by Lowe, Shelia
The will had been witnessed but not notarized, which was surprising, given the size of the Sorensen estate. A mobile notary could have been called in. Why had that not been done?
Two witness signatures appeared under the name of Torg Sorensen, testator. Bert Falkenberg was one of them. He’d written a small, illegible signature that slanted to the left. His handwriting told Claudia that he would not be forthcoming unless there was something in it for him. Left-slanted writers were particularly hard to get to know. The illegibility added another layer of emotional distance and said that he guarded his emotions well.
The second witness signature was larger, more conventional. The name Laura Miller was penned in the Palmer model common to older women who’d had religious school training, and was typical of many who worked in administrative jobs.
“Is Laura Miller the secretary?” Claudia asked.
Paige said that she was. The question was more out of curiosity than a need to know. Paige’s attorney would undoubtedly question the witnesses, but unless they were accused of forging the signature on the will, Claudia wouldn’t need to interview them herself.
The rude bleat of a cell phone interrupted again. This time it was Falkenberg who dug out his mobile phone and checked the screen.
“Dammit. Annabelle.” He hauled himself off the sofa, excused himself, and headed for the front door as he flipped open the phone.
Claudia watched him go, curious about who Annabelle might be and why she had called twice in just a few minutes.
Paige cleared her throat before offering some explanation. “She’s new at the Sorensen Academy,” she said. “She’s finding it difficult to settle in.”
“Oh, is it a residential school?”
“A few of the girls live on site. Annabelle’s one of them. The trouble is, the other girls are constantly picking on her because she’s . . . different from them. She doesn’t even try to fit in.”
“Different, how?”
Paige looked uncomfortable, as though she was sorry she had opened that line of conversation. She leaned forward. “This is confidential, right?”
Getting Claudia’s assurance, she continued. “Annabelle tried to kill herself a couple of months ago. She came to us right out of the hospital. That’s why we can’t ignore her phone calls. She’s still pretty fragile.”
The front door opened and Bert returned. “I’ll talk to her when we get back,” he said, lowering himself onto the sofa beside Paige.
“She’s really taken a liking to Bert,” Paige said. “He’s become kind of a father figure for some of the girls.”
Claudia felt a stirring of interest about Annabelle, who had been so unhappy that she had attempted suicide, yet felt comfortable calling this bear of a man for—what? Support? He did have that big, cuddly look. Maybe she saw him as a teddy bear. A young girl might be drawn to that kind of man.
An image of her own father, loving but ineffectual in the face of her mother’s vitriol, reached out from the past. She firmly pushed the image away.
“Do you work at the school, Mr. Falkenberg?”
He nodded. “I help Mrs. Sorensen with the business end of running the Sorensen Academy. The administration of a private school is quite different from a public one.”
“I’m sure it must be.” Returning her attention to the case, Claudia indicated the file folders on the table. “I have to be frank, Mrs. Sorensen. Because of the physiological effects of the stroke on your husband’s handwriting, this is a difficult case. I’ll do my examination and let you know whether I think I can help.”
Paige visibly sagged with disappointment. “But Bert saw him sign it. Didn’t you, Bert?”
“Yes, yes, that’s right, I did.”
Paige’s body strained toward Claudia, something like desperation showing in her eyes. “You have to testify that his signature is genuine—that’s what I’m paying for!”
“What you’re paying for is my objective opinion, and that’s all I can promise you.” Stacking the folders together in a neat pile, Claudia slid them back across the coffee table with an apologetic shrug. “I’m not your lawyer, Mrs. Sorensen. I’m an advocate of the court, and that means I deal with the truth, whatever it may be.”
“But I’m telling you the truth—he signed the will.”
For a moment, no one spoke. The sudden roar of a leaf blower outside shattered the silence, startling them. The sound rose and fell under the window, amplifying the tension in the room as the gardener walked the noisy machine up the pathway. The return to quiet when he switched it off was as jarring as the racket it made.
Bert Falkenberg abruptly snatched the file folders from the table and tossed them into his briefcase, giving Claudia an icy glance. “If you can’t handle this case, maybe you’ll refer us to someone who can.”
Chapter 2
Stunned by Falkenberg’s sudden change in attitude, Claudia felt her cheeks flush with anger. She stared back at him, battling to keep her emotions in check.
“You’re welcome to take your case to someone else if you think you’d be more comfortable. I don’t testify unless I can prove my opinion based on the evidence given me.”
Falkenberg’s cold expression relaxed into a grin and he offered a conciliatory hand, which Claudia ignored. “Ah, no hard feelings, Ms. Rose,” he said, dropping his hand when he saw that she was not going to take it. “I just wanted to see if you’re easily rattled. The attorney representing Mrs. Sorensen’s stepchildren is Frank Norris—ever run into him? He’s a pit bull. We need someone who’s going to be a strong witness. You’ll do fine. There won’t be any problem with you taking your time and doing whatever you have to.”
Paige scratched the little dog’s head rapidly with her sculpted French acrylics. “Just give her the money, Bert.”
Falkenberg took an envelope from his briefcase and tossed it onto the table. “Here’s your retainer agreement and the check. Parsons will schedule you to testify at the hearing next week—assuming you agree that the signature is genuine, of course.”
Of course.
They drove away a few minutes later, leaving Claudia feeling unsettled but unsure why. She thought about the discrepancy between her impression of the Paige Sorensen she had spoken to on the phone and the Paige who had showed up for their appointment.
Then she considered Bert Falkenberg’s prying eyes going over her living room with more than just passing interest. Neither felt quite right, and the something continued to niggle at her.
Carrying a mug of fresh Brazilian roast in one hand and Paige Sorensen’s files, which Bert had returned to her, in the other, Claudia went upstairs to her office, trying to put her finger on what was bothering her.
With land at a premium in the small beach community of Playa del Reina, homes were built up rather than out. Claudia’s house, which consisted of two stories built over a garage, was a prime example. On the second floor, an interior wall had been demolished to create an office that ran the length of the house, but client meetings always took place in the downstairs living room. Her workspace was private and off-limits.
In her office, she fed a meditation CD into the stereo, then dropped into her chair behind the scarred old executive desk. She closed her eyes, trying to get in touch with the sense of words left unspoken.
Breathe, one-two-three . . . Focus on the sounds coming from the stereo: water gurgling, wood flute, loons warbling. Four-five-six . . . vapor bowls humming.
But instead of decompressing, her brain continued to buzz with a jumble of unwelcome images. Her mind insisted on returning to a letter she had received earlier that morning by fax—a court judgment against a client for whom she’d recently testified.
Recalling the day she had taken the witness stand and suffered the worst beating of her career made her shudder. It wasn’t the first time she’d had a client lose a case, but this one was different.
Boris Beckett had insisted on representing himself in his lawsuit against a large, powerful hospital—
major error number one. The hospital had presented a signed form giving them permission to perform a surgery that left him permanently disabled. Pointing out that even a child could see it wasn’t his signature, Beckett had steadfastly ignored Claudia’s appeals for him to hire an attorney. He had an excellent case—wasn’t that enough?
Arriving at court armed with exhibits to prove her points, Claudia was ready for anything. Anything but the sleazy expert witness who testified on behalf of the hospital.
Beckett had ignored her plea to obtain a witness list from the attorney representing the hospital—major error number two. The opposing handwriting expert was Andrew Nicholson.
Handwriting analysis was a small, highly specialized field, and Nicholson had earned a reputation among his colleagues for inflating his credentials like a helium-filled balloon. If she’d known he was her opposition on the case, Claudia could have produced materials to impeach him. But blindsided by his unexpected appearance, and without a savvy attorney to protect her, she was left defenseless on the stand.
During voir dire, where a witness explains his or her qualifications to the court, Nicholson had rattled off an astonishing number of professed accomplishments. Hell, he’d all but claimed to have analyzed God’s handwriting. His assertions that he worked for the CIA and that he taught document examination at Stanford made Claudia sound like a rank amateur. She would have been impressed, too, if she hadn’t known what an inveterate phony Nicholson was.
Losing on a level playing field based on the facts was one thing; combating the smoke and mirrors of an out-and-out liar was something else entirely. Her confidence in the legal system and in herself took a body blow. The last thing she wanted was to return to the witness stand so soon.
And that brought her thoughts back full circle to her afternoon visitors. Her gaze fell on the folders they had left with her. She thought about everything Paige Sorensen and Bert Falkenberg had said and the inflections with which they had spoken, and evaluated it all with professional detachment. You couldn’t be swayed by a client’s story. Sometimes they lied.
Had Paige Sorensen lied to her? It didn’t matter if she had. The signatures themselves would tell Claudia what she needed to know.
Cases involving attorneys tended to generate a lot of paperwork and needed larger storage space than the average personality profiling assignment. Claudia took a red accordion file folder from the supply cabinet and printed out a label with the name P. Sorensen, adding QD on the corner of the tab to designate it a questioned document.
Once she had organized everything, she opened the folders and spread the documents out on her desk.
Okay, Torg, speak to me.
Over the next couple of hours, Claudia made a meticulous examination of every document Paige had left with her. She began by placing them under the stereo microscope one by one and taking digital photographs through the trinocular lens port. After she was satisfied with the shots she had taken, she uploaded the pictures onto her computer.
Andrew Nicholson wouldn’t even know what button to push, she told herself with satisfaction as she launched the graphics editing program she used for courtroom exhibit prep. Pulling up the photos she had just taken, she displayed them on-screen, then electronically cut just Torg Sorensen’s signature from each document and pasted them into a new file that she named Stack Chart. The stack chart comprised a column of isolated signatures that would make it easy for her to compare each of the known signatures to the one on the questioned will.
She magnified each individual signature on-screen until the tiniest details were exposed, making notes on the differences and similarities. She measured the size of each writing zone and keyed the numbers into a spreadsheet. It was tedious, mind-numbing work, but in the event she was actually called to testify, the measurements would lay a foundation for her opinion.
Once the numbers were recorded, she ran a formula to find the standard deviation for each measurement. Next she measured the relative height of the capital letters, the alignment of the baseline, and space between the names, repeating the process of adding them to the spreadsheet.
Her back and shoulders were getting stiff. She stood and stretched, walked around the office, working out the kinks. Before returning to her desk and taking up her examination once again, Claudia ran downstairs to exchange her cold coffee for a cup of sweet mint tea.
The tea boosted her energy, and the break gave her a second wind. Completing her notes about idiosyncrasies in Torg’s authentic signatures, she made a new copy of the questioned signature she had taken from the will and checked it for writing habits similar to the known signatures.
The next step was to use a tool in the graphics editor to make the questioned signature semitransparent. Overlaying the transparent copy on each of the known signature standards allowed her to make a direct comparison.
Even in cases where a forger was able to make a clever simulation of the pictorial elements of someone’s name, the unconscious aspects of the signature could not be copied. It would take a highly skilled forgery to fool Claudia’s trained eye, and highly skilled forgeries were rare.
The phone on her desk rang, an interruption she welcomed. She picked up the receiver. “Claudia Rose.”
“Claudia, hello! It’s Stu Parsons. How’re you doing?”
Her first thought was that Paige had called the attorney and asked him to put pressure on her. “Hi, Stuart,” she said, hiding her suspicions and keeping her tone friendly. “Thanks for referring Paige Sorensen. I’m working on her case right now.”
“Isn’t she a sweetheart?” His tone held genuine affection. “Her husband was a close friend of mine for many years . . . How’s the case coming, anyway? I’m counting on you, you know—you’re my star witness.”
Claudia laughed, a little uneasy with his characterization. “Don’t put the onus on me, Stuart. It is what it is. If I can prove her case, I will. No promises.”
“I know you’ll do a super job,” he said. “You always do.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. Actually, I’m glad you called; I’ve got a question for you. Have the Sorensen children retained their own expert?”
This was information Parsons would receive in discovery—the part of the trial where each attorney got access to information, documents, and evidence that the other side had accumulated, information that would help the attorney to zero in on the strengths and weaknesses of his case.
“Norris hasn’t designated an expert,” Parsons mused. “And the deadline is past. It’s possible he’s got someone waiting in the wings for rebuttal.”
If that were the case, Norris would not have to name the witness until they came to the stand to testify. It could be a sneaky strategy that would prevent Parsons from deposing Norris’ expert before the hearing. After her experience with Boris Beckett, not knowing who her opponent was, or whether there would even be one, left Claudia feeling edgy.
They chatted for a few minutes longer, and she gave Stuart Parsons her preliminary findings, promising to e-mail the final results to him later in the evening.
After they rang off she began the next segment of the examination: a careful study of the writing impulse, the movement from each starting point of the pen—where she placed a red dot—to its stopping point, which got another red dot. A green dot went at every turning point and a blue one at every intersecting line. Then she compared the numbers and colors of dots on the questioned signature to the ones on the known signatures.
When she was finished, she printed out the exhibits she had made in preparation for the hearing the next week. She had concluded that the signature on the will was genuine, and that meant she would be back on the witness stand.
The thought of it made her clammy. Claudia had learned one thing from Boris Beckett’s case: If you can bamboozle the judge with fancy pretend credentials, it’s anybody’s game. When it comes to the legal system, there is no sure thing.
When the doorbell chimed twice, followed by the sound
of a key in the lock, Claudia got to her feet and stretched, surprised at how the shadows had lengthened while she worked. The pool of light from her desk lamp scarcely made a ripple in the dusky office. The computer clock said that more than two hours had passed since the last time she had gotten out of her chair.
“I’m up here,” she called, beginning to flip on some lights. Footfalls sounded across the teak living room floor, then became muted on the carpeted stairs. A moment later, Joel Jovanic—the man in the photo that had so interested Bert Falkenberg—entered the office loosening his tie, his suit coat bunched over his arm.
“Hey, I’m looking for a good handwriting expert . . .”
Claudia started toward him. “What are the qualifications?”
A slow smile curved his lips. “Hmm, let’s see—nice body . . . long auburn hair . . . good kisser.”
She walked into his space and grabbed a handful of his shirt. “C’mere, I’ll give you a referral.”
Fatigue had etched fine lines around his mouth and eyes, but his lips were warm against hers as they melded naturally together. She stroked her fingers along the dusting of stubble darkening his jaw. “Long day?”
“Mm-hm.” He rested his head against her hair and didn’t try to hide his yawn. “Started around five this morning.” He was a detective with LAPD, currently working sex crimes.
She slipped her arm through his and led him to the comfortable sofa in a far corner of the office. Her favorite place to rest and recharge her batteries. “A drink?”
“Not yet; I just want to zone out.” Jovanic sank into the cushions and stretched his long legs in front of him. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Some people are unbelievably fucked up. Nothing the gas chamber wouldn’t cure.”
