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She lowered the window and leaned out.
    “Hey, dickhead! What the hell?”
    The man took off at a jog toward the elevators, throwing a contemptuous grin over his shoulder. “Tough shit, babe. You snooze, you lose.”
     
Claudia made a mad dash to join the long line of courthouse visitors waiting to get through security. Twenty or so people ahead, some idiot’s pocket change set off the metal detector.
    Goddamn it!
    Had the hearing started yet? She was scheduled to be the first witness. She checked her watch—twenty minutes late. The judge would be pissed; the attorneys would be pissed. She could imagine Paige biting her expensive acrylics to the quick.
    The line shuffled forward like slugs on the sidewalk; then it started to rain.
    An omen? How about a prophecy of doom?
    Cursing the jerk in the MG who had stolen her parking space, she blamed him for the dark spots staining the tan leather of her briefcase and her lank hair. If she hadn’t had to spend extra time looking for parking, she would have missed the rain.
    She made it through the metal detector at 10:15.
    Any reasonable person would understand that traffic snarls were beyond her control, Claudia assured herself, pressed behind a half dozen other silent riders in the stale coffee-and-cigarettes-smelling elevator. She’d even left early. She dabbed her hair with a tissue, wishing she’d taken the stairs, wishing she’d swallowed a tranquilizer, wishing this day were behind her.
    Judge Harold Krieger glared right at her as she entered the courtroom. At the counsel table on the defendant’s side, Paige Sorensen and Stuart Parsons turned to look at her. Relief registered on both faces.
    “Is this the witness we’ve been waiting for, Counsel?” Judge Krieger inquired pointedly as Claudia took a seat in the back row.
    “Yes, Your Honor. We’d like to call Claudia Rose.”
    With a deep inhale, Claudia gripped her briefcase and rose. The theater-style seat uprighted behind her with a loud whup-whup .
    A woman seated in the front row of the gallery twisted around and scowled at her. Smoldering, hooded eyes in a broad, square face. This had to be Diana Sorensen. She was seated next to a wheelchair that was parked at the end of the row, and Claudia remembered Paige saying that Neil, the youngest Sorensen, was disabled.
    Diana Sorensen jerked around to face the judge. Her black crepe jacket strained at the seams as if animosity bulged against her skin, struggling to break through her clothes. Her father’s widow, Paige, was the enemy, and by extension, so was the handwriting expert she had retained to represent her.
    Claudia could feel the woman’s gaze burning into her as she maneuvered around the wheelchair. She pushed through the swinging gate that separated the gallery from the counsel table, her nerves twanging like an overstrung guitar.
    The bailiff stood up and faced her. “Face the clerk and raise your right hand,” he said after Claudia ascended the two steps to the witness stand.
    She spelled out her name for the record and promised to tell the truth. Then she sat down and placed her briefcase on the table. She took out the exhibit books she’d made over the weekend for the judge and the attorneys, and arranged her notes in front of her, using the time to calm herself.
    Inhale deeply through the nose. Hold for a count of six. Breathe out slowly, silently through the mouth for a count of four. Ball the hands into tight fists until the tension travels all the way up to the shoulder muscles, then let go. In, two-three-four-five-six. Hold it. Out, two-three-four.
    Claudia swung the microphone closer to her mouth, waiting for Stuart Parsons to begin voir dire . Her eyes roamed around the courtroom, taking in the half-dozen spectators and the parties occupying the counsel table.
    On the plaintiff’s side, a man was whispering to his attorney. He looked up at her and Claudia realized with a shock that he was the jerk from the parking garage. The man in the