Authors: Lisa Gardner
“You punched a boy?” Alex asked.
“I was seven,” D.D. said, as if that explained everything. “Split my knuckle, too. My first thought was that I needed boxing lessons. My mother’s first thought was that I should be grounded for the rest of my natural life. We haven’t moved much beyond those positions since.”
“They don’t like you being a detective?” Alex ventured.
“Detective isn’t so bad,” D.D. granted. “Detectives, even in my parents’ universe, command some respect. But when I first became a cop…I believe my mother was just relieved I was on this side of the judicial system.”
Alex smiled at her. “A comment I’ve thought about many of my associates in uniform. Nervous?” he asked evenly.
She looked at him. “Nobody makes me feel as ugly and stupid as my mother does,” she said simply.
“Then we will keep their visit short and focused on Jack. Maybe your mother has never appreciated your right hook, but how can she argue with him, sweetheart?” Alex gestured down to their kicking, gurgling baby. “How can anyone argue with him?”
T
HE PHONE RANG TEN MINUTES LATER
. D.D. put Jack in his bassinet, where he’d hopefully sleep for a bit, then it would be time for his next feeding. She dug out her spiral notepad and minirecorder as she put Alex’s teacher friend on the speaker phone.
“Professor Dembowski? Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren. Thanks for calling me.”
“Ray. Please, call me Ray.”
Dembowski had a pleasant voice. Deep, smooth, maybe fifty to sixty years of age, D.D. thought. She settled in at the kitchen table, the note in its clear plastic sheathing before her.
Everyone has to die sometime.
Be brave.
Alex sat across from her with a fresh glass of wine.
“So my first question,” the forensic expert spoke up, “is do you have more samples? In my line of work, I’m generally comparing an exhibit against several exemplars. This note would be the exhibit. But where are the exemplars?”
D.D.’s eyes widened. She glanced over to Alex, who shrugged, equally perplexed.
“Exemplars?” she ventured.
“Other handwriting samples to be used for comparison. For example, if you suspect this note was written by subject A, you would submit three other handwriting exhibits from suspect A to serve as exemplars for my analysis.”
“Ummm…I don’t have subject A,” D.D. volunteered. “In fact, I was hoping to work the other way—you could analyze the handwriting on this note to help me find subject A.”
“You mean, judging purely by the script, I would provide age, gender, and probable occupation of subject A?”
“That would be perfect,” D.D. assured him.
In the silence that ensued, it occurred to her she might have taken a misstep. “Ummm…assuming such an analysis is possible?” she asked belatedly.
“No,” Dembowski said.
“No?”
“That’s called graphology, a pseudo-science if you will, where experts claim to read subconscious clues buried in a person’s handwriting. I am not a graphologist. I am a forensic handwriting expert, meaning I scientifically compare documents to determine if the same person authored all the exhibits or not.”
D.D. didn’t know what to say. She glanced across the table at Alex, who shrugged as if to say,
Who knew?
“I’m sorry, Ray,” D.D. attempted at last. “I only wish I was far enough along in the investigation to bring you multiple samples. Where things stand right now, however, I have one dead body and this note, left on the windshield of my car outside the shooting. Now, we have reason to believe the shooter is not yet done, so any insights would be greatly appreciated.”
On the other end of the phone line, Dembowski sighed heavily. “You understand, we’re moving beyond the field of science into the realm of conjecture?”
“You prefer to speak off the record?”
“Have to. I’m a forensic handwriting expert, not a graphologist, meaning even if a court of law were willing to entertain the notion of graphology, my analysis still wouldn’t meet standards.”
“Okay.” D.D. nodded, starting to understand how her expert wanted to play it. “Let’s call this a chat between colleagues. I got this fascinating note. Say, what do you make of it?”
Another pause, a deep breath, then Dembowski got down to basics. “As someone who studies handwriting, there are several aspects of this note that strike me. First off, the note is written in cursive, versus the more commonly used print. Furthermore, the letters are fairly large in scale, and looping, with the exception of the bottom
of each letter, which has been flattened, as if the writer used a straight edge for guidance.”
“I noticed that myself,” D.D. said. Across from her, Alex craned his neck, reexamining the plastic-covered note.
Everyone has to die sometime. Be brave.
“Few other anomalies—the average person creates letters of uneven size. For example, common letters, particularly vowels, have a tendency to be smaller in scale, more rushed in execution. In your exhibit, however, each letter is nearly identical in size and scale. Notice the crossbars on the two t’s. They are exactly the same width, down to the millimeter. This indicates someone with a high degree of attention to detail. The use of a straight edge to set the bottom line further supports a writer with a high need for precision. From a graphology point of view, the author of this note is most likely someone with a significant need for control in every aspect of life, a type A personality, a tightly wound anal-retentive, my first ex-wife,” Dembowski laughed hollowly, “etc., etc.”
D.D. pursed her lips, made a note. Given the scene, that made sense to her. The wiped down kitchen, the two mugs carefully placed in the sink. Even the shooting was direct and clean, double shot to the forehead, precisely placed to ensure instant fatality. So a murderer who possessed above average attention to detail and was a neat freak. Interesting.
“When analyzing handwriting, one of the things I always look for is letter slant. A left-handed person almost always has a backward slant to the letters, a right-handed person a forward slant. These letters are nearly perfectly perpendicular. To play the odds, I’d theorize your letter writer is right-handed, but again, exercising rigid precision in the formation of each letter.”
D.D. made another note.
“Next up, let’s examine the open parts of letters such as m, n, y, h. Some people scrawl with a tight, cramped script that closes up these spaces. But your letter writer has produced full, open shapes, very elegant. Also, looking at the m’s and n’s, each hump is fully formed and rounded on top, while in contrast, the v in the word ‘everyone’ is sharply angled. This level of precision, each letter being
fully and accurately formed, doesn’t just imply control, but also a great deal of practice, someone well schooled in penmanship.”
“You mean someone of higher education? Above average intelligence?” D.D. asked.
“I mean Catholic school,” Dembowski said bluntly. “I mean no one learns to write this beautifully without wearing a plaid uniform and being beaten by a nun.”
“Makes sense to me,” said D.D., who was the product of public education and wrote with a tight, cramped scrawl only a doctor could love. Across from her, Alex, who had attended a private Catholic school and regularly teased her about her illegible handwriting, grinned.
“Of course,” Dembowski continued, “the accurate spelling and correct use of punctuation, grammar, and capitalization all indicate a well-educated, intelligent person. Then again, the note consists of only two lines, meaning we have limited material for analysis.”
“Understood.” D.D. was starting to enjoy this. For better or for worse, Dembowski’s pseudoscience was starting to create an image of a killer in her head, and she liked it. The note agreed with her crime scene; her crime scene agreed with the note. That worked for D.D.
“Finally,” Dembowski said, “it’s important to look at the tail of the y and the ending hook of the last letter of each word. These flourishing touches can tell us a bit more about psyche. For example, while the consistent size and accurate form of each letter tells me your letter writer is practiced and precise, the tail of the y gives us the first insight into style. In this case, the y has a distinct loop, above and beyond what is strictly necessary for form. Likewise, each word ends with an upward flourish, a sort of graceful finishing touch.”
“You mean refined,” D.D. said sharply. “As in, I’m not only looking for someone well educated, but also upper class? Higher socioeconomics?”
“Possibly. Attending a private school, however, would seem to indicate that. Overall, my highly unscientific opinion is that the person who wrote this note is right-handed, very neat in appearance, detail-oriented, well educated, possibly Catholic, and of course…”
He paused a beat, as if the last piece of the puzzle should be obvious to D.D.
“Rounded letters,” Dembowski prodded. “Finishing flourishes.”
D.D. finally got it. Her eyes widened. “No way!”
“Oh I’m nearly positive. And when it comes to gender, studies have shown even a layperson can accurately predict the sex of a letter writer nearly 70 percent of the time. Men and women are different, even when it comes to penmanship. So, assuming the person who did the shooting is the same person who wrote this note, then your murderer…”
“Is a woman!” D.D. filled in.
“Yep and, most likely, a tightly wound one at that.”
“T
HEY ALLOW DOGS IN THE COMM CENTER?
”
I looked up from the coffee-stained counter in the tiny kitchenette area to find Officer Mackereth, lounging in the doorway, studying me and Tulip, who sat patiently by my side.
Seven forty-two A.M. My replacement, Sarah Duffy, had done me the courtesy of showing up on time for day shift. She’d logged in, performed roll call, then we’d spent thirty minutes reviewing the dispatch log from the graveyard shift, so she’d have a sense of history to guide the day. It helped particularly with domestic complaints, where maybe two calls from the same residence had already come in during one shift, then a third hit during the next shift. At that point the second dispatcher knew the situation was ongoing, possibly escalating, and probably it was time to get more aggressive with the police response, whether the caller agreed or not.
I’d just clocked out, feeling I’d earned every penny of my $14.50 hourly wage. I was simultaneously exhausted and cranked up on adrenaline, a dangerous combination for anyone, but particularly for me.
One more day down, three more to go until the twenty-first. Randi and Jackie had each been murdered in the evening. For the sake of argument, I’d set my mental deadline at 8
P.M.
January 21. Meaning eighty-four hours and counting. Or, assuming I slept six hours each morning, only sixty waking hours left.
Tom pushed away from the doorjamb and walked into the small space. He approached Tulip, held out his hand.
“He got a name?”
“Her name is Tulip.”
“Bring her often?”
“Too cold to leave her outside,” I said, as if that explained everything.
He nodded, so maybe it did.
I finished wiping down the counter with a Clorox wipe, then went to work on the battered stainless steel sink with a scrubber sponge. Nine months ago, I’d started buying all new cleaning supplies for the break room. Trust me, someone had to do it.
Officer Mackereth was scratching Tulip’s ears, but eyeing me. I didn’t return his gaze. I scoured the sink. Coffee and hard water stains everywhere. Drove me nuts.
“Quite the call tonight,” he said presently.
I stilled, noticed a rust stain that would never come out, scrubbed harder.
“Sorry I was slow on the intel,” I said abruptly. “Caller was hiding from her husband and couldn’t really talk.”
“Then how’d you get the information?”
“Phone beeps.”
“Pardon?”
I finished the sink, glanced at him, then turned on the water to rinse the sponge. Officer Mackereth was probably mid-thirties, blue eyes, short-cropped brown hair. Bit burly, but carried it well. Gave him the kind of presence that made subjects give up on the idea of running and surrender instead.
I didn’t like him standing so close. I didn’t like him studying me with cop eyes, trained to ferret out secrets and spot dissembling.
He’d never caught up with me after a shift. Most of them hadn’t. On the one hand, as Detective D. D. Warren had said, I had their backs and they felt like they had mine. On the other hand, dispatchers had a notoriously high burnout rate. Meaning most of my officers were waiting for my one-year anniversary, to see if I was still around, before investing in a personal relationship.
I was like the walk-on part in all those old war movies. The new guy whose name nobody bothered to learn.
Except Officer Mackereth was talking to me now, paying attention to me now. Following war movie logic, he’d just doomed me to blow up in scene two.
The thought made me smile, then made me want to laugh, then made me want to cry.
Exhaustion and adrenaline. A dangerous combination in any person, but particularly in one with only eighty-four hours left.
“What do you mean phone beeps?” Officer Mackereth asked again.
I put away the Clorox wipes. Got out my messenger bag. “I asked questions. The caller responded by using one beep for yes, two beeps for no,” I supplied. “Got the job done.”
I slipped the wide flat strap crossways over my body, black leather bag, with my loaded Taurus, draped at my hip. I picked up Tulip’s leash.
And Officer Mackereth placed his hand on my arm.
I stilled. Maybe sucked in a breath. Tried to think what to feel, how to respond. For a year I’d been training to attack, retaliate, defend. I should drop into boxer’s stance, hands in front of my face.
Take a picture,
my coach always yelled. I should prepare to deliver jab one to be followed quickly by punch two, left hook three, uppercut four.
No one had touched me in a year. Casually, politely, kindly.
And the sheer vacuum of my isolation suddenly threatened to consume me. Isolation, exhaustion, adrenaline.