by Jane Haddam
“So this interests you? Murders?”
“Well, you know, it’s interesting that it happened where I live,” Mary-Louise said. “Holcomb is just a farm town, really. There are lots of them all over the state. They’re not anything special. But we’re special, because that happened to us.”
“Do you play video games?”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you play video games,” Sheila said. “You know—”
“Oh, no, I do know,” Mary-Louise said. “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t think for a minute. I like some games, sort of. I guess you can call them video games. I like Bookworm.”
“What’s Bookworm?”
“It’s where you spell things and if the words aren’t long enough, red tiles come down and they can make you lose. I’m pretty good at spelling.”
“Do you like any other video games?”
“Not really,” Mary-Louise said. “I mean, you know, I’ve got a computer at home, but my parents want me to use that for school. They don’t like it when I just goof around with it. And a lot of the boys have those game systems things, like Nintendo, you know, but it’s all just blowing things up, so I don’t think that’s very interesting.”
“Why did you try out for America’s Next Superstar?”
“Really?” Mary-Louise said. “Well, I guess I tried out for the same reason everybody does. Because I wanted to win. And because I wanted to get away from home. I mean, you can get away from home by going away to a fancy college, and my parents would probably have paid for that, but I didn’t do all that well on the SATs. And, you know, it’s not that I’m a great singer, or a great dancer, or anything like that. But you don’t have to do all that, from what I can see. You just have to be a personality. And I’ve got a lot of personality.”
“Did you expect to be cast when you were asked to come in and audition?”
“I didn’t think I’d get asked to come in and audition,” Mary-Louise said. “You really wouldn’t have believed it when I got that letter. I went running all over the house, just screaming. And all my girlfriends were jealous. They really were. The girl who’s cheer captain this year sent in a tape and didn’t get asked. I laughed so hard, I thought I was going to explode. Not that she was a friend of mine or anything, or bad to me, you know how that goes. It’s just that I’m not the kind of person who wins things, and there I was. It was wonderful.”
“Did you shoot at me in the Milky Way Ballroom?”
“Oh,” Mary-Louise said. “No. No, of course not.”
“Did you see who did?”
“Well,” Mary-Louise said, “I was standing in the middle of the crowd, you know, when you started talking. And after we heard the shots, I looked around and, right near me, there was that blond girl and she had the gun. But I thought that was a little funny, because I didn’t hear anything. I mean, I was standing so close, I should have heard something. And then later one of the girls here told me that that wasn’t actually the gun that fired any shots. I heard the shots today, though, when they went off. They were really loud.”
“Did you know the girl who died?”
“The little blond one?” Mary-Louise said. “No, I didn’t know her. I mean, I didn’t know who she was or where she came from. But I’d seen her before, you know, in the Ballroom. And before that, too.”
“Before that?”
“I was the first in line, so I didn’t notice her in line, because she must have been behind me,” Mary-Louise said. “But she was in the pink room, the same one with Grace. I know because I saw her come out of there and go to the place where the panel was. You know, the judging panel, where we all came and talked to you guys. Then they called my name and I went in and when I came out she wasn’t there anymore. I have no idea where she went.”
“Have you ever been arrested?”
“Oh, of course not.”
“Have you ever owned a gun?”
“We’ve got a shotgun at home,” Mary-Louise said. “It belongs to my father. He uses it because of the animals, you know, the ones that get into the yard.”
“If I asked you which of the girls you would choose as the one who had been firing shots at me, which one would it be.”
“Oh,” Mary-Louise said. “That’s easy. Everybody in the whole house says it’s Coraline who’s doing these things, and that it’s Coraline who killed that girl, too. Grace says Coraline is a religious fanatic and she’d kill anybody for God, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. Coraline seems like she’s all right. Most of the girls do. It’s that Ivy person who really makes me get the hives. I don’t understand her at all.”
FIVE
1
By the time Gregor Demarkian got to Sophie Mgrdchian’s hospital floor, there were several uniformed officers and two homicide detectives as well as Billie Ormonds and David Mortimer already there. Dr. Halevy was also there, yelling at nurses in what sounded like Arabic. Gregor went to the door of Sophie’s room and looked in. She still looked like she was sleeping.
Gregor went up to Billie Ormonds and tapped her on the shoulder. “So?” he said.
Everybody turned to look at him at once.
Gregor cleared his throat. “I take it I’m not crazy,” he said. “I take it giving blood pressure medication to somebody without a blood pressure problem, or a low blood pressure problem, can cause what we’ve been seeing.”
Billie looked back at Dr. Halevy and the nurses. “I don’t think they even know what she’s saying. She’s livid, by the way. People didn’t write things down on charts. People didn’t double-check other people.”
“The problem,” Mortimer said, “is that this still won’t get us what we want.”
“Meaning an excuse to keep Karen Mgrdchian locked up,” Billie said. “We’ve got homicide here now, and we can start treating this as an attempted murder, but the simple fact of the matter is that we can’t really prove it was one. Sophie Mgrdchian had this other woman’s pills in her own pocket—well, they’re old ladies, aren’t they? They could have become confused. They could have picked up one another’s medication by accident.”
“She’s not Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said. “She’s the wrong type, if that makes any sense.”
“That’s not exactly enough to go on,” Billie said. “And you’ve got the fact that this woman was in Sophie Mgrdchian’s house. Her friends on the street say she wasn’t disoriented or going into dementia—”
“As far as they know,” Gregor said. “Sophie Mgrdchian hasn’t been running around being social for years.”
“Even so,” Billie insisted. “You have to at least assume that the woman would have been able to recognize her own sister-in-law.”
“No,” Gregor said. “She hadn’t seen the woman in decades. Literally decades.”
“Again,” Billie said. “Not enough to go on. She was in Sophie Mgrdchian’s house. There’s no evidence that entry was forced, and in fact we know it wasn’t, because we know she was there for some days. Are you trying to say that this woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian forced her way into the house and stayed there by—what? Threatening Sophie? But Sophie has been in and out of the house since the woman arrived there; she could have broken free any time. There isn’t a child to be held hostage, is there? Or even a pet. And yes, I do know that sometimes kidnap victims end up collaborating with their kidnappers for all kinds of weird psychological reasons I can’t understand, but there’s no indication of that here.”
“Didn’t Bennis give you the message about looking in the basement for bodies?” Gregor asked.
“Well,” Billie said, “she gave it to me, but I thought it was mostly metaphorical. Are you trying to tell me you know where bodies are buried?”
“I think so,” Gregor said. “I’ll admit, it’s mostly a guess, but I’m pretty sure it’s only a guess about where, not about if. If I was the woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian, and I’d killed the real Karen Mgrdchian, I’d have put the body in the basement. It’s the most logical pla
ce, if I’m working alone and I’m an old lady. It’s out of the way, so that the chances of a smell permeating the immediate area are slim for at least a while. And it’s easy for me to get to and get done.”
“I thought there was a daughter,” Billie Ormonds said.
“There is,” Gregor said. “I don’t know anything about her. That’s why I said it was a good idea to look for two bodies, or even for three. I know Marco Mgrdchian is dead, but not when he died or how he died. Assuming that was natural causes, though, and a bit back, that leaves the mother and the daughter. If the daughter was in the habit of coming over to the house, if she lived close by, if she was responsible and not sick or addicted in some way—then my guess is that you’d find two bodies in the basement and not one.”
“Why?”
“Because the daughter hasn’t called,” Gregor said. “And even if she didn’t have the numbers of the people on Cavanaugh Street, if the address book at that house is missing as the address book is here, then there’s the fact that she hasn’t reported her mother missing. I’ve checked every source I can think of. I’ve looked on the Internet. There’s no missing person’s report on Karen Mgrdchian.”
“Maybe,” Billie said, “the reason for that is that Karen Mgrdchian isn’t missing. She’s here, and her daughter isn’t worried about her because her daughter knows that she’s here.”
“If she was Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said, “she wouldn’t have done that to her fingerprints.”
“It doesn’t matter what she does to her fingerprints,” Billie said, “there are no fingerprints on file for Karen Mgrdchian. We really did check.”
“I’m sure you did,” Gregor said, “but I’m willing to bet that there are fingerprints on file for whoever this woman really is. Because this is not some brand-new, supercreative secret plot. This is an old-time con game. And I’m going to be shocked if it turns out she’s never been picked up for it before.”
“You mean you think the woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian has been—what? Convicted of murder?”
“No,” Gregor said, “convicted of fraud, or, if not, then arrested for fraud. The only reason to destroy your fingerprints is that you don’t want the police to be able to connect you with something you’ve already done, the only reason to destroy your fingerprints is because they’re on file somewhere you don’t want anybody to know about.”
“People do sometimes destroy them accidentally, no matter what you think,” Billie said.
“Not people like Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said. “We need to pinpoint the place where this woman lived and have the local police go out there with a search warrant. And I’m sure they’ll be able to get one. We’ve got an elderly woman, incapacitated under suspicious circumstances, and another elderly woman we’ve got reason to be suspicious of. They’ll be able to find a judge.”
“But you don’t actually know what the address is,” Billie Ormonds said.
“Someplace in or around Cleveland,” Gregor said. “The Very Old Ladies seem to be convinced of that. That would be the best place to start. I’ll ask Father Tibor, to go over the parish records again. They may have a mailing address, although I did have him look once before and he didn’t come up with anything. I wonder what the story is there. Cleveland isn’t all that far away.”
“So?” Billie asked.
“Armenian families tend to stick together,” Gregor said. “They visit for holidays. I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t get along, and after Viktor died, they didn’t see each other because they didn’t want to. I wish we had that address book. It would tell us a lot of things.”
On the other side of the room, Dr. Halevy had stopped speaking Arabic and was onto English. She sounded beyond livid now, and possibly ready to do violence.
“The patient is old,” she said. “We have all kinds of fancy terminology for it, but that’s what it amounts to. The patient is old. We could have killed her. Didn’t it occur to anybody, anywhere, that—never mind. Never mind. I want somebody in here twenty-four seven. I want her every breath monitored. And I want you to come and get me if she so much as sneezes.”
Dr. Halevy broke away from the group of nurses, and came over to Gregor and Billie and the police. She was red in the face and short of breath.
“Yes,” she said, “yes. Screwups happen in hospitals. They happen all the time. It’s a scandal. But this is really egregious. One of those women over there said she thought the low blood pressure readings she was getting were normal, because Mrs. Mgrdchian is in a coma, and that’s the kind of thing comas produce. Of course, very low blood pressure can give you a coma. She doesn’t seem to have thought of that.”
The two homicide detectives came forward and introduced themselves as Allejandro and Kennedy. Dr. Halevy said hello to everybody but didn’t really take them in.
“What we need to know,” Gregor said, “is whether or not this could have killed Sophie Mgrdchian if it had been done on purpose. If somebody had given her medication to lower her blood pressure when she didn’t need it, could that have resulted in death?”
Dr. Halevy sighed. “You can kill anybody with any kind of medication,” she said. “It’s just that some things would take larger doses than others. In this case, it would have been mostly a matter of time. If this had gone on for another, I don’t know, week or so, with the patient this elderly and somewhat frail—yes, it would have resulted in death. And as a murder method, it wouldn’t be bad. It would be hard to pin down.”
“How do you mean, pin down?” Billie asked.
“Well, you’ve probably all talked about it already,” Dr. Halevy said, “but you know how people are with the elderly. The same way they are with children. If I was the doctor on the case, and I had an elderly patient who died from taking the wrong medication—well, I’d just assume there’d been a mistake, or an accident. That the patient had become confused or forgetful. Two old women in a house, both of them have pill organizers, one of them picks up the wrong one.” Dr. Halevy shrugged.
“Exactly,” Billie said.
“Except,” Gregor said, “that this is an experienced con woman. I’ll guarantee it. She made friends with the real Karen Mgrdchian, got all she could out of her, found out about Sophie and the chance that Sophie had something worth stealing—”
“Does she?” Billie asked.
“Well, she’s got a house in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Philadelphia,” Gregor said. “And my guess is that you’ll find it without a mortgage. She almost certainly had money, and social security income if nothing else. She wasn’t starving. The house was in good enough repair. She must have been paying somebody for that, or for some of that. If Sophie hadn’t lived in the same neighborhood she’d been in all her life, and if there hadn’t still been people there who had known her for years, this woman would have been able to move into the house and take over. That’s what she almost certainly did with the real Karen Mgrdchian. Moved in, took over the house, then either ran through the money or started to feel she’d be better off getting out of town. So, having heard about Sophie and her house from the real Karen Mgrdchian, she came out here.”
“Just like that?” Dr. Halevy asked.
“I think we’ll start looking for where this Karen Mgrdchian lived,” Billie said. “We’ve got twenty-four hours, as far as I can tell, and then it’s over. And I hate to tell you this, but as things stand, I’m not sure we can stop her from going back into that house. There aren’t any relatives, you see, to say she isn’t welcome there, and what she says is that she was invited in to live there permanently. Or, you know, that’s what her lawyer said she said.”
“That’s all right,” Gregor said. “Whoever this woman really is, she isn’t interested in going back to Sophie Mgrdchian’s house.”
2
By the time Gregor left the hospital, it was pitch dark. There were still a lot of people on the street, but most of them looked hurried. He walked a few blocks and tried to stay oriented. This was not a pa
rt of the city he knew well. The trouble, he thought, was that the two cases had so many odd similarities—women who claimed to be other people than they really were, for instance, and who simply stayed quiet and shut up and wouldn’t say anything except to their lawyers. But that was a little thing. There was also the problem that both cases looked terribly complicated when they were really terribly simple—
No, Gregor thought. That was not quite right. The case of Sophie Mgrdchian actually looked simple when it was really very complicated. It wasn’t complex. There was nothing complex about a con game. Of course, newspapers and magazines and television shows liked to call con games “elaborate,” because that made them sound more plausible. Nobody likes to think he’d fall for the simplest and most obvious little lie. Everyone likes to think he’d see through the nonsense right away.
In real life, though, con games were absurdly, stupidly obvious, and people fall for them anyway. Bernie Madoff confidently tells his clients that he can get them 17 percent a year on their investments, year after year, good markets and bad—and virtually none of them go, “but that’s impossible, there must be something wrong here.” Then there was all that Nigerian nonsense, and the idiocies with “Australian lotteries” on the Internet. You go to your e-mail. You open one that announces that the writer has heard such wonderful things about you and knows that you are trustworthy, and therefore he’s willing to pay you five million dollars to help him get his money out of Nigeria. All you have to do is send him $2,500 or so to pay the bank fees so that he can get the money out of the country.
The first time Gregor had heard about the Nigerian Internet scam, he’d been dumbfounded that anyone, anywhere had ever fallen for it. Did people really know so little about the way banks worked to think that this thing even began to make sense? And what about the people who fell for the same scam, except it’s presented as the declaration that they’d “won” a lottery? Didn’t it bother them that they’d never entered that lottery? There were lotteries in the United States. Surely, people knew that they didn’t have to fork over money before they were allowed to pick up their prize? Weren’t there enough specials on brand-new lottery winners that demonstrated at least that much? Gregor remembered a man in Pennsylvania only a few years ago, who had bought a lottery ticket with his last dollar. He’d been out of work for months and was living, with his wife and two young children, in his car. It had to be obvious that he hadn’t been required to spend a couple of thousand dollars to get his money. If he’d had a couple of thousand dollars, he’d have had a place to take a shower.