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and when she finally got around to it, she’d write out one big check for all the fines.”
    Zebediah adjusted his chair upright, stuck his long legs underneath it, and attacked his food with the anticipation of a starving man. “If she was blackmailing Sommerfield, I’d guess she must have made him pay in spades over the years.”
    “What about her mother? Why didn’t she do something about the abuse?” Even as she asked the question, Claudia guessed the answer.
    “She claims her mother knew all about it, but she didn’t want to lose all the perks, so she kept her mouth shut. She was only too happy to look the other way.”
    Looked the other way while her child was used as a sex slave. Lindsey must have been crushed by the emotional abandonment, along with everything else she had to suffer .
    It was not uncommon for victims of long-term abuse to eventually identify with their abuser. Like Patti Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, back in the Seventies. Psychologists had dubbed it the Stockholm Syndrome, after a botched bank robbery in Sweden, where the hostages had eventually refused rescue. One of them even became engaged to her captor.
    “So, what happened to this guy?” asked Claudia.
    “I don’t know, but as I said, Lindsey was pathologically attached to him. She talked to me about it, but she didn’t want him prosecuted for the prior child abuse. She was an adult, which meant I didn’t have the same legal obligation to report it, as I would if she’d been a minor.” Zebediah looked thoughtful. “If she was blackmailing him she probably made more money than she would have been awarded in a lawsuit. He must be delighted that she’s dead.”
    “Do you think Preston Sommerfield could have killed her?” Claudia breathed, then immediately wondered how she could obtain a sample of the pedophile’s handwriting to compare to the suicide note. What were the chances that he used a block printed style?
    “If Earl Nelson thought Sommerfield was involved in Lindsey’s death, he’d cash in on it, big time. I doubt he’d worry about a paltry thousand bucks from Ivan.”
    “But if he and Lindsey were blackmailing Sommerfield, Nelson must have the negatives or he wouldn’t have given up the photos. Lindsey may have hated her brother, but he said something about them being partners.” Claudia tore off a hunk of bread and dipped it in the blue cheese dressing she’d requested on the side. “If Nelson was blackmailing Sommerfield, why is he living in such a dump?”
    Zebediah waved at the bikinied skater again as she rolled past them, going the other direction. “My guess is, any money he gets goes straight up his nose or into his veins.”
    “Good point. Okay, first things first. I haven’t examined the suicide note yet. I’ve been waiting, hoping to find some good block printing samples for comparison. Ivan is sending Lindsey’s files over, so I’ll need to finish going through them and decide whether she actually wrote the note or not. The handwriting on those photos Nelson gave me was done too long ago to be useful, except for one thing. It’s block printed, which tells me that block printing is a style of writing within Lindsey’s personal range of variation.” Claudia sighed. “I need to find out whether a police expert actually examined the handwriting on the note, as they told Ivan.”
    “Do you know any of the detectives at the PD in her district?” Zebediah asked.
    “No, that would be Wilshire or Beverly Hills. I’ll call my contact at Pacific Division and see if she can find out for me which detective was assigned to Lindsey’s case.”
    “Do that, sweetie. Who knows? He might be just what you need.”
~
    Dialing the number for the Pacific Division police station an hour later, Claudia couldn’t get the images of the young Lindsey and her abuser out of her head. What she had learned about Earl Nelson and Preston Sommerfield turned her stomach and had put Lindsey in a totally