words. “Touch it. Feel it. See it?”
“ See what, exactly?”
‘ The small clubs at the ends of many of the letters. See here and here, at the bottoms and tops of the long letters.”
“ What exactly do you mean, clubs?”
“ The little caveman clubs.”
“ Oh, you mean how the author has allowed the ink to swell into a bulb at each end?”
“ Yes, precisely what I’m driving at-like the bulb at the root of a hair follicle. You see, this man… this supposed killer didn’t passively allow the ink to run there. It wasn’t passive. His hand pressed hard as hell at those points. This indicates great aggression, pent-up anger, rage released through the ink and pen. See here and here, and over here?”
Suddenly she saw little clubs all over the page where before she hadn’t noticed. He continued, guiding her forefinger like a marker on a Ouija board. ‘ ‘Take a close look at his lowercase Ds.”
Together they located a number of lowercase Ds. “What’s so remarkable about his Ds?” she wondered aloud.
“ Well, you do see the pattern, the similarity between every lowercase D, don’t you?”
“ Yeah, they all slant drastically far to the right. But what’s the significance?”
“ It’s what we call the ‘maniac D.’ See how violently slanted they are, leaning at an acute right angle toward the next word? See how far to the right it goes from the center line of the words on the sentence plane?”
He had told her about center, top and lower lines, saying each was a plane. Everyone’s handwriting followed a center line; some people dipped below their personal center diagonal excessively, and those with wild, swooping lower- plane letters, while not necessarily sexual deviants, were highly charged sexual beings. Those who spent most of their writing energy in upper regions, above the center line, were more interested in mental games, money, domination and winning. Aberrant behavior was shown in shaky, enigmatic loops and swirls on letters at either upper or lower regions. Those who maintained an even keel, staying close to the center diagonal at all times, were both better at control and more even-tempered and rule-conscious, and perhaps less sexually inclined. A shaky hand which had no control or patterns whatsoever might be that of a madman or a seriously ill person, or a person suffering from cerebral palsy or some other nervous disorder. He demonstrated via a quick forgery of Richard Nixon’s handwriting when he was at the pinnacle of his career how “in charge” and brash the man was; showed her a forgery of his name during his near impeachment that demonstrated how incredibly deteriorated the handwriting had become; and ended with a reconstructed, steadier Nixon signature upon his becoming an unofficial delegate to China. The emotional differences were startling and revealing.
It appeared the Night Crawler was all over the scale, swooping high, showing intelligence and creativity, and then dipping low below the center line, showing deviances of all sorts, his hand sometimes erratic, sometimes calm and controlled but always aggressive, harsh, brutal.
“ Whoa, you’re losing me a bit here,” she complained now and again as Eriq painted a picture of both the value of the analysis and the character of the killer as seen through his writing, saying that handwriting clearly mirrored the condition of the mind, that it was as good as or better than having a look into a man’s soul through the eyes.
Jessica began to see the pattern Eriq called the maniac D. “Oh, yeah… I see what you mean by the Ds now. Each D leans or points directly across at the word following?”
“ Like a spear, an attack, isn’t it?”
“ ‘ Maniac D.’ Just how scientific is that term, Chief?”
“ Jack the Ripper, in his notes to the White Chapel Vigilante Committee and authorities in 1888, used clubs and the maniac D. That’s how scientific it is. And we see it time and again with violent offenders behind bars.”
She looked again at the clubbed ends and the strange, violent Ds. “I take your point. What else does his handwriting tell you, Eriq?”
“ Tells me he’s a jumble, a complex SOB. Creative, ingenious perhaps, certainly an above-average IQ, which-”
“ Suggests a Ted Bundy type? Suave, smooth, lures his victim in and snares her in that instant when her guard is completely down?”
“ Could well be, but if so, it’s an act; likely a well- rehearsed and polished act, but an act all the same. This guy’s full of phobias and problems. Likely the product of a broken home; likely a failure at most everything he’s touched; likely working at some menial job somewhere which he regards as far below his natural talents.”
“ You can tell all that from his handwriting?” She could not completely keep the skepticism from filtering into her voice.
“ Well, I combine the handwriting analysis with what we also know of profiling, of course. It’s in the combination that I sometimes get startlingly lucky results.”
“ Sometimes?” she replied sarcastically. Much of Santiva’s work was chronicled, much of it now standard reading for FBI Academy personnel. His work in both document investigation and handwriting analysis had caused his star to rise meteorically, due to his extraordinary success rate at pinpointing killers through trace evidence and profiling techniques which were applied to victim and killer alike to create a matrix for murder.
Santiva coined an interesting line to explain what it was that his profiling team did, telling the press once, “We create a vector of character, personality, physical traits, even habits of both the victim and the killer.”
By studying the victim or victims, as well as by studying the killer, Santiva and the profiling team to which Jessica now belonged could put together a total picture of what occurred, and sometimes from that why it occurred. Before getting on the plane, they had already put together a complex picture of the man the press had dubbed the Night Crawler, but Jessica had not been in on sessions directly related to the handwritten document the killer had felt compelled to forward to authorities.
There at thirty thousand feet, Jessica had next concentrated on the ME’s report on Allison Norris. A capable man, this Miami M.E. named Coudriet demonstrated his own smaller, neater, nearly pinched handwriting, which Eriq called controlled, conservative, careful. “He’s likely to hold his cards extremely close to his chest,” Eriq said, sizing the man up in much the same terms as Jessica had. Even the corrections he’d made on the page told her that he was a guarded man. There was that element of purposeful equivocation in his language. He’d likely been prodded and rushed to turn over a report which he was not entirely happy with; he likely had wanted much more time to find the truth than people and agencies around him wanted him to take, from insurance companies to the Miami Police Department to the FBI. In Dr. Coudriet’s couched tones, bruises about the wrists might indicate handcuffs or possibly tightly tied ropes. Strangulation about the neck perhaps might indicate use of rope or cord, and/or likelihood of the killer’s hands. Strangulation death may have occurred before seawater entered the lungs, and this may indicate death before drowning. The man’s tentativeness was a sure sign the autopsy was a slapdash job, that he was attempting to cover his ass in the event questions arose later, at which time he could simply say, “I never said that…”
“ What do you know about Dr. Andrew Coudriet?” Santiva had suddenly asked, as if reading her mind.
“ Not much, save by reputation.”
“ Good, bad. indifferent?”
“ Highly regarded, well respected. He’s always on someone’s dais.”
“ Someone’s what?”
“ You know, giving speeches on the latest technologies used in crime detection. Speaks anywhere and everywhere they’ll pay his fee.”
“ Which is?”
“ Astronomically high-five, six figures, I’d assume.”
“ Sounds lucrative. Why aren’t you on the talk circuit?”
“ Doing’s better’n telling? I haven’t given it much thought. Not that I haven’t had offers, but who has the time?”
“ Obviously Coudriet does,” he replied, but beneath his words, he was running a thought-trying to figure out just how to take her last remark about having had offers, she guessed. She tilted the photo of Allison Norris’s body in his direction, a mushroomed body that had exploded with gases after having been picked over by sea life. In the photo, sand crabs were still making a meal of the dead girl, who was missing a chunk of flesh from her upper left thigh, a right femur and a right arm up to the elbow, where, obviously, sharks had taken more than a passing
