eating burgers and fries, drinking Sam Adams. She didn’t have to ask about Alex; he volunteered the story, and explained everything.

  “That photo Annabelle took. It happened exactly the way I told you.”

  “I know. I’m sorry I let myself believe otherwise. We had gotten so close, it scared me. I think I was unconsciously looking for an excuse to put some distance between us.”

  “Well, since we’re making confessions—”

  Claudia gave him an apprehensive glance, not wanting to spoil the evening. “You don’t have to—”

  “Just hear me out,” he said. “You weren’t totally wrong about Alex. No, wait a second—” He put his fingertips over her mouth as she started to protest. “She’s been coming on to me pretty heavily for a couple of months. I haven’t encouraged it, I swear to you, but it hasn’t made any difference. She’s done everything she can to get me in the sack.”

  “I knew it.” Claudia’s anger with Alex collided with a feeling of triumph that her antenna had been twanging in the right direction. “If you were trying to discourage her, taking her to your apartment while you were in the shower wasn’t exactly a smart thing to do.”

  He gave a sheepish shrug. “I know. I figured that out afterward, when you wouldn’t talk to me. Hey, I’m a guy—we’re stupid.”

  “Lower than pond scum,” Claudia agreed with mock severity. “Lower than—”

  “Okay, enough already. Just believe me when I tell you that Alex means nothing to me. She’s my partner, that’s it.”

  “Why don’t you report her for sexual harassment?”

  “And get laughed out of the division? No, thanks, babe. I’ll handle it myself.”

  “Ju
st make sure you do.” Claudia swallowed the last bite of her burger and washed it down with a swig of beer. “On another subject, I heard that Grusha spent some time in prison.”

  Jovanic gave her a look of admiration. “Grapholady, you always were a good detective.”

  They were in the shower. Claudia stretched her arms overhead and leaned against the wall. Rubbing as much lather as he could squeeze from the puny hotel soap, Jovanic began to massage her neck, moving slowly down, over both scapulae and along her spine. He spent extra time on the glutes, then moved down to her thighs.

  “How long are you staying?” Her voice was low and husky as he found all the places that he knew would quicken her breathing. “I’ve missed this.” She felt his lips on her neck and arched against him.

  “I have to leave in the morning.”IT

  “No way!” She twisted around to look at him in astonishment, the shower drenching her hair and running in rivulets down her face. “You flew all the way out here just to turn around and go right back a few hours later?”

  “M’hm.” He kissed her again, deep and hot. “You’re worth it, babe. I needed to see you for myself.”IT

  Jovanic shut off the faucet and drew back the shower curtain. He unfolded two bath towels from the rack, draped one around Claudia’s shoulders and hunkered down, drying her legs with the other.

  “By the way,” he said, pressing a kiss against her belly. “There’s one other thing you might not know about your baroness.”

  “Do I care about Grusha right now?” she asked in a dreamy voice.

  “You might be interested in this. She did her time in a minimum security men’s facility.”

  Claudia’s eyes flew open. She looked at him, confused. “What?”

  “Ha! Looks like you missed something in your investigations.”

  “What are you talking about, men’s prison? Why would they—”

  “It seems she was a he, undergoing ‘gender reassignment.’ ”

  Chapter 22

  By the time Claudia awakened on Friday morning, Jovanic was already gone. He’d left her a note that put a silly grin on her face. On the desk in his familiar block printing was a page from his notebook—he never went anywhere without it.

  God, you’re hot! Don’t analyze my handwriting. J.

  In the hours they had spent in each other’s arms, there had been no thought of discussing the information that Claudia had gleaned about Grusha’s clients. It might have been fun to hash through all the facts together, but she wouldn’t have given up a nanosecond of his brief visit to talk about work. And she hadn’t brought up the incident with Ian McAllister and his explosive behavior over his beloved car the night before. She hadn’t looked on it as a date, but Jovanic might have, and she couldn’t bear to have anything else come between them.

  Wriggling into a pair of jeans and slipping a teal turtleneck sweater over her head, she smiled, hardly daring to believe how far they had come in their relationship over those few hours. Then she thought about the surprising scoop on Grusha.

  Following his news about her sex-change surgery, Jovanic had said that Grusha, whose birth name had been Georg Orlov, had started to undergo some of the processes necessary for her sex change, but still had a penis. Glancing at his own sexual apparatus with a shudder, he said, “She—well, still officially he, at that time—was taking the female hormones and had developed breasts, but there was no choice. You go to the facility that matches the parts you’ve got right now.”

  “God, that must have been awful for her.”

  He shrugged, but not without sympathy. “In the facility where she was in custody, it’s mostly drug offenders, so it probably wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Yeah, it was prison, but it would have been much worse if she’d been placed in a population of violent offenders.”

  Claudia continued to mull over the information as she took a cab on the way to the Elite Introductions offices. Whatever might have happened to Grusha while she was an inmate, she had risen above the ordeal and made a success of her life. At least, she had been a success until someone started intruding. Now Claudia could understand Grusha’s need to uncover what was going on in her dating club before she involved the police. After spending time in prison, she would hardly look on them as her friends.

  The vibrating cell phone in her jeans pocket jolted her. She checked the number on the display, thinking it looked familiar, but not enough to place it. Answering, she recognized the Boston accent right away.

  “Ms. Rose, it’s Detective Jim Gray, Stowe, Vermont. I’ve got a video I’d like to send over for you to take a look at.”

  “A video?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been going over the surveillance tapes from the ski lodge on the day before Heather Lloyd died and I’ve pulled out a clip of a woman who might be her. She’s got a male companion with her. It’s not the greatest quality, but I’d like to e-mail it to you and ask you to see if you can ID either one of ’em.”

  “That’s great,” Claudia said as the cab arrived outside her destination. “I’m going to see the owner of the dating club right now. She knew Heather personally, of course, so she’d be much better able to make an accurate identification than I could. I’ll ask her to look at it with me.”

  “All right, sounds good. What’s your e-mail address?”

  Claudia gave it to him with a tingle of anticipation. Maybe this would be the breakthrough that she’d been waiting for.

  When she got up to the Elite Introductions offices, Claudia was in such a good mood that she took a moment to admire the arrangement of tropical flowers on the entry table: orchids, proteas, tuberoses. A stately bird-of-paradise rose out of the center, looking as though it were ready to fly away. For the first time in a long time, she felt happy. The Latin beat music playing in the background matched her upbeat mood and she felt like dropping her briefcase and dancing a samba right then and there.

  Sonya seemed subdued as she escorted her through the loft to Grusha’s private office. It became apparent that her mood was a reflection of her employer ’s. As they entered, the matchmaker was standing at the display case, gazing at her collection of fake Fabergé eggs, her back to the door.

  “Good morning, Grusha, I have some news . . .” Claudia broke off, struck by the violet smudges under the matchmaker’s eyes as Grusha turned slowly to greet her. Where had this sad figure come from?

  The normally boisterous presence seemed to have diminished overnight, replaced by a doppelganger, a shadow of herself. Her shoulders sagged in the wide-necked dolman-sleeved silk top she wore over narrow black pants. She looked exhausted and beaten, like someone who had given up.

  “Please, sit down,” Grusha said in a voice drained of energy. Even her hands drooped as she indicated the seating area of the office. She sank onto the sofa. “Sonya vill bring us coffee.”

  Claudia’s good mood took a dive. She already missed the larger-than-life personality of the Baroness Grusha Olinetsky she had come to know.

  Now that she was aware of Grusha’s secret, Claudia saw her through different eyes, suddenly noticing how much larger her hands and feet were than the average woman’s. That was not something that could be surgically changed along with her sexual organs.

  She had spent an hour that morning researching gender reassignment surgery. The Internet had offered more explicit information than she would have dreamed was available. She’d read about vagino plasty, orchiectomy, phalloplasty, astounded by what modern medicine was able to do for the patient who believed he or she was occupying the wrong gender body.

  Hormone replacement, hair removal, even facial surgery to femininize the male-to-female patient. Close-up photos of genitalia bore warnings: not for the squeamish. Yet these were people motivated by years of unhappiness to endure months of surgical procedures and therapy. Once the transition had been made, visually, you couldn’t tell the difference.

  “What did the police say?” Grusha’s voice quavered with anxiety. Despite the high-heeled sh
oes that put her over six feet, she seemed to have shrunk.

  “You won’t need to worry about the police,” Claudia said right away, feeling compelled to reassure her. “They weren’t interested in what I had to tell them. Too many jurisdictions involved. Mostly, they just didn’t take it seriously.”

  Grusha squealed and practically jumped out of her seat. “Oh, thank god! If I were to lose my business again—”

  “Even if the police aren’t interested, we’ve still got to find out what’s going on. I know I’ve kept saying I’m not a private eye, and I’m not, but I don’t believe these deaths are coincidences and I know you don’t, either. I’d still like to help you if I can. Cops or no cops, if there’s anything we can do to prevent it, I’d like to make sure no one else dies. So, here’s the good news. We might actually have an ally in Vermont.”

  Claudia told her about Detective Gray’s phone call and the video he was going to send.

  “I know nothing of computers,” Grusha said apprehensively. “You vill use Sonya’s machine. I vill look and I vill tell you if the young voman in the video is Heather, that silly girl. But I tell you one thing. I did not send Heather skiing vit anyone and she did not tell me who she was going vit. This is strictly against the rules of the club.”

  “You didn’t tell me that before,” Claudia said. “Are you saying that whenever the members go out with someone, they have to report it to you?”

  “Of course. I must know what my clients are doing vit each other. Otherwise, how vill I know who is available for a match?”

  Claudia considered this new piece of information as they went out to the main office part of the loft together and found Sonya brewing their coffee. Grusha told Claudia to explain what she needed, and Sonya showed them to her computer.

  Tapping a few keys to open a browser, Claudia launched her Web mail account, signed in with her password, and clicked on the in-box. Quickly scanning the twenty-three new e-mails that appeared, at the end of the list of familiar addresses she spotted the latest e-mail to arrive: j-gray@townofstowevt.org. A paper clip icon on the detective’s e-mail led her to a large attachment with an .avi file extension, indicating an AV file.