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Ivan looked less than thrilled, but he quickly pasted on the Hollywood version of sincerity. “That’s so thoughtful, Senator. I’d be delighted.”

“Lindsey meant a lot to us all,” Bryce Heidt said, the lines around his eyes tightening with the gravity of the occasion. “I know she’d want you to be there.”

Ivan let that go and beckoned to Claudia, who was still waiting for him on the stairs, wishing for some heavy-duty painkillers.

“Have you two met?” Ivan asked. “Senator Bryce Heidt, Claudia Rose. Claudia, Senator Heidt.”

Bryce Heidt flashed her a high-intensity smile that made his eyes crease at the corners, and took her hand in a firm grip. “Delighted to meet you, Ms. Rose.” He was undeniably handsome, with the benevolent look you’d want in someone who represents your interests. Claudia searched her memory. He’d managed to keep his Senate seat for a second term, so he must be doing something right.

Except that looks aren’t everything and handwriting always tells the truth.

“Did you see Claudia on the news last week, Senator?” Ivan prattled on. “She’s a world-famous handwriting expert.”

Heidt shook her hand with warm, sweaty fingers, appraising her. “Is that right? Do you work for the police, Ms. Rose?”

She smiled and took back her hand, battling an impulse to wipe it on her dress. “I’m an independent handwriting analyst, so I work for whomever needs my services. Even the police.”

Heidt favored her with another thousand-watt smile. “So, a crook forges someone’s signature and you figure it out, is that it?”

Claudia nodded. “Forgery identification is part of it, but a significant portion of my work involves behavioral profiling.”

Those magnificent brows shot up. “
Profiling?
From
handwriting?
You can’t be serious? You’re saying you can tell how someone
behaves
from their handwriting?”

Claudia was used to dealing with skepticism. At least he hadn’t held out his palm for her to read. It wouldn’t have been the first time someone had asked her to tell their fortune.

“Handwriting is like body language or tone of voice,” she explained. “It reveals a lot of important information about the writer.” She’d repeated the words so many times before, they came as automatically as a taped message. “Most people don’t realize that handwriting analysis is based on scientific research. It gives clues about how the writer functions. Potentials, weaknesses.”

“Well, that’s really something,” he said when she’d finished her spiel. “Maybe I’ll get you to analyze my opponent’s handwriting in the next election. You could be our secret weapon.”

Right. When pigs fly
.

She glanced around, surprised to find herself alone. “Would you excuse me, Senator? Ivan’s been waiting to speak to me. I need to find him again.” He frowned. “Don’t go yet. I’d like you to meet my wife. You can look at her handwriting and tell me what she’s been hiding from me all these years.”

The unpleasant drumming in Claudia’s head was now clobbering her right eye from inside her skull.
Migraine.
She didn’t have the patience to think up a polite answer.

“Sorry, Senator, I don’t do quickies.”

“Oh, come on, be a...” Heidt broke off, his eyes veering off to her right, filling with panic. His lips worked, but no sound came out. Turning to see what had caused his reaction, Claudia stepped back hastily as the beaded-haired woman from the cemetery swept past her as if she were not there, and eased up to Senator Heidt.

The woman slipped her arm through his, pressing her body against him. Her mouth brushed his ear intimately. “
Hello
there, Mr. Senator.”

Heidt recoiled as violently if she had held a match to his bare feet. “Excuse me,” he said a shade too loud. “I’m afraid I er...”

The woman’s smile revealed a set of film star-perfect teeth. “Your victory
party,
Senator. You remember, don’chu? I was with Lin’sey.”

For an instant, though the chatter went on unabated around them, the three of them occupied a private zone of frozen silence. Heidt darted a quick glance around as if gauging the need for damage control, but no one seemed to be looking their way. The moment passed and the consummate politician recovered his poise. He gave the woman an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, miss, you must be mistaken.”

Undeterred, the woman winked, long and slow. Seductive. “No, no,
no,
Senator. Let me remind you, I am
Destiny
.”

He shook his head, his lips stretched into a bad excuse for a smile. “I’m sorry, it doesn’t ring any bells.”

She gave a throaty laugh. “Oh, but I thought it
would
ring
your
bell.”

“Destiny darling, how
are
you?” Ivan had returned. “Let me get you a drink.” He took the woman’s arm in a firm grasp and hustled her away, glancing back over his shoulder. “Claudia, don’t go anywhere, I’ll be right back.”

Claudia stared after them. Was the woman drunk? A spurned lover? She had appeared neither spurned nor drunk. She’d looked downright pleased with herself.

Ivan and Claudia ascended the swirl of white Carrara marble stairs, party noises chasing them to the second floor.

“Lindsey never expected to live a long life, poor darling,” Ivan remarked as he led her along a hallway lined with framed photographs: Lindsey, at a restaurant, laughing with Johnny Depp. Lindsey, snuggling up to Tom Cruise. Lindsey having drinks with Donald Trump. None of them had turned out for her burial. “She made plans for her funeral a long time ago. She hated looking at long faces. A party was more her style.”

“You’ve certainly given her that,” Claudia said, blanching at the odor of stale cigarettes as Ivan opened the door to an elegant home office.

Ivan crossed to the six-foot desk that dominated the spacious room and offered Claudia a guest chair. He removed his coat and hung it on the back of the throne-like executive chair before seating himself behind the desk. “Thank god,” he said, rolling up his shirtsleeves and fanning himself with his hands. “I’ve been dying to do that all afternoon.”

He shook a smoke from the pack of Marlboros that lay on the glass-topped desk and lit up with a silver lighter. Leaning back against the inset moiré silk he sucked in a generous drag and puffed it out on a long sigh, watching the blue smoke curl toward the ceiling. It wasn’t until he had finished enjoying the nicotine rush that he broke the silence.

“Lindsey may have planned her funeral, but one thing she
never
planned was to kill herself.”

Carefully setting the cigarette on an ashtray filled with half-smoked butts, he stared at Claudia, as if daring her to dispute him. She waited in silence as he opened the top drawer of the desk and removed an envelope, tossed it across the desk.

She opened the envelope and withdrew a single sheet of paper, folded in half. Six words had been block-printed on Alexander Agency letterhead in black ink.

IT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED

“This is the suicide note?”

“That’s what the cops called it.”

Claudia’s brain flipped to automatic as she studied the note: Nothing remarkable in the style. Not enough handwriting to suggest depression or suicidal ideation; none of the tremor that would be expected in a case of illness or drugs or forgery. No signs that the writing might have been coerced. Nothing unusual at all. A lengthier sample would have offered further insight. “You don’t believe Lindsey wrote this?”

“Hell no.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“She never printed.
Ever.
She
never
wrote in black ink, and she wouldn’t have used company letterhead.”

Ivan’s words struck a chord. Lindsey’s odd quirk had always irritated Claudia. Twenty years earlier, when Lindsey had lived on a large Bel Air estate, she’d bragged to anyone who would listen that she had money to burn. Yet, when she sent personal letters, they invariably came written in her trademark green ink on the backs of junk mail or bills, sent in reused envelopes; a mailing label slapped over the original address.

Extreme recycling.

Ivan lit another smoke from the first, which was only half-consumed, and pointed at the paper Claudia held. “I’m not satisfied with the way the police handled this situation. They came up with some dumbshit theory that she wrote it, changed her mind and then went ahead and killed herself anyway. It’s ridiculous. I’m not buying it, not for a second.”

Unwilling to accept what he was suggesting, Claudia shrugged. “Okay then, it was an accident. Too much booze and...”

Ivan slammed his fist on the glass top hard enough to make the silver lighter jump. “No! Lindsey was
murdered
.”

She’d known it was coming, yet the bald words still shook her. She massaged her throbbing temple, not wanting to hear what she knew was coming next. “I suppose you’ve told the police what you think?”

Ivan slumped back against the chair, his face crumpling. “They weren’t interested in my opinion.”

“Wouldn’t they have to do a thorough investigation for someone as high profile as Lindsey?”

“If she’d been one of our clients they would. But the only time Lindsey was in the limelight was when she stood next to them. Reflected glory, isn’t that what they call it?” Rancor curled Ivan’s lip. “That damn detective never took it seriously. He claimed he had it examined by their experts and that they said she wrote it, but I’m telling you,
she didn’t!”

They had come to the crux of the meeting. Claudia tensed as Ivan rested his hands on the desktop and leaned forward.

“I need you to prove she didn’t write the goddamned note. The life insurance companies are jerking me around. They don’t want to pay on a suicide.” Opening the drawer again, he took out a Waterman fountain pen and a leather bound checkbook. “Will a retainer of three thousand be enough to get you started?” He folded open the checkbook and began to write, the platinum nib scratching against the paper.

Claudia’s hands shot out, palms forward. “Hold on a minute, Ivan.”

“Four thousand? Five? Tell me what you need.”

“It’s not the money. I need time to think.”

Ivan sprang to his feet. “There
is
no time! Look, everyone knows you’re the best in the business. But you were also once her friend. Don’t you want to know the truth about her death?”

Sitting in front of Lindsey’s desk with Ivan’s eyes boring into her, Claudia silently reviewed the catalog of inexcusable acts Lindsey had accumulated and weighed them against the earlier years when they had still been friends. There could only be one answer.

Claudia kicked off her sandals and trudged up to her second-floor office, more than ready for some down time after the loud crowd at Lindsey’s. Her bruised toes throbbed, keeping time with her headache. She sank into her desk chair with a sigh of relief and a tall glass of iced tea, and downed a handful of Ibuprofen.

Before she’d taken her leave from Lindsey’s apartment, Ivan Novak had urged her to agree with his belief that Lindsey had not written the alleged suicide note. She’d had to lay down the law with him. Her opinion was not for sale.

In as clear terms as she could manage, Claudia had explained that before she would be able to give an opinion on the authorship of the note, a thorough examination of many handwriting samples would be required. Because the handwriting on the alleged suicide note was block printed, she would need to see a selection of block printed samples of Lindsey’s true, known handwriting for comparison.

Once she was in possession of those comparison samples, Claudia would measure the size and proportion of the letters, the angle of slant, the amount of space between letters and words. Her stereo microscope would reveal some important pieces of the puzzle. A special piece of equipment called a Handwriting Comparator would add more.

Only after the handwriting had yielded all its secrets would Claudia know whether or not the samples had sufficient similar characteristics to qualify as a match.

If she were unable to make an identification—if she reached the conclusion that Ivan was correct and the note was written by someone other than Lindsey—Ivan would take her report to the police and attempt to persuade them to reopen the investigation.

Kelly was right, Lindsey had made more than her share of enemies. But was that simply the price of a trip up the Hollywood ladder? Or had someone hated her enough to kill her and arrange her death to look like suicide?

Claudia considered the other option. What if the samples
were
authored by the same hand? If she determined that the suicide note was indeed genuine, Ivan would have to accept that, for whatever reason, Lindsey had found her life too unbearable to live.

She focused her gaze one the hand-printed note, now encased in a protective plastic sleeve, mulling over the reasons why people kill themselves.

Money worries, being jilted by a lover, fear of damaging information being exposed, terminal illness. Hopelessness that life will ever improve.

Lindsey had been one of the top PR agents in the country and usually appeared in the company of some gorgeous male. Judging from the luxury of her penthouse apartment, money appeared to have flowed freely, but was it possible that things were not as rosy they appeared to be? Could she have made unwise investments or otherwise be struggling for money? Or had she been jilted by a lover? In Claudia’s memory, Lindsey had never allowed herself to care enough about a man to be annihilated by a breakup.

Yet another possibility came to mind. What if Lindsey had authored the note under duress? Had someone forced her to write her own death sentence and then carried it out?

Claudia kicked herself for agreeing to get involved with
anything
to do with Lindsey Alexander. What the hell had she been thinking?

She took Ivan’s retainer check from her purse and studied the little string of zeroes following the number he had insisted on. The plain truth was, work had been slow for the past couple of months and she couldn’t afford to turn down such a healthy retainer. The same reason she had accepted a few recent handwriting analysis assignments from Lindsey herself.