Free Dead Write: A Forensic Handwriting Mystery by Sheila Lowe

Grusha Olinetsky’s clients. That left a little more than an hour for Claudia to take a second look at the files and collect her notes.
    “Oh, and Ms. Rose,” Sonya added, “I’ve messen gered you a file the baroness forgot to give you yesterday. It should be there any minute.”
    No more than two minutes after they had rung off, the front desk called to say there was a package waiting for Ms. Rose. She asked for it to be brought up to her room.
    After handing the bellman a tip, Claudia closed the door and ripped open the flap of the thick envelope. With a sense of inevitability, she removed the folder and read the name of the client: Ryan Turner. The medical student who had drowned while scuba diving.
    She took the folder to the desk and sat down, opening it first to the head shot, then flipping to the photo gallery. Her first impression of Ryan Turner was of movie-star quality looks: thick black hair, strong jaw, six-pack abs, muscular legs.
    I wonder what his bedside manner was like .
    As with Heather Lloyd, she didn’t want to accept the fact of his death; it was just too sad to contemplate. Yet Grusha had sent her his file so she could examine his handwriting. Heather Lloyd’s file might have been given to her by mistake, but two mistakes of the same kind stretched the boundaries of credulity to the breaking point.
    When she turned to Ryan Turner’s handwriting, she was intrigued to note that of all the Elite Introductions client files she had examined so far, his sample had the greatest emotional maturity. Firm, swinging rhythm, good spatial arrangement and simplified forms equaled a smart, adaptable guy with the ability to plan ahead. Not far enough ahead to avoid his own death. Scuba diving . Huh.
    Maybe comparing the handwritings to each other would provide some answers. Claudia smoothed the bedspread over the unmade bed and set out the leather folders in two rows of five, each one opened to its handwriting sample.
    Her practiced eyes traveled over the handwritings, searching for something in common between the scripts, or something in the personalities of the clients that might clue her in to Grusha’s motive for giving her this mystifying task.
    She found that two of the women—Heather and Shellee—shared some similar personality traits. The men’s handwritings were all over the map, but three of them—Avram, Marcus, and John—had red flags for pathological behavior. Ryan Turner’s handwriting was emotionally healthy, but he was dead.
    In the next phase of her examination she considered the demographics: four women, six men, aged from their mid-twenties to late thirties. Their careers were varied. From the information in the files, there was no connection that she could see.
    Except that two of them are dead. It kept coming back to that.
    Why would the baroness want me to analyze the handwritings of two dead clients?
    She opened her laptop and signed on to the hotel’s wireless Internet connection. Opening a browser window, she Googled “Heather Lloyd + model + dead” and found a handful of links to minor articles featuring the young woman, most of them covering fashion shows.
    Two recent articles mentioned her tragic death. One added an important detail that Susan Rowan had been unable to provide: Heather had been skiing with an unnamed companion when she left the trail. Only minutes later, she was dead from severe head injuries.
    Who had her companion been—a match made by Grusha Olinetsky? Since Lloyd had evidently plunked down a big fee to join Elite Introductions , chances were she would be dating a member. Maybe it was her companion’s handwriting that Claudia should be analyzing. Or maybe she already had. She made herself a note to ask Grusha whether Lloyd had dated any of the men in the group.
    A search on “Ryan Turner” produced a short article about his drowning death in Nassau, the Bahamas.
    According to the reporter, the young doctor was new to scuba diving. The spokesperson for