Inkslingers Ball (A Forensic Handwriting Mystery)

by Sheila Lowe

  He looked at her with an expression of bafflement. “Why should I care? I don’t even know him. He’s just some reporter asshole.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Shane. Just don’t say I told you anything.” Mouser glanced around the coffee house, his eyes darting from one patron to the next, as if there might be a spy for Viper in their company. He lowered his voice another notch. “If you tell them anything about me, I’ll say you’re lying.”

  Annabelle lifted her chin, less impressed with him after their conversation. “That sounds kind of chickenshit,” she said with spirit. “Angel was your girlfriend, but you let him pass her around to his friends. How could you do that?” Her voice wobbled. “She was barely sixteen.”

  Mouser jumped up off the love seat, putting Annabelle’s latté in danger of spilling. He glared down at her. “Just forget I ever called you, okay?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “…thirty-seven year-old mother of two was shot at close range in her Cheviot Hills home. There was no sign of forced entry, and police believe the victim may have known her attacker. The woman’s body was discovered by her teenaged children when they arrived home from school…”

  Claudia pointed the remote at the small flat screen TV on the kitchen counter and muted the news. With Angel’s death and Travis Navarette’s, she had heard enough about murder to last a year. Besides, it was past five and she needed to think about what to fix for dinner.

  She took a package of chicken breasts out of the refrigerator and was rinsing them in the sink when the back door opened. She turned, surprised when it was Jovanic who entered, not Annabelle, whom she had been expecting.

  “You’re home early.” She smiled with pleasure. When he was working a fresh homicide it was rare that he came home at a decent hour.

  Jovanic’s fatigue-shadowed eyes flicked to the TV, where police crime scene tape fluttered around an upscale house. “What’s that?”

  “Poor kids found their mom shot to death. No suspects. Cheviot Hills; not the kind of neighborhood where those things happen.”

  “There’s no such thing anymore.” Jovanic laid his briefcase on the breakfast table and snapped it open. Cheviot Hills was outside of Pacific Division’s coverage area, and he had two homicides of his own on his hands. “I have some handwriting for you to look at.” He took out some sheets of notebook paper. “It’s a statement. I just need to know whether you think the person who wrote it is telling the truth.”

  Claudia wiped her hands on a dish towel and slid into the breakfast nook. “Are you home for the night?” She accepted the two pages he handed her and laid them side by side on the table, glancing through them, getting a first impression of the handwriting.

  “Yeah. Randy’s going to the station for a while. He wanted to bring the murder books up to date and write some reports before they get away from him. Nothing else we can do until tomorrow.” Jovanic pointed to the papers in front of Claudia. “So?”

  “Just so I’m clear, you don’t want a personality profile? You just want to know whether she’s lying—assuming this is a ‘she’?”

  Jovanic was still wearing his suit coat, but had loosened his tie. His shirt was open at the neck, tempting her to unbutton the rest of it and slip her hands inside. She kept her thoughts to herself as he cracked open a beer and dropped into the seat across from her. “I already know everything I need to know about her personality. She’s a nasty little piece of work who likes to run the show.”

  Claudia put aside her desire to lead him up to the bedroom and focused on the handwriting “I can see that. I would expect her to be diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. As far as honesty goes, I can tell you right now, she doesn’t begin to know the meaning of the word, let alone apply it to herself.”

  Jovanic told her then that upon leaving the Morgan house he had requested a criminal background check on Ariceli Lopez. She was twenty-two, older than she looked. She had a sealed juvenile record and had been arrested twice for shoplifting when she was eighteen, twice more for domestic abuse over the ensuing year. Lopez had spent a week in the Twin Towers Women’s County Jail when she was unable to make bail. That sounded interesting.

  From her handwriting, Claudia had already deduced that the writer was the type who would habitually attract the wrong sort of man into her life. It wouldn’t surprise her to hear that Ariceli had been on the receiving end of the domestic abuse and then turned on her attacker. She would not be the first young woman Claudia knew of who had been jailed under those circumstances. Then again, maybe Ariceli was just an abuser herself. Her handwriting suggested that either or both could be true.

  Getting up, Claudia riffled through the junk drawer for a hand magnifier and took it to the table. She held it over the lined paper Ariceli had torn out of a spiral bound notebook and took a closer look at the ink line—the ductus—which often provided important clues that could not be seen with the naked eye.

  The writing was a printed style—fewer and fewer public schools continued to teach cursive handwriting in the digital age. The California curriculum required students to be taught how to write legibly, but did not specify the importance of learning to write in cursive. Ariceli had probably been in one of those classes that did not bother with penmanship training.

  The printing was large and rounded, the words crowded close together. Some letters butted up against each other with hook-like forms intruding into many of the vowel letters—forms that were often found in the handwritings of habitual liars. Claudia continued to pore over the statement, not reading the words, but letting her eyes relax and absorb the patterns created by the writing and the spaces between words and lines.

  Coming to an area with extra large spaces between words, she stopped and read what it said:

  So Angel was fine when she left out of here. I don’t know anything about what happened to her after that.

  The slant of the words “I don’t know anything” changed from upright to leaning to the left. Both the additional spaces and the altered slant told Claudia that something was amiss with the emotion behind those sentences. The left slant in a writing that was generally upright indicated that Ariceli was not being truthful in what she wrote.

  While Jovanic changed his clothes, Claudia took the handwriting sample into her office. After making a photocopy of the statement so she could make notes on it, placed the original in a special acid-free mylar sleeve to preserve it. She used a yellow highlighter on the copy to mark the parts of the statement which she believed to be false.

  Looking more relaxed in shorts and a T-shirt, Jovanic came up behind her. Her body molded itself into the circle of his arms. They tightened around her, making her feel safe and loved.

  Claudia wanted to soak up every second of this unexpected interlude. But he had two homicides to solve. So, after a lingering kiss, they returned to the kitchen together and took their places at the breakfast nook.

  Claudia pointed out the words she had highlighted on the copy of Ariceli Lopez’ statement. “See how the word ‘fine’ is isolated from the words around it? She had to stop and think about it before she wrote it and before she went on to the next words. If it was true, and she knew Angel was ‘fine’ when she left the house, she could have continued writing without the pause that created the extra spaces.

  “And if the next part were true, where she writes, ‘I don’t know what happened to her after that,’ the slant would have continued in the same direction. Again, it’s because she had to pause and think of the lie that she was about to write. The slant changed to an unnatural one for her because her brain didn’t want to tell the lie.”

  “So, that might mean either Big Carl roughed her up before he took her, or she wasn’t fine because she knew something bad was going to happen and she was scared, maybe resisted going with him.”

  “Scared
, and with good reason.”

  “Too bad we couldn’t get anything from the Parker girl.” Jovanic said. “By the way, how’s the kid doing?”

  “She was pretty upset after we got home from the station. She went for a walk.” Claudia glanced at the clock and saw that more than an hour had passed since Annabelle left. “She should have been back by now. I’ll give her a call. Since you were nice enough to get her phone back, she just might answer.”

  Jovanic let loose a tired sigh. “I don’t remember being such a pain in the ass when I was her age.”

  “I wonder if your mom would remember it the same way,” Claudia grinned.

  “Probably not.”

  This situation with Angel has kicked up everything that happened to her at the Sorensen Academy last year. She started having PTSD episodes again.”

  Jovanic opened his mouth to reply, then stopped, his ear cocked toward the back door. Footsteps sounded on the back stairs. The door opened and Annabelle entered. When she saw them at the table she came to an abrupt halt.

  “Oh, cool, you’re here,” she said to Joel.

  Claudia and Jovanic glanced at each other in surprise. Jovanic and Annabelle had arrived at an uneasy truce some time ago, but it wasn’t often that she volunteered to speak to him. Cops were not on her A-list, even the one who lived with the person she loved most, next to her father.

  “Why are you limping?” Claudia asked, then she spotted the abrasion. “What happened to your knee?”

  “I tripped. No biggie.”

  “It looks like a pretty nasty scrape. Go and put some ointment and a band-aid on it.”

  “I will, but I have to talk to Joel first.”

  “Have a seat,” Jovanic said. “What’s up?”

  While Annabelle grabbed a soda from the fridge, Claudia folded the statement they had been discussing and returned it to its folder, hiding it from the girl’s curious stare. She slid over to make room and Annabelle settled herself in the breakfast nook beside her.

  “I met up with Angel’s boyfriend, Mouser, at Tyler’s,” she began, by way of explanation. Beginning with Mousers assertion that Jamie’s betrayal was the reason for Angel’s death, Annabelle launched into an account of her encounter with Mouser. She related everything she could remember about the conversation he had overhead between his brother and Ariceli Lopez.

  “I told him you had to talk to Bobby,” she finished up, taking a long drink of soda before looking over at Jovanic. “Because you can’t use hearsay—right?”

  Jovanic looked impressed. “You got it, kiddo. Is there anything else, or is that everything?”

  “That’s pretty much it. Are you gonna go talk to Shane, the writer guy?”

  “Trust me, I’ll be talking to everyone.”

  “I bet they won’t talk to you. They’re all scared of that Viper dude.”

  “Thanks, Annabelle. You did a great detective job. I’ll take it from here.”

  Annabelle pouted. “So, I did good, but now you want me to butt out?”

  “Well, I might put it a little more elegantly, but the fact is, I don’t want you anywhere near any of these people. Claudia and I want to keep you safe.”

  “That’s for sure,” Claudia chimed in. “Your job is to be fifteen years old, not some kind of avenger.”

  “But Angel was my friend! I could help—”

  Jovanic interrupted, “Listen to me, Annabelle. Next time Mouser calls you, I want you to tell him you can’t meet him. With somebody like Viper involved, it’s just too dangerous. I don’t want you getting hurt again.”

  “Mouser’s not gonna call me again,” Annabelle said. “He’s way pissed.”

  “Well, in case he does, just let me know,” Jovanic said. “I’ll handle it.”

  “Fine.”

  The offhand way Annabel said it made Claudia nervous. It was unlike her to give up without an argument. She was not convinced that the message was getting through to the girl. “Annabelle, you have to trust us on this,” Claudia said.

  “Why? Because Angel ended up all dead in the garbage?”

  Claudia couldn’t hold back her shocked gasp. She could see from Jovanic’s face that Annabelle’s words had taken him aback, too. “How did you—”

  “Mouser told me that, too. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Jovanic fixed her with a stern glare. “Listen up, Annabelle, and listen good. That’s not something we’re releasing to the news. It’s important that you don’t repeat it to anyone. Do you understand me?”

  “I don’t repeat stuff when I’m not supposed to. I’m not a gossip girl.”

  “I know you’re not. I’m just saying, this is something we need to keep under wraps. Don’t even tell Monica.”

  “Duh! As if.”

  Claudia covered the girl’s hand with her own. “Annabelle, I didn’t want you to know about that. The fact that she was killed is enough. You don’t have to hear all the details.”

  “Yes, I do! Otherwise, I just keep imagining what that crazy ass dude did to her, and that’s even worse.”

  “Haven’t you been exposed to enough violence?”

  Jovanic glanced over at Claudia, but he spoke to Annabelle. “She was strangled.”

  “Joel!” Claudia protested.

  “How?”

  “With his bare hands.”

  The color drained from Annabelle’s face. She had to be remembering the strangulation murder she had witnessed. Claudia wished Jovanic had kept that from her. What good could it do?

  Annabelle was silent for a long moment. She swallowed hard. “Mouser heard his brother say Viper kicked the shit—I mean the crap—out of her. Is it true?”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  She stood up. “Thanks for telling me. I’m gonna go band-aid my knee.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Thursday morning

  The homicide team met for breakfast at The Firehouse on Rose, a cop-friendly restaurant where they knew the waitresses wouldn’t spit in their coffee. They had been coming there so long, they had their own booth along the wall, near the back.

  Without bothering to peruse the menu, RJ Scott ordered her usual breakfast BLT. Health-conscious Randy Coleman wanted the Bodybuilder—egg whites, oatmeal, and a buffalo patty. Rationalizing that he needed to fortify himself for the long day ahead, Jovanic ordered a breakfast burrito with the works, and Huey Hardcastle, sour-faced, asked for a tofu scramble.

  “My wife would freak if I ate that,” Hardcastle groused about Jovanic’s order as the waitress left them. “She’s always nagging about my cholesterol.”

  “What, she’s got a nanny cam hidden in your lapel?” Scott wisecracked. “You need mommy to order for you?”

  Coleman grinned. “Hey, Baby Huey, maybe if you got your ass to the gym once in a while, your wife wouldn’t have to worry about those extra pounds you’ve been piling on.”

  “Yeah, Huey. A few pushups, pump a little iron—” Jovanic didn’t smile when he said it. Lately, Hardcastle had been finding excuses to do as little work as possible. Something was going on with him. He had his suspicions, and he would have to get to the bottom of it when he had time to breathe again. That was the down side of being lead detective.

  “Forget I said anything,” Hardcastle muttered, burying his face in his coffee mug.

  Jovanic had been up since before dawn. He counted himself lucky to have snagged four hours of sleep after a scorching session of lovemaking with Claudia, which he had to admit was worth the lack of zzzzs. Long before she awoke, he had dragged himself out of bed and gone to the station to pore over the two murder books, making plans for the day’s activities.

  Their conversation meandered desultorily while they waited for the food to arrive. RJ Scott’s family was planning a
big barbecue for her parents’s 50th anniversary. Hardcastle made a point that his department vehicle needed to be serviced—it had to be done on a strict schedule for insurance purposes. Jovanic made himself a private note to follow up and make sure it wasn’t just another excuse for Hardcastle not doing some real work.

  The waitress brought out their food. Coleman’s cooled while he took a phone call. The mother of one of his cold cases called him every few months, demanding to know whether any progress had been made in finding her son’s killer. There had not, but he grabbed an empty booth where he could speak with her in private.

  Jovanic called the meeting to order once Coleman rejoined them. “So listen up, guys. You are not gonna believe what I got last night.”

  “We don’t need to hear about your sex life,” Hardcastle cracked.

  Jovanic shot him an acid look that made the other detective shut up and shove a forkful of scrambled egg white into his mouth. “Turns out our ‘angel in the dumpster’s’ boyfriend spilled his guts to our young houseguest. Some good stuff.”

  That caught their attention. Jovanic brought them up to date on what Annabelle had told him and Claudia. “I talked to the ME this morning,” he added. “They were able to get a partial print off the body at the scene. They’re going to try again at the morgue, but I don’t want to wait to see if that works.”

  Jovanic had been on the phone early with a request for the post mortem on both Travis Navarette and Angela Tedesco to take place at the same time—first thing tomorrow morning. As long as nothing more urgent came in, the medical examiner had promised to accommodate him.

  First, though, he planned to re-interview Robert Morgan and talk to the other guy both Annabelle and Jack Solis had told him about—Big Carl. If he had a snowball’s chance of getting anything from him, it meant tackling Carl when he was away from Viper’s tattoo parlor.