Dead Write: A Forensic Handwriting Mystery (24 page)

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

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

“Just 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.

 

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 shoes 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: [email protected]. 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.

Once the file had finished downloading, she clicked on the play arrow and they all fixed their attention on the monitor, waiting to see Heather Lloyd and, perhaps more importantly, her companion. With Grusha craning over one shoulder and Sonya squeezing in on the other side, Claudia felt like a sandwich filling, but her buoyant mood had returned. Nothing was going to prick that happy balloon this time.

There were a few seconds of silent black-and-white static before the video clip began to play. The first frame was filled with a bank of plate glass windows and a glass door that opened onto a snowy parking lot. A split second before the front doors slid open, a couple could be seen approaching the ski lodge.

Tall and willowy, the woman wore what appeared to be a white fleece jacket and ski pants with a furry hat. Recalling that Heather Lloyd had been a model, Claudia was unsurprised to see that she moved with the grace of one accustomed to cruising along a run-way. As they approached the entrance to the lodge, she pulled off the hat and shook out her short, dark hair.

Claudia, Grusha, and Sonya stared at the screen in silence, collectively holding their breath as they tried to see the woman’s face. “It’s like a mirror,” Sonya cried, pointing to the bright sunshine reflecting off the snow and the white clothing. “It’s like her face is a blank.”

The man in the scene wore a duckbill visored hat with earflaps, pulled low on his forehead. His head was bent and he was looking down as he listened to something she said. The couple strolled through the door together and disappeared from view. The entire clip had lasted less than ten seconds.

“Eto ploho,”
Grusha murmured.

“What does that mean?” asked Claudia.

“What? Oh, it means is bad.”

“You can’t see much of
his
face at all,” Sonya said, not trying to conceal her disappointment.

“You were right, Claudia,” Grusha said with some satisfaction. She walked away from the screen, the scent of Clive Christian wafting behind her, and began pouring herself a mug of coffee. “Looks like Ian to me. Did you see his beard? Outside, before they come in and he look down.”

Claudia was less certain. “Do you really think so?” She reran the clip, focusing on the man. “Sonya’s right, you can’t see his features. His build seems too broad to be Ian.”

“That down jacket, it adds bulk.”

“But you do think the woman is Heather?”

“Yes, the poor girl. It is her—the vay she valk. Is terrible video, though. Hard to see anything clearly.”

“Detective Gray admitted it wasn’t very good quality. He wasn’t joking. It’s the lack of contrast that’s the problem. The sun on the snow washes out the image. Makes the security camera pretty worthless, doesn’t it?” Claudia frowned. “I think the man was deliberately avoiding the camera.”